Disclosure Day

Disclose Encounters

Disclosure Day
Directed by Steven Spielberg
USA/Canada/New Zealand/Japan 2026
Universal
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Well then... Disclosure Day is not the suspected sequel to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind it was rumoured to be (although it does have a couple of on screen references and could easily be taking part in the same shared world... in which case it definitely is, despite Spielberg’s protests). What it is happens to be Spielberg’s third ‘aliens on Earth’ movie after his brilliant, original, studio release cut of Close Encounters and his abysmal ET - The Extra Terrestrial movie. Disclosure Day is somewhere in the middle of the quality of those two... not quite as good as the former but walking all over the latter.

We have the various ‘everymen sucked into extraordinary adventures’ which is a particular Spielberg signature, often seen as a legacy archetype in his pictures. These are played by the wonderful Emily Blunt, Josh O’ Connor and Eve Hewson. Then you have the obligatory human villain, played by Colin Firth and the wise, helpful ally to the good guys, played by Colman Domingo. Plus assorted ‘also ran’ characters performed by the likes of Wyatt Russell and Elisabeth Marvel. 

The film is not quite, as I’d suspected, a reveal about the various alien/human hybrids living in society among us (see the Al Adamson documentary Blood And Flesh: The Reel Life And Ghastly Death of Al Adamson, reviewed here, to find out more about those, since Adamson actually met one and then died in particular ghastly circumstances sometime after, before he could finish his expose documentary... whether that aspect of his life was relevant to his death or not) but more a look at the way aliens are trying to escape the knowledge-prison of the independent task force trying to stop the leakage of their existence on Earth.

So, in terms of the plot... it’s not what I was expecting but, the sad thing is, everything else went exactly as I’d expected. It’s not a bad movie by any means and it hits some nice Spielberg moments such as an elabourate and suspenseful ‘car being dragged along on the side of a train’ chase and various metatextual references back to cinema over the years. It’s true to say that in some ways it’s somewhat of a postmodern pastiche of things we’ve seen over the years in many movies.* 

Perhaps my favourite appropriation is when Eve Hewson’s character is being psychically interrogated from afar by Firth’s sinister invasion of her mind and, she uses her crucifix in just the same manner that Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer used the rusty nail in the brainwashing sequence of The IPCRESS File (reviewed here) so, yeah, Spielberg really nailed that one. 

The film neatly bypasses the effect on mass culture of the possible lack of faith in religious practices in a way which is, perhaps, not multiculturally sensitive (although I don’t mind) and uses a direct quote from the Bible to directly allow for the possibility of alien life forms being present in the universe. So for a certain section of the audience he has that pretty well sewed up. 

I did object to the use of animal scenes in the film... not because this is not what aliens do, as documented in numerous cases (whether you believe those cases or not) but because, the logic of using those encounters out of an environment where there are only one or two humans present seems contrary to logic and not a part of, as Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp neatly put it, how aliens represent. So, atmospherically it works effectively in a spooky manner in the movie but, one or two of those scenes seem somewhat out of place. 

Now the ending is, I suspect, going to divide people. Not because you won’t see it coming... I defy anyone to not figure out exactly when the camera is going to cut to the end credits before it actually happens... but because there’s no real sense of closure to the disclosure. That is to say... how else could you end this movie? It’s absolutely the right way to end this without leaving some section of the audience bitterly disappointed in the content of the message of the aliens. That would then become a different movie and this way at least allows for that all important message to go either way, in terms of the fate of mankind, for sure.

Added to this we have an excellent, post-retirement score by regular Spielberg collaborator John Williams, who at 94 is still able to come up with one of his best scores in years. So that’s a CD I will hopefully be getting a hold of soon. 

All in all though, I’m about done with Disclosure Day. Excellent performances in a not too shoddy package with a nice bit of scoring is certainly enough to take a trip to the cinema for but, ultimately, I was a little underwhelmed by the whole experience. I suspect that’s because I’ve been around too long, though and I’m sure the younger audience... who have not seen much of the history of cinema to be as jaded by this plot as I am... will be thrilled with this one and lionise it, to a certain extent. At least until they get a few films under their belt. Not a film I’d easily recommend because I felt it pulled its punches a little too much but, not a huge disappointment either and I think it will find its audience, for sure. 

 *Although, after only a few days of the film’s release into cinemas, I’m already sick of reviewers making assumptions that the Inn-Di-Ana Motel where two of the characters stay overnight is a tip of the hat to Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movies. Take a step back and realise that the home of Roy Neary in the original Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is situated in Indiana and, maybe do a little better at connecting the dots on your film references people!

UFO Flying Saucers

Close Encounters
Of The Gold Key

Flying Saucers (Dell)
5 issues April 1967 - October 1969

UFO Flying Saucers (Gold Key)
13 issues October 1968 - January 1977 continuing as...
 
UFO And Outer Space (Gold Key)
12 issues June 1978 - February 1980

I thought there used to be a TV show which was on reruns in the very early 1970s, when I was a kid, about Project Blue Book. I’m pretty sure it was a 1960s TV programme but, looking up the info on both the shows Project Blue Book and Project UFO gives me listings on productions which aired in the late 1970s. So I’m really not sure which show I was thinking of, to be honest.

Either way, I was very interested in UFOs as a kid but never saw any of the comics I’m going to talk about today. Starting with DELL Comics’ five issues of Flying Saucers which were basically short stories telling tales which seemed to be a fusion of reported UFO incidents and flights of fancy. These aren’t great and I only found out about this run halfway through reading the Gold Key comics resurrection of the title. When their partnership with Western Publishing finished, Western formed Gold Key Comics and somehow managed to take a load of DELL’s licensed characters and comics with them. Once such was, kind of, their Flying Saucers comic, which was transformed into UFO Flying Saucers. The first four issues of the DELL version are all original tales and the fifth issue, which was published much later during the same time as the Gold Key run, which is surprising in itself, is composed entirely of reprints of one of the earlier issues. I’ll confine my thoughts about the DELL title to the Gold Key version because it’s all pretty much two similar sides of the same coin.

