SADDO: THE MOVIE (aka READY PLAYER ONE)

This discussion reminds me I still haven't seen Welt am Draht (1973), the ur-VR movie/miniseries, and its on YT with English subs.

The Red Letter Media guys just tackled this, and it's kind of telling how little enthusiasm they can drum up to even criticize it. I do like their theory that Spielberg signed on when he realized he would only have to direct like 11 minutes of live action and could probably just pass the remainder of CGI stuff to the tech wizards. They also make an astute observation that Jurassic Park is considered a CGI breakthrough even though it's got maybe 8 minutes of CGI, and that this movie is its complete converse.

i had some inkling of that idea when the movie started too - that so much of this movie is in CGI - but there's enough Spielberg in this (esp. in that showstopper scene in the middle) that I think he genuinely put his heart into this, if not so much examination (but this is Spielberg, so...)

he realized he would only have to direct like 11 minutes of live action and could probably just pass the remainder of CGI stuff to the tech wizards.

god help me i'm gonna defend spielberg on the ready player one thread but the idea that cgi sequences are any less 'directed' than live-action sequences is... incorrect

And he's already directed an entirely CGI effort. I imagine he enjoys it

I've always been curious about what counts as "directing" when it comes to animation or CGI. I mean, do they just storyboard it, then pass it on to the technical department, then review the footage that comes back and say "Nope, move him more to the left and her one inch down" or whatever?

I doubt they did motion capture for each individual character in montage scenes, but motion capture is less bulky these days so you can have a couple people acting in the rigs

my understanding is that it's not really any different to directing live-action - the director works with the production designer, costume department, director of photography and everyone else they would normally work with to decide the look of a scene, then oversees the action the same way they would with actors, either through motion capture of real-life actors or working with animators to decide the movements they want characters to take

in some ways the amount of control the director has over the frame is greater than live action, so in a sense it's potentially a more involved process from their perspective

Huh. I thought you just like told a robot 'do some CGI' and bam. And that it would occasionally glitch and spit out a 'Johnny Johnny, Yes Papa' video but otherwise make whatever robots and future buildings you wanted.

i mean i could be wrong, maybe spielberg just asked alexa to whip up a stain on his filmography and voila

Just press the CGI button and it makes dinosaurs or spaceships or splosions or sassy animals like magic!

just throw all the character models into a computer game engine and have people walk around in game

tbh there have been actual series made that way, although not a feature film from a notable director

I know my initial post was a gross oversimplification, but that's why I phrased it in the form of a question. I was having difficulty conceptualizing "direction" in the context of animation, where it seemed to me that the person doing the drawings (or whatever) was the one in control. bg's post answered my question.

I have no idea how long it takes these days to re-render - or re-shoot - a CGI action sequence. Let's say you have a fight between a giant robot, Picachu, Godzilla and Rocky. You have to have that totally storyboarded out, right, to the millisecond? Then let's say you get it mostly done, decide it's not working, and you'd rather it be King Kong, Mario, Abraham Lincoln and the Ark from Raiders, and that you want it on the seaside, not on the top of the Golden Gate bridge. Is that extremely slow to "reshoot," or is it relatively simple these days? I mean, Pixar movies are apparently absolutely locked down when they start "shooting," so wouldn't a "live" action film work the same way? And I've often wondered, with huge FX extravaganzas, there are dozens of scenes being worked on at the same time, right? Like, a whole team is maybe working on one scene, or one character, or one effect - the lighting, the setting, the editing - which leaves the director sort of floating around from station to station and computer bank to computer bank, checking on progress?

In any case, for a conventional director, it just has to be totally different, right? It's not as simple as telling an actor to do lines 50 different ways, or approach a scene from a different angle.

I haven't seen this, btw, but playing devil's advocate for myself, I thought Tintin was very Spielberg, so at least in that case the director's presence was apparent. But I think back to the end of of Iron Man 3. I remember that movie having something like a record number of FX people, maybe 1000, and that the credits just kept rolling name after name after name. But the final battle is just absolute chaos of dozens of robots and Iron Mans and bad guys flying around a building and shooting. Of course it had to have been storyboarded, but there's very little essential stuff going on. It might as well have been Shane Black just saying "Iron Man fights a bad guy this way, but in the background all sorts of other shit is going to happening. Work on that and let me know what you come up with."

Hey, look at this!

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/iron-man-3-special-fx/

“This was a tricky one,” said Williams of the frantic Iron Man 3 finale in a May 2013 interview with Art of VFX. Describing one element of the scene – in which various suits of Iron Man armor under the control of Tony’s robotic assistant J.A.R.V.I.S. do battle with super-powered mercenaries while Tony pursues Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) across the collapsing oil rig – Williams revealed that it was the background action that gave his team some initial trouble.