The things that weren’t quite the same for the majority of the Gold Key title was that a) the stories were all much shorter, usually ranging between one and three pages each (so there were obviously a lot more stories per issue) and b) they were mostly presented as real life case reports and I do believe that they were trying to present what they saw in a serious and respectful way, at least when the comic first started, as illustrated versions of actual incidents. And it’s kind of scary in some ways because each is presented with it’s own specific time stamp and you’ll get modern incidents within the same issues as things like the prophet Ezekiel witnessing early alien spacecraft in the 6th century and, I don’t know, something about the mechanism departing the Earth with a sound of powerful running water (like a waterfall) seems to me to come off as something really eerily similar to what one of our modern rockets sound like if described back then. Kind of hard to imagine something terrestrial like this in the 6th Century, I reckon.

At first, stuff like this was keeping me fairly interested and there was some scary or, more often, just intriguing stuff culled from real life case files (some of which I recognised from my own research into the phenomenon more than a couple of decades ago... until I decided to give it up as sleepless nights no longer appealed to me). However, it has to be said, after a while this was getting boring precisely because of those limitations. An average story has various witnesses seeing either a UFO or an alien creature, nothing much really happening and then having said craft or creature departing and nobody believing the various witnesses except, sometimes, those ‘in the know’ who work for the government. There’s no real excitement in these things other than something sighted, something draining power or, occasionally, some human interaction which might or might not result in the death of said human or an animal. And that’s basically it.

Also, it looks like the idea was getting increasingly difficult for Gold Key to sustain by the time they got less than half way into their run. The stories already seemed exactly the same due to, you know, being based on what little they could grab of real life incidents... so they decided to go the whole hog and start asking readers for their true encounters with UFOs or aliens, the best ones sent in getting an adaptation in the comic. So, yeah, I can’t imagine how many people they got writing in and spinning them a yarn just to see their name in print. However, after a few issues of advertising this feature, they started doing exactly that. The readers’ stories are all pretty much just one page long but they are in abundance and, just like the slightly longer stories, they are all pretty much saying the same thing.

I’m guessing, in an effort to at least make some attempt to have some stories lasting longer than about three pages (you know... like five), some of the reported case studies are, I suspect, montaged together by what the writer at the time thought was a common denominator in certain tales... at least I’m pretty sure that’s what happened because, sometimes, some of the dates quoted in the stories seem completely contradictory. For example, in a story linking the deaths of various astronauts, at least one of the recorded deaths is from a fair few years ahead of the time zone of the guy telling his colleagues about them so... yeah, they seem to screw up sometimes.

And I don’t know what was happening in an issue from 1975 when the narrative talks about the ‘late’ famous astrophysicist and extraterrestrial researcher Carl Sagan... since he didn’t die actually for over 20 years later. No idea.

Another thing the writers did to hold interest was to introduce a ‘back up’ feature, which is a strange concept in a comic which would hold maybe ten ‘stories’ anyway, much as the successful Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom (which I reviewed here) had a Professor Harbinger strip. The back up in UFO Flying Saucers was called The Hoaxmaster and this top hatted fellow would talk directly to the audience and tell them the stupid tricks people have resorted to in order to get people to believe in UFOs. I guess it was the production team’s way of holding up the hoaxes to lend veracity to the other stories found in each issue. However, stuff like this was not enough and the magazine stopped publication for a while with issue 13 in January 1977.

However, the magazine returned with a slight name change in June 1978, continuing from issue 14 as UFO & Outer Space... the first two issues of which seem to consist entirely of reprints of stories from earlier issues. So what happened here to give Gold Key the idea to rush the magazine back onto the market after an almost a year and a half hiatus? Well, I can only speculate but I don’t think I’d be far wrong in suggesting that Steven Spielberg happened. December 1977 saw the release in America of his UFO movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and it was really popular (and sort of terrifying in some ways). It wasn’t as popular as Star Wars had been earlier in the year, of course but, it was taking the world by storm (we got it in the UK in 1978 and if I ever get around to reviewing it for this blog, I’ll tell of my terrifying experience after seeing that movie).

So my guess is that Gold Key saw the opportunity in the market and put the comic back out, filling it with selected reprints while the writers and artists, whoever these unsung folk were, beavered away on creating new material to capture the lightning in a bottle that was Spielberg’s film before the next trend came along. So before long we had... all the usual stuff again but also two new features. One was a two page text story each issue... the first two or three of which seem to be concentrating on paranormal investigation rather than anything else, so I suspect the first couple were filler reprinted from one of Gold Key’s horror titles. The other thing was a ‘What If...?’ story each month. The plus points on those stories were the fact that the stories could be both a little longer and, since they were being presented as a fiction, go a little further in terms of the various alien encounters in each tale. The minus points were... most of them were still pretty dull and dismal, perhaps to add to the authenticity. Oh... and there was also an attempt to have a running serial about a funny alien for light relief but... I suspect that wasn’t very well received because it vanished mid story after two or three issues (it just wasn’t funny).

By the end of the comic’s run in February 1980, reprints were once more beginning to creep in and the stories, as intriguing and worthy of exploration in real life, still seemed really dull in comic strip form... or at least they did to me. The very last issue looks like it was printed to fulfil some kind of contractual obligation and, once again, consists entirely of reprints. I suspect the comic wasn’t that much missed by anyone when it finally stopped publication.

That being said, although it felt like I was reading more or less the same stories over and over again in each issue, the comic book is something of a curio and it does hold a certain appeal... especially if you have an interest in the subject matter in the first place. It’s not really a comic I could recommend to anyone but some people would probably get a kick out of it and, as per usual with the Gold Key and DELL comics, the painted artwork covers for these things are absolutely superb. It’s just a shame the stories within those covers never really lived up to the spectacle on the front.

Ready Player One

Refer Madness

Ready Player One
2018 USA Directed by Steven Spielberg
UK cinema release print.

Ready Player One is the second new Spielberg film I’ve seen at cinemas this year... the first being The Post released back in January in the UK (you can read my review here). I’ve always quite liked Spielberg’s cinema with the odd few exceptions and this one is... well it’s neither bad nor great. It’s also got a lot of information crowding out almost every frame so I’m not sure if one viewing is enough to process it all. That being said, I’m not sure I’d care to sit through it all for a second viewing so I’m currently locked in kind of a Mexican stand off with this film.

It’s based on the best selling and highly recommended novel of the same title (that title being a general call to arms for those of us who remember it on all those arcade games of the late 1970s and 1980s) by Ernest Cline, who also co-wrote the screenplay. Well, I say highly recommended... one of my friends recommended I read this a few years ago and I just never got the ‘to be read’ pile low enough to add it. So I’m not exactly ‘in the know’ about how faithful an adaptation it is... all I knew before going in was that it heavily references lots of pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s (and a few other eras too, as it turned out). However, as it happens, my friend Teresa, who was the one who recommended it to me, also saw this the same night I did and she messaged me the next morning saying that it wasn’t anywhere near as good as the book. So... there you go. Maybe I will get around to reading it at some point.

The film stars Tye Sheridan as main protagonist Wade Watts, the brilliant Olivia Cooke (so good in The Limehouse Golem, which I reviewed here) and the wonderful Mark Rylance as Halliday, the inventor of the virtual reality world The Oasis, where most of the film takes place. It also stars Simon Pegg as Halliday’s former partner and Rogue One’s bad guy Ben Mendelsohn as the main antagonist here.

The plot is fairly simplistic...

In the relatively near future, people are plugged in most of the time to their computer simulated VR world The Oasis, where anything can happen. I’m not sure how the economy of this world works... I suspect it’s all much better explained in the novel... but Wade lives in the equivalent of a slum and he, like many others, are looking for three keys hidden by the creator of the games after his death. This ‘Charlie And The Chocolate Factory-like’ incentive to inherit and control The Oasis is a world wide obsession but the puzzles to finding the keys are not so easy to work out unless you really get inside the mind of the creator. Wade and his virtual friends are among those looking but the stakes are high as the underhanded IOI corporation has hundreds of people on their payroll  looking for the same clues in order to inherit The Oasis and monetised it, turning it into an advertisers delight. They will stop at nothing to get the prize and... that’s the plot in a nutshell.

And along the way you’ll meet and not have nearly have enough time to spot all of the gazillions of cultural references scattered around the film in small or sometimes very large cameos. You’ll see Batman, the Back To The Future Delorean, the 1960s TV Batmobile, King Kong, The Iron Giant and so much more. Including a starring sequence from... Mechagodzilla... and this was my favourite surprise of the film even though it wasn’t a man in a suit but a much more flexibly moving CGI equivalent.

There are many nice touches but I’m a little bit puzzled as to why Alan Silvestri’s score is being touted as totally original and non-referential musically when, frankly, there are a number of famous musical moments which refer back to stuff as much as the movie does visually. For example, a nice idea of a ‘Zemeckis cube’ which reverses time for a period has a moment from Silvestri’s own Back To The Future scores and at one point during the sequence where The Iron Giant fights Mechagodzilla, we hear Akira Ifikube’s famous Godzilla march woven into the score. I’m actually not the biggest fan of Silvestri to be honest (although I did love his score for The Mummy Returns) but it’s nicely done and, though referential, it’s not nearly as overcooked as it might have been and it holds its own with the images and gives them the required lift.

In all honesty, this movie does play out pretty much, in terms of the plot goals too, like you’re watching a fast speed, live action version of The Lego Movie (reviewed here) but it has a little less charm, perhaps. There are quite a few dull moments in terms of the action choreography too but there are also some great sequences worth going to see it for.

The first run through of ‘the race’ near the start of the movie, for instance, deserves all the enthusiastic film reviewer roller coaster analogies it might get because it really does feel powerful and big (and just about followable, in terms of the way it’s edited). Another favourite sequence is where the characters have to go into the Overlook hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s famous adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. This was really well done and, in terms of the music, does have some of Wendy Carlos’ score from the movie (frustratingly still unreleased commercially on CD... although a ‘promotional’ boot does exist). This sequence is nice and also was one of the best for making me think I did, indeed, spot a key Spielbergian signature when I saw The Post earlier in the year...

To explain, I realised that sometimes, instead of following the main protagonist, the camera will suddenly split away and start following one of the other characters instead for a sequence before returning to the rest of the plot. Kind of like a little detour but one which helps highlight the next story thread/motive for the main characters to pick up on later and this is exactly what happens in The Shining sequence here (and in a few other places too, I might hasten to add). We take a bit of a ride with one of the other characters as they’re subjected to some of the famous set pieces of Kubrick’s masterpiece and, frankly, it left me wondering how Spielberg could get away with showing all this stuff from The Shining here in a film which has a 12A rating when I’m pretty sure it’s these same sequences that would have earned Kubrick’s film an X certificate back in the day. Hmmm... not sure what’s happening here.

All in all, Ready Player One is not a bad movie and it does have some lovely moments. It’s also a bit lumbering and, frankly, could have done with being trimmed by a good half an hour or more, I reckon. However, it’s quite possibly something which might grow on me a little more at a later date so I’m not ruling out a revisit at some point in the next few years. It’s certainly nowhere near to being one of Spielberg’s best films, as far as I’m concerned but it’s still a heck of a lot better than stuff like ET and AI, that’s for sure. I suspect I’m a little too old for a lot of the references but it will be a nice nostalgia rush for people in their late 30s is my guess. Give it a go if there’s nothing else going on, is my advice.

The Post

Haste

The Post
2017 USA Directed by Steven Spielberg
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very light spoilers, of a sort, in here if you are not familiar with the subject matter.

I quite like Steven Spielberg.

Pretty much since seeing his TV movie Duel on an old black and white set back in the early 70s.

I think he’s a director who, for the most part, makes consistently good films, sometimes great films and whose star status behind the camera dwarfs most actors and celebrities he works with. I’ve not seen all of his work but I’ve seen the large majority of it (barring a few films) and, asides from stuff which were real clunkers and which I could never quite bring myself to watch again (like E.T - The Extra Terrestrial and A.I) then you are usually on to a winner if you take a trip to the cinema to see one of his movies. He’ll also, usually, get to show you a moment or two of things which are unique or inventive.