“The foreground fighting and choreography is pretty straightforward. It was the background action that took a while to get right,” he said. “Animators are trained to make action as impressive as possible and bring it to the forefront. We found that early on, we were having too many interesting things happening in the background action, (and) the viewer’s eye was being drawn away from the storytelling and into the background.”

Weta addressed this problem with a mix of framing and timing adjustments that kept flying armor out of the center of the screen and randomized key moments in these background battles. The result was a series of intentionally “messy” skirmishes between Iron Man’s army and the film’s villains.

cgi action sequences aren't all-or-nothing propositions, afaict - they're storyboarded and then they're turned into a low-res pre-vis, which is why you'll often see dvd extras featuring deleted scenes with only partially finished effects, like the ones i just watched last night on the thor: ragnarok disc with a pretty shonky-looking ps3-era hulk taking the place of a full render

doing it that way pretty much ensures that you're not gonna have to reshoot or rethink things totally at the last minute

like, the kind of director who's that unfocused or uncertain is probably not the kind of director who's gonna be handed a $150m tentpole movie in the first place

in fact i think you and i actually had this exact conversation, probably on the iron man 3 thread, years ago now that i think about it

randomised action isn't the same as 'undirected' action fwiw - i suspect weta may well have developed those techniques for the giant battle scenes in lotr, where it would be insane to hand-animate hundreds of cg creatures in a crowd scene just as much as it would be to personally coach every extra's every move in a live-action scene

xp obv

in fact i think you and i actually had this exact conversation, probably on the iron man 3 thread, years ago now that i think about it

I think we did! Didn't I learn or you tell me that inexperienced big budget directors go through an FX bootcamp or something, that brings them up to speed on CGI and other FX stuff?

And yeah, I do remember it being a big deal that Weta developed a way to randomize background action in LotR.

yeah, possibly? sounds about right

Obv. Spielberg is a set piece master, so I doubt he struggles very much with this stuff. He knows exactly what he wants and how it should play, even with a shitty movie. He's been let down by material in the past (as recently as the Posszzzzzzzzzt) but his movies are never badly directed, or at least his direction is never the weak link. Probably not even in Hook, which is ugly as hell, iirc, but I blame the set-looking sets. I didn't see The BFG, but I don't like that book, either, and can't imagine a movie being good.

He's been let down by material in the past

i suspect probably never more so than in this case

I mean you could take this "material" and turn it into all kinds of things, some of them really interesting and relevant and provocative, but most of those are probably not going to play well to the fans of the book because they would involve addressing how fucked up the book's worldview really is, and this is the kind of movie that needs great fan buzz and repeat viewings from fans to really clean up, right?

It seems like it could make a pretty clever PoMo satire, esp. with Spielberg involved. He could have even played himself as some evil executive or something. Or manipulative "director" of the VR world.

yeah, that didn't happen lol

Should’ve been given to Verhoeven imo

nah, the Oasis doesn't need grisly rape

the Matrix was probably the first movie i ever saw a pirated friend-a-downloaded-it-from-Kazaa movie. that was a magical moment, for years you had to struggle w crappy codecs and lo res/fps video like RealMedia, etc. it's a great movie in so many ways

got this far before I guessed the poster

was flipping quickly through the thread and caught "like watching someone play Streets of Rage 2" and also immediately knew who it was

https://68.media.tumblr.com/9362ebb7eb5121a773a5eed0f0486f91/tumblr_p6le3aE5OO1u56vsco1_1280.png

Abhay Khosla:

Ready Player One got this vitriol thrown at it before it came out that struck me as really odd because the stuff the internet seemed angry about was stuff that I’ve seen the same exact internet do for my entire adult life. And defend! Tumblr just spent years shouting “Teenage girls writing fan fiction where Picard and Master Chief from the Halo games have sex is the greatest liberation movement of our times” at me, and then they make a movie of that and it’s like “how darez you.” Cultural product has been devalued– almost none of it has any meaning any more– if people are angry about it, they’re too late…? I just look at what’s happened with comics alone– the idea of there being a big hit comic everyone reads and that people debate and still talk about years later (or even pretends to respect– can’t even pretend that much after you start making Watchmen sequels)… That’s all done. Those times are gone. It’s just … a nightmarish mass of stuff, and there’s no common culture around any of it. Same with movies– same with TV. Go look at a supply and demand curve– demand hasn’t changed; supply on everything’s skyrocketed– basic economics means that everything’s worth less. (And maybe it’s better this way– the olden times were exclusionary). So, yeah, you can put Iron Giant in a movie fellating King Kong and it doesn’t mean shit anymore because this all matters less every day– it’s just stuff on the stuff pile. I don’t know.

...

At the same time, it’s a Spielberg movie– if the idea is Steven Spielberg should interrogate the thing he’s making a popcorn movie about… I mean, that’s not what he does. That’s never been what he does. Would that other movie have been better? Absolutely yes– this movie desperately needed a screenwriter who was smarter than Ernest Cline and it may have actually gotten one that was dumber… Just in the stuff they chose to keep (e.g., I was like “there’s no way they’ll be fucking dumb enough to keep the birthmark thing” and they kept the birthmark thing).

Or what was fascinating is that movie is actually thematically more problematic than the book in a key way, which is they took out the book’s minimal attempt at being about class. In the book, the main character is poor and fat, and he lives in a nasty place– and because he has no money, most of the Oasis is locked away from him because he can’t afford to go to the good parts of it. And the book takes it as a given that having money means having access to a better life. They took out that entire element so it was like “yeah we’re in the ghetto but everyone who lives in the ghetto is white, and in my free time I’m riding around on the Millennial Falcon, crushing poverty’s not so bad, I guess.” Hollywood somehow made Ready Player One MORE problematic…??? How is that possible??? The movie’s like Peak Rich Democrat where it doesn’t care at all about class while like lecturing the audience about how “anti-net neutrality people are the worst.” Or at the end of the movie, the heroes don’t defeat the bad guys– slight adjustments in corporate governance create market conditions that make the bad guys unable to compete and the bad guys go out of business, despite having an obviously lucrative industry operating built around oppressing the poor…? What the fuck??

Like, if the question is “is there fucked up shit dripping off of every edge of that movie” the answer is absolutely yes. But that wasn’t really the question I went to see get answered, so much as just basic “Does Spielberg still got moves when it comes time for a set piece” and I think the answer there is still pretty much yes though there were parts that I think didn’t land as much as they could’ve (I thought he could have done more with the girl’s story in the third act…).

lol Peak Rich Democrat. Kind of agree about it being more problematic re:class though, that whole aspect barely seems to matter past the first 20 minutes

I’m kind of annoyed with sic for making me read that, the first paragraph especially (“this is dumb... but sic reposted it so it probably has a point somewhere”)

use of multiple question marks = suspect

I have a friend on facebook who was angry that the underlying capitalist struggle in the plot was never acknowledged

doesn't the lead character get a bunch of money at the end? see just like in the real world money solves all problems.

An opinion from a guy I only know from Facebook:

I really can’t say enough about how much I loved Ready Player One, both as a film and an adaptation. Simply, it was superb. Ernest Cline’s book is such a rare, singular work of genius, it literally restored my faith in popular fiction. So many other directors would’ve ruined the film, but here, Spielberg shows us why he’s one of the greats. In the places where the film strayed from the original source material and its creators actually had to come up with their own ideas, these alternatives were inspired in their own right, instead of a cheap disappointment, as we’ve seen all too frequently before. Thank you, Steven!

http://cdn.guff.com/site_9/media/17000/16278/thumbnails/fb1_4eaf73e600d6967d8d87571f.jpg

Literally, thank you!

It's not hard to believe at all that there are people who will love this movie for what it is and tries to be. The book itself was a smashing success, right?

4.5 stars on amazon!

officially better than Ulysses

a week has now passed since I saw this and I keep forgetting I saw it, so unmemorable and dull it is

at last something you can hate more than A.I.

Seriously, people who have gone to see this: you do know that every ticket bought for this piece of shit is effectively a vote for Hollywood to make more shit like this? Why encourage them?

am morbidly curious what a PG-13 3D IMAX recreation of eyes wide shut would be.

haven't seen the movie but it's cool that it was such a hot topic of conversation for months, and now it's out, and i don't hear shit.

best possible outcome

It's not hard to believe at all that there are people who will love this movie for what it is and tries to be

yeah kind of amazing, who would think if you market a product there are people that will buy that product.

see this movie: it clears the same bar a box of kleenex does.

Eh, a box of kleenex is usually employed in the aftermath of the act this film most closely resembles.

This review by Vern is interesting, because Vern got his start on Ain't It Cool News and so has an interesting perspective on the rise of the culture this movie celebrates/encapsulates:

This movie could be the final chapter in the Nerdening of America, the last shot fired by the original generation of internet self-proclaimed geeks. I’m talking about the people and attitudes given voice (like me) by the since-disgraced Headgeek Harry Knowles, who encouraged and empowered our nostalgia and masturbatory enthusiasm for the totems and trivia of sci-fi and comic books and shit. From his laptop he told the world about Austin film and “geek” happenings like SIX STRING SAMURAI, the Alamo Drafthouse, Mondo posters