Now, The Post, is a pretty good movie. It’s not a great movie but it is, at the very least, entertaining. I thought it was less gripping than a more recent cinematic outing into investigative journalism from a couple of years ago - Spotlight (reviewed by me here) but this is still genuinely compelling in places... especially if, like me, you have absolutely no first hand (or even any second hand) knowledge of the real life events that are being depicted in the movie.

The film opens strongly as we follow a soldier called Daniel Ellsberg, played by Matthew Rhys, on a stint in the Vietnam war. As his patrol is ambushed and all hell breaks loose we have a nice transition where the footage is revealed to be him flashing back to this chapter of his life as he rides a presidential plane in his current job. We then see him, a few years later, start to abscond with... and then have photocopied... various documents which show a history of American presidential regimes have been lying about the success and expectations of that particular war.

We then meet some of the other key characters in the film, the main two being Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee, an editor or head of department for The Washington Post (someone who I believe both Hanks and Spielberg knew socially at some point in their lives) and Meryl Streep as Kay Graham, the owner of the family business that The Washington Post was. Now, we have a few things going on at the start of the film... declining sales, Kay Graham’s decision to launch the newspaper on the stock market and, amongst all this, Bradlee’s hunch that a crack writer at one of their rivals, The New York Times, has been silent lately and so must be working on something really important. These threads are followed and pulled together as we flit between the team of reporters working on their assignments and Kay’s social circle, where it’s highlighted that she knows some of the players about to be embroiled in what happens when, as Bradlee gets wind of, The New York Times are going to publish Ellsberg’s 'Pentagon Papers' and reveal the dark underbelly and legacy of the US politics.

When The New York Times are threatened with a cease and desist document from the American government while they seek to sue them, one of Bradlee’s people find the source (Ellsberg), gets the photocopies of the documents from him - which are almost to hot to handle (as it happens, the real ones from the actual incident were used in all the scenes where they are seen in the film, it seems) - and the film then becomes about whether Kay should greenlight printing them in this manner and, very briefly, the outcome of the court case in light of her decision.

It’s good stuff and, as you would expect from Spielberg and the team of craftsmen he surrounds himself with, it’s all put together pretty well including, of course, the excellent performances from a wealth of great actors. Of special note, naturally, are Streep and Hanks and, since I don’t have too much to say about the way the movie has been put together, let me just focus on these two giants of modern acting for a moment.

Streep is someone who I haven’t seen that much but she’s always struck me as being completely convincing in any role I’ve seen her in (starting for me, I think, with her role as Woody Allen’s lesbian ex-wife in his classic Manhattan). Now, I have to say, I found her character a little infuriating here... because she seems so, how do I put this... measured here, in her delivery. It’s like the character takes time to process every thought and sentence and I had a real desire to just shake her and tell her to get her words out quicker. Which tells me two things... one, the real life person she’s playing must have had some element of that inherent in her personality (or there was a good reason for playing it like this) and, two, she must be a bloody good actress (which I think enough people know by now).

Hanks surprised me a little. I’ve always liked him since I started pointing him out to people as some one who may go far after seeing him in a TV movie called Mazes And Monsters when it was broadcast in the UK in the early 1980s. I was thrilled when he got a big feature film role in Splash and, yeah, I guess the rest is history... and he’s always been an actor I’ve liked but he’s also someone who I equate with being a ‘movie star’. That is to say, he plays more or less the same type of person in every film and he’s generally someone you wouldn’t mind hanging out with in a bar. So I was astonished at just how different the character he inhabited here seemed. I mean, yes, it’s still Hanks and he feels all Hanks-ike as usual but, there’s something extra here somehow. An edge to the character where he would say and do things and I would think... I wouldn’t expect Tom Hanks to say or do that in quite that way so... yeah, there you go again. Another great actor and also a joy to watch.

Now, Spielberg is someone whose films I have mostly enjoyed (as I mentioned earlier) but he’s one of those rare director’s who I’ve never really been able to identify as having a discernable signature style in his work. Other than always being amazingly competent and providing nice compositions which don’t call attention to themselves. Now I’m sure he wouldn’t have it any other way either but... looking at this... I kinda noticed something which I think may actually be something he does in other films... I just can’t think of a single example off the top of my head right now. However, in The Post, I caught him doing this...

He will switch out from a general shot of lot of hubbub where a fair few people are doing things which are fairly distracting (almost like a mini version of a Robert Altman movie but... not quite that distracting and disorganised) and then one character, often not the main character, will be given a task which becomes his or her purpose for the rest of the shot and quite possibly the next scene. And then the camera will filter everything else out and go hell bent for leather with that person as he or she completes her task to fill in, usually, an important plot point. So, for instance, Hanks character might grab an intern and tell him to do some stuff over the background miasma of a noisy office and then, suddenly, we follow that intern with a certain speed and purpose which dominates the scene for the next minute or two... I dunno. I just go the feeling that it’s a genuine Spielbergism and I’m going to be watching a few more of his movies this year (hopefully) and see if it’s a common factor. This idea of splitting away from a general ensemble atmosphere and then suddenly intensifying the focus onto just one character for a minute at the exclusion of all else.

The other big star and character in this, if you will, is the wonderful score by Spielberg’s regular musical collaborator, composer John Williams. Now, I have been a big admirer of this composer and have been following his career and going to concerts by him since the 1970s. When he scored Star Wars - The Force Awakens a couple of years ago, I thought it was one of the best things he’d written in many years and he really would have deserved the Oscar for that one (alas, I believe Oscar politics may have gotten in the way of things that year). Even my friend who is a big Williams devotee and who used to even travel to Boston in the United States to see him in concert too, agrees with me that his music for The Last Jedi was a real patchwork of a score and a bit of a career lowlight.

However, having now seen this movie, I’m baffled as to why he got an Oscar nomination for his new Star Wars score when, frankly, his score for The Post is way more deserving. I think, of many Spielberg films, this really does need the supporting score to drive home its points. It’s not particularly subtle but it really helps the film that it isn’t, I think. I said last year that Zimmer’s score for Dunkirk was the only thing which provided the underlying tension of that film and, if you took it away, the movie would fall flat. I think the same thing applies to The Post. There were sequences here where Williams is using... well not exactly 1950s B-movie stingers but certainly a close cousin as he highlights conversations and sequences with a building menace which, frankly, I would not have realised were supposed to be in any way suspenseful without the score there to spell it out for me. It’s probably because I don’t understand and don’t really care about anything political, in terms of not knowing I was supposed to be feeling lurking dread but, thankfully, Williams provides it all here and this is a real example of a score doing more than just supporting the film, I think.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this one. The Post closes out with, more or less, a reconstruction of the opening sequence of the classic film All The President’s Men and, I’d have to say, although I don’t think this movie is quite as powerful as that one, it would make one hell of a good double bill playing before it at cinemas. So there you have it, Spielberg gives us, not a great film but a fairly good one and, with his track record, that’s really not bad. If you enjoy movies of this ilk then you’ll no doubt like this one too so... catch it at the cinema to get the best of that Johnny Williams score, is my advice.

Bridge Of Spies

Spy Society

Bridge Of Spies
2015 USA
Directed by Steven Spielberg
UK cinema release print.

So once again we have a Steven Spielberg movie which stars someone who I believe is fast becoming a frequent collaborator of his, Tom Hanks. Hanks is one of those rare cases, for me, when I actually spotted him as a talent to be watched way before he ever got famous. Back in 1982, which is the last time I saw it (and I wish it wasn’t), I watched a TV movie called Mazes And Monsters which starred young Tom as a man whose Dungeons And Dragons gaming had caused a malfunction in his brain. He started confusing the game for real life... or something like that. Forgive me, it’s been a long time. I remember liking it so much that I read the source novel it was based on and also told my friends to look out for this guy called Tom Hanks because he could really act. Two years later he made Splash and it didn’t take long before his name was synonymous with quality acting and, due to some sound career decisions, quality movies.

I’m not the best lover of some of the material he’s been in but I still, to this day, think Hanks is an incredible performer and, whether I like his films or not, I always find that his presence lifts whatever he’s in. A truly great actor and, to boot, with a public persona that makes him someone you really wouldn’t mind hanging out with at a pub on a Saturday night, perhaps.

Bridge Of Spies is no exception but it also, of course, comes with the seal of competence that Spielberg, again... whether I agree with his choice of subject matter or not... brings to all of his work as a director and producer. He makes films which are so well put together that you know that, whether you are going to have a really great time with his movie or not, that the very least you will get is something compelling in the way it is shot. Something which isn’t dull.

Bridge Of Spies is certainly never dull and, since Spielberg knows how to use his toolbox of cinematic syntax so well, it turns out to be an extremely entertaining movie. It’s not exactly a dynamic movie, although it does start off with a very gripping sequence which is like a toned down version of something you might expect to see in The Quiller Memorandum (reviewed by me here). That is to say, it starts off with a classic set of sequences featuring a spy and the people trailing him before he makes his escape and is then raided at home, quietly destroying as much evidence as he can right under the noses of the people sent to arrest him.

So, yeah. Maybe not dynamic but certainly very interestingok and Spielberg’s use of some amazing compositions, many of which section various characters off into their own little compartments in the way the frames are split by scenery and objects, is brilliant throughout the running time of the movie. The shots are leisurely and slow for the most part but, because Spielberg is so gifted with making things look perfect visually, well... like I implied earlier... you’re certainly not going to get bored with this one. The film is almost two and a half hours long but you probably won’t feel that it is.

This ‘inspired by a true story’ tale is fantastically put together as we see Tom Hanks character defend a real life Russian spy with a Scottish accent (which is apparently as it was in the real circumstances) and also negotiate an exchange for the Russian for two US prisoners or varying interest to the US government. As you would expect, you get as fine a performance from Tom Hanks and his co-stars in this picture as you would expect and special mention must go to Mark Rylance playing the ‘unworried by possible death’, laid back spy whom Tom Hanks develops a friendship with. It’s good stuff and, though it’s not an action movie it's... well, like I said before in reference to Spielberg’s movies... it’s compelling. It also helps that, while it’s a dialogue heavy movie, Spielberg is one of those few directors who understands that silence is golden and will leave a character to contemplate things in a way which almost allows the audience to pick up on their thought processes without having to have it spoon fed in the narrative. It harkens back to the days of silent cinema to an extent and with someone like Hanks at the helm in terms of the acting stakes... you know you are going to get something very crystal clear coming through to your spectators. There’s a wonderful shot near the end of the movie where Hanks sees some kids climbing fences from the train he’s on and you realise just what he’s thinking about due to the visual metaphor of the shot echoing something far more dramatic you see earlier in the movie. No words are used to bolster or spell out this moment... most people will surely ‘get it’ though.

One slight criticism I have with the movie is Thomas Newman’s score. Now this is one of the very few times that Spielberg has not teamed up with John Williams to provide music for his art. My understanding is that Williams was fitted with a pacemaker this year and couldn’t keep up with scoring both this movie and the new Star Wars movie (reviewed by me here) and so was forced to drop this one. Newman’s score is certainly serviceable and kinda appropriate in the places it’s used but... I dunno, maybe I’m just being biased here but I didn’t feel it was anything more than appropriate. It didn’t feel out of place but it didn’t feel to me like it was adding any lift to the movie either. As a stand alone listen it’s probably pretty cool but it just felt a little ‘off’ to me, I would say. There’s actually very little music in the movie, it has to be said. The way the thing is spotted is such that there are lots of long passages, it seemed to me, with no score in it whatsoever... so I wonder if that would have been the case if Williams was involved or not. I guess well never know and Newman certainly doesn’t let the film down too much, I think... I just didn’t experience the emotional pull I was expecting in some scenes... at least not from the music.

All that being said though... Bridge Of Spies is a very fine film. It’s not something I could watch again anytime soon but it’s a quality product and I think it deserves to be seen as much as anything else out there at the moment. Spielberg and Hanks are both masters of their art and this film is absolutely no exception. If you’re a fan of cinema, you really should go and see this one if you get the opportunity. Not the best film from either Hanks or Spielberg but certainly something which will probably linger with you a while after you leave the cinema. Don’t let this one pass you by.

Gremlins Christmas Double

Mogwai-Fi

Gremlins
1984 USA
Directed by Joe Dante
Warner Brothers DVD Region 2

Gremlins 2: The New Batch
1990 USA
Directed by Joe Dante
Warner Brothers DVD Region 2

Okay then.

For my other Christmas double bill I chose the two Gremlins movies, the first of which is set at Christmas.

Gremlins
I remember all the hoopla surrounding this film when it came out, which was much more focused on the “Steven Spielberg presents...” part than any contribution by the wonderful director Joe Dante. There was an absolute obsession with the cute furry creatures in their “mogwai” stage and I remember all the kids used to have either a plush, furry mogwai or a rubber, flexi-gremlin figure. If you went to the seaside and looked at any crane machine, these things were filled with little mogwai. This film caught the public imagination and didn’t let go for a while and the first movie, at the time, deserved its success, I think.

Starting off as a little tongue-in-cheek urban myth from the Second World War, if I’m not mistaken, the idea of gremlins as the creatures who were always blamed for malfunctions in machinery in that period became very popular at the time. These days if something goes wrong with a piece of software we say it’s got a “bug” in it... if something was going wrong with something in those days it was a “gremlin”. This was lovingly personified in an old episode of The Twilight Zone (Nightmare at 20,000 Feet) where William Shatner gets hysterical watching a small “gremlin” taking apart the engine of the passenger plane he is travelling in and it was this story which was later remade for release the year before Gremlins in 1983 and used as one of the segments in Twilight Zone: The Movie. The production of the  movie presumably sparked the imagination of Spielberg enough to get Gremlins off the starting block and he hired Dante, who had directed a different segment of the Twilight Zone movie, for the job.

The film is a bit of a classic and, though I found it had dated quite a lot since the last time I’d watched it, I still think it’s a classic piece of movie making. I’m not going to summarise the movie here too much, suffice it to say that when free-lance inventor Randall Peltzer buys the mogwai for his son Billy for Christmas, the three “rules” that one must never break when looking after such a creature are quickly and accidentally broken, which leads to the birth of a fresh spawn of mogwai (from water) who then gestate and metamorphose, once they’ve eaten “after midnight” into creatures that are, way more than mischievous. Indeed, I remember there being some quite hard censorship objections to the film which made the national news at the time because, although it’s clearly intended for a young audience, it was slapped with a 15 rating due to some quite nasty sequences involving gremlin death (gremlin pulverised in a liquidator, gremlin shredded in a waste disposal unit, gremlin exploding in a microwave etc) which worried the hell out of parents and censors at the time.

And that’s the little trick of Gremlins, in that it takes the, now familiar, key signatures of Dante’s work in the lighthearted touch of an old Warner Brothers cartoon sensibility but then swiftly, about half way through, turns into a much more darker entertainment, much more akin to a horror movie, as the film's main human protagonist fights off a gremlin who is trying to chainsaw him to death, for example.

Still, if you’re of an age when you are not going to get freaked out by such stuff (I must have been 16 at the time I saw it on its original cinema release) then it was a great little movie and packs a lot of industry in-jokes in such as having people like composer Jerry Goldsmith appearing in a few shots, along with The Time Machine and the original Robby The Robot from Forbidden Planet... indeed, the much used Robby even does some lines from his debut appearance in this film if you listen carefully.

Talking of Goldsmith, the score is composed by him in his usual effective and entertaining style (he was a frequent collaborator with Dante and was able to capture just the kind of atmosphere that was required) and its fitting that he was called in to score this as he composed the music for Twilight Zone: The Movie which included a little melody, orchestrated for dominant fiddling, for the gremlin on the wing story which Goldsmith appropriately used as the basis for the main gremlin theme in this movie.

It’s still a great watch of a movie and is full of fun, moving sequences of unabated cuteness, quirky and dark horror and it has a beyond fun score. Definitely one to watch out for if you’ve never encountered it before.

However... then came Gremlins 2: The New Batch... and my view of that one remains exactly the same as the only ever time I saw it, when it was released in cinemas back in 1990.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Gremlins 2: The New Batch has more of everything in it, concentrated in a single more claustrophobic space of a tower block which is obviously inspired by the Trump tower, known as the Clamp tower. Indeed, there’s even a main character clearly modelled on Trump in the movie. So the main human protagonists from the first film, Billy and his romantic interest, are now working in this tower in the big city, where they once again encounter the original mogwai from the first movie, Gizmo, who is once again accidentally forced to spawn a mischievous and deadly infestation of gremlins which the humans must try to stop leaving the tower and reaching the streets of New York.

But where, say, a film like Die Hard worked better from limiting the setting, the second Gremlins movie just becomes hamstrung by the indulgence of the director who is allowed to let his toys out to play in earnest. There are the usual movie references (Christopher Lee playing a mad scientist who is, at one stage, seen carrying one of the original seed pods from the 1950s version of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers) but somewhere in the midst of all this excess of cute gags designed purely for laughs, the film kinda forgets to make us feel anything or let us care for any characters.

Worse, it betrays the memory of the first film where characters you thought were killed by the Gremlins are brought back (aw, they were only slightly injured after all) and even the brutal but effective sequence where Phoebe Cates character Kate in the first film explains exactly why she hates Christmas... is spoofed and made light of in this movie in a sequence that leaves a bad taste of condescension in the mouth.

Even Goldsmith’s Gremlin Rag has been transformed by the composer into something that is a little more like a “pop-shortening” of the original theme and it’s far less effective than his score to the first movie... and certainly less fun.

All in all I generally like Joe Dante and think films like the original Gremlins, Matinee and Looney Tunes: Back In Action are all little masterpieces... but I think Gremlins 2: The New Batch is probably one of his all-time worst movies and it feels much less subtle and overplayed than the original classic.

At the end of the day, most fans of the first movie are going to want to see this one due to the memories of the first, but I really wouldn’t recommend this second, over-blown yet watered down confection to anybody. Stick with the original movie and give this second a wide berth.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

Have You Hergé One About A Reporter And His Dog?

The Adventures of Tintin The Secret of the Unicorn

2011 USA Directed by Steven Spielberg

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: Haddock inducing spoilers

to be discovered in this article.

You know, I always liked TinTin as a kid. I remember those comic strip albums which were a little over A4 in size and which used to be fairly expensive to buy... at least the Asterix ones got rereleased and sized down to a more affordable price... but there were no smaller versions of the TinTin strips, at least no tin the UK that I remember. Consequently, I used to only get bought one every couple of years as a young 'un. I think I only ever possessed about seven of them all told, but I always read what I had of these every year, fortified by such other childhood reading delights as Jennings, Asterix and a big pile of Harvey, DC and Marvel comics.

I also used to like those bite sized 5-10 minute episodes of (cue shouting voice) “Hergé’s The Adventuuuuureeeees of TinTin” which used to pop up every school holiday just before the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials, The Adventures of Robison Crusoe TV serial and Why Don’t You (just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead)? My favourite of these TinTin cartoons was, of course, The Crab With The Golden Claws and so, when the new Spielberg directed TinTin was announced I was doubly pleased and then doubly disappointed. Pleased that Jamie Bell would be playing TinTin (what an excellent choice) but then later disappointed that this would not be a third “live action” TinTin adventure like the two French/Belgian and French/Spain coproductions of the sixties, reviewed here (TinTin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece) and here (TinTin and the Blue Oranges). I was equally disappointed when I found that Spielberg and his co-producer Peter Jackson had chosen to adapt The Secret Of The Unicorn for their movie. This was not a story I knew... I wanted The Crab With The Golden Claws or, at the very least, my other favourite (if somehow strangely baffling when I was a kid) TinTin adventure, The Cigars of the Pharaohs.

My worries for the new “franchise” were further compounded when I finally saw the trailer to the new movie which, honestly, looked a tad alienating with its CGI characters and blistering barnacled pacing. It was a TinTin movie though... so there was no way I was going to miss this one. And you know what? I’m really glad I didn’t.

My first worry, that of the CGI, very quickly wore off soon after a stylish credits sequence covering “other” TinTin adventures, punctuated by Johnny Williams unusually orchestrated (for this kind of subject matter) title music, as the film-makers made a nice visual gag, post-credits, comparing the new CGI animated TinTin to the old comic album likeness which really helped me start to lose my barriers to the technique very early on. Yes, I realised as I was watching it that this was a cleverly concocted and blatantly deliberate visual ploy on Spielberg’s part to say “look it’s okay, this is still the proper TinTin we’re doing here” and that, as an audience member I should have perhaps felt a little more insulted by this than I actually did, but I have to say that the scene did it’s job... so I couldn’t knock it too hard if it worked.

My initial upset as to the adaptation soon crumbled also, as soon as I heard the word KARABOUDJAN! Yep, this was not just an adaptation of The Secret Of The Unicorn but also a cross-pollinated adaptation of, you guessed it, The Crab With The Golden Claws... and while a large amount of that story didn’t make it into the film (including the opium smuggling elements from which the original work got its name), there were enough large chunks from this to keep me mollified throughout the length of the film. It was, after all, the story where TinTin and Captain Haddock first met... and I’m glad to say that first meeting, including the TinTin’s storage room exit with his champagne cork booby trap, made it into the film unscathed... as did a lot of the dessert sequences and the seaplane.

The story also goes into Red Rackham’s Treasure towards the end of the movie, ready to jump into a sequel where we’ll presumably, finally, get to meet Professor Calculas (who is conspicuous in his absence from this film) and his brilliant and iconic shark submarine from the story in question. That’s gonna look good on screen... I remember seeing a lifesized replica of it at a TinTin exhibition at Greenwich Maritime Museum a few years back and it brought back a rush of memories.

Frankly though, I’m doing the film a little bit of a disservice by citing all these examples as being the main reason why I thoroughly enjoyed this particular cinematic concoction. The main reason is because this is a thrifty, entertaining piece of cinema executed with, mostly, good taste and a similar spirit to Spielberg and Lucas’ Indiana Jones adventures... not that I think they’re actually trying to follow that style consciously... it just so happens that the Indiana Jones adventures and the TinTin adventures are pretty much cut from the same cloth so the way in which the narrative style has been exploited and the musical treatment of these on-screen adventurers (by the same composer as it happens) was bound to give it a cinematic echo. It’s true that the action chase sequences have, perhaps, become a little more elaborate and “adrenalised” from what you’d expect to find in a TinTin strip... but you’re talking chalk and cheese here in terms of static panels versus 24 frames per second so you can hardly find fault with this quite legitimate approach to the action and it really doesn’t ever wander off into something which doesn’t retain the spirit of those original stories. And as such... succeeds legitimately and brilliantly as a coherent adaptation (or indeed extrapolation) of the text.

I have a couple of minor criticisms which I should probably mention, however. Three, in fact.

Number one is that I missed the little surreal sequences that occasionally used to turn up in TinTin. Specifically, stuff like the bizarre and almost horrifying vision of TinTin as a champagne bottle about to have his head “de-corked” by Captain Haddock with a massive corkscrew, for example. It think there was room to include the quirkier Hergé traits in the film.

Secondly, the film was perhaps just a bit too long and although the chase and action sequences were pretty good, the final one felt like it was going to lead into an even more spectacular, climactic action sequence and, instead, led into an overlong explanatory scene and set up to the next one, which felt a little like it outstayed its welcome just a bit too much. I think the film could maybe have done with some judicious pruning in places... but it’s hard to complain too much because they did get the mix just about right.

My third grumble is fast becoming a common one on the general state of the technology these days... the 3D wasn’t particularly special or outstanding in that it didn’t add anything to the movie and was, in my opinion, completely unnecessary. Could have done without that and the extra £1.50 added on to the ticket price. What a con!

Although the actual The Crab With The Golden Claws artefact itself wasn’t bedded into the main plot, a very strong visual allusion to this and other TinTin adventures are scattered throughout the movie to keep fans happy. Mr. Spielberg also gets a cameo in a passport photo which is hilarious... until the CGI version of the character appears in a later scene and perhaps overplays the joke just a little (and if I’m not mistaken, the CGI maestro Mr. John Williams is with him in one scene). But even with these slight criticisms, I have to say that The Adventures Of TinTin: The Secret Of The Unicorn was a thoroughly enjoyable ride. Lots to recommend in this and, as importantly, it doesn’t betray the spirit of the original works. Go and see it on a big screen while you can.

Jurassic Park

Raiders Of The Lost Park

Jurassic Park 1993 US

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Screening at UK cinemas for two weeks only.

Warning: Big dinosaur sized spoilers on this one...

if you seriously haven’t seen this movie before.

You know I couldn’t believe, when I heard the news of Jurassic Parks limited re-release at the cinemas, that it had been 20 years since I first went to the cinema to see it. The most I would have said it had been out was maybe seven or eight years. Well, as it happens I was right to an extent. It hadn’t been 20 years... I checked and it’s only been 18. What the heck? Drumming up business for BluRay sales and such like. Shame on you Mr. Spielberg. I remember a time when it was “all about the movies”.

Still, I’m not complaining too hard. It’s definitely a classic film and a bit of a masterpiece for one of America's most commercial movie makers. I’ve always liked the film and it truly deserves the status it holds with film enthusiasts and here’s why...

Jurassic Park is one of those movies which very much takes the Hollywood line of “cause and effect” cinema to its most resilient and unshakeable and, though I’ve never been an admirer of that A leads to B leads to C kind of linear and logical progression in US moviemaking... it has to be said that when a movie of this stature is released, and that whole way of focussing and sharpening a script until everything (and I mean everything) in it is relevant to what comes after and before it, then just occasionally it’s a real pleasure to be watching a movie that gets it all so right.

Starting off with a very bleak opening sequence that completely killed the illusion created by its almost cutesy, cuddly advertising, Spielberg does exactly the same thing that David Lynch did with Wild At Heart... and that is to demonstrate just how dangerous one of the main (non-human in this case) characters can be. After a few, almost atonal scene setting notes from Johnny Williams score play out to start off and continue through the sequence, we get a truly great piece of film-making where some well equipped “experts” try to transfer a Velociraptor from a cage into its enclosure. Of course something goes wrong and in an absolutely brilliant and very chilling sequence comprising of sound and rustling foliage in which we never actually see the dinosaur, a man is dragged into the cage to be eaten. The disturbing impact of this and the foreknowledge that even a bunch of well-equipped specialists could not compete with this particular breed of dinosaur does a lot to the way in which you view the rest of the film. You can watch people make googoo eyes at cutesy Brontosaurus’ and Triceratops’ all you like but you know that your central characters are really going to have to tread through the movie carefully if they want to make it back out alive.

From there on, the movie never lets up the pace (even in the talkier sections) and everything thats said or focussed on in one sequence has some kind of pay off in a later scene... all except one. Nedrys “samples” which he’s stolen from the super-rich owner John Hammond (played charmingly by Richard Attenborough in the movie but who is actually almost a villainous character in the original novel) are buried in their shaving foam tin protector under some wet mud while Nedrys is being chomped up by a roving dinosaur. This was possibly left in to be picked up on in a sequel but, ultimately, neither of the two Jurassic Park sequels chose to pick up on this little gift to future filmmakers in the franchise.

Other than that slight detour, though, it really is full steam ahead on this movie in which Spielberg really shows us he is one of the true “children of Hitchcock” in the way he controls the audience thrills and suspense. People forget how dark a movie this one actually is and frequently take very young kids to see it. There was a 6 or 7 year old in the audience behind me when I revisited this in the cinema the other night and he never made it past the break out of the Tryannosaurus Rex before his dad had to remove him from the auditorium. Spielberg even manages to throw in a cross cut set of sequences where Laura Dern and Samuel L. Jackson attempt to get the park booted up again while Sam Neill and two kids are climbing down a dead electric fence. The suspense across these two sequences is tremendous because you know that if one group are successful in their endeavour, the electric fence is going to spring back into life and one of our other characters will suddenly be toast.

The one thing I would flag up as slightly underwhelming though is the CGI work in the movie. I know it’s because of this movie that George Lucas realised that the effects were such that he could move ahead again on his Star Wars movies and finally shoot the prequel trilogy but, seriously, the effects didn’t look that great back in 1993 (especially the Brontosaurus animations) and they really don’t hold up well today when they are being screened on digital equipment. I’ve noticed this before but some of this digital stuff seems to make old effects movies look worse and certainly makes some of the stuff really look like its laying on a separate plate within a shot. This is not good and the only thing that I could throw up in its defence is to remind people that CGI hasn’t really got that much better in recent years than it was back then... especially when it comes to dinosaurs. Have you seen those awful CGI effects in the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong? And Yoda looks more like an animated cartoon these days than a real person (of course he's a real person, don’t be näive).

Packed full of some great and iconic moments (including a sound activated glass of water which is a steal from the start of the sequence of the tanks rolling in at the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia from The Unbearable Lightness Of Being) it was truly a joy to rewatch this movie in a cinema again. Jurassic Park really is like a well oiled machine... a big, well oiled, movie making machine which really knows how to reach the audience and push the right emotional buttons to engage with that audience. Especially with the assistance of Johnny Williams melodic and mostly sugary score which, though it doesn’t musically reference the 1933 Max Steiner scored version of King Kong like the music in the first sequel to Jurassic Park did in one place, has loads going for it and even the most casual viewer will most likely have at least one or two of the main, pulse pounding tunes lodged in their heads for a good deal of time after their screening.

You know, I remembered there’s a shot where a girl falls out of a heating vent, is caught by her friends and pulled back in right as a Velociraptor makes a jump for her leg and just misses... I clearly recall that back in 1993 I was so on the edge of my seat by this point in the movie that my right leg gave an involuntary kick as if to kick the Raptor away from me at that moment. I’m glad to say that, this time around, I had sufficient control of my bodily functions to not get caught out like that again but as I was watching it I realised that, really, there is a lot of power oozing out between the frames of this movie. It really is one of the great American works of commercially accessible art and it really needs to be taken out of the closet every ten or so years and appreciated and celebrated all over again. Every now and again these days, Hollywood is still capable of making, not just a good or halfway decent movie, but a really great film. Jurassic Park is one of them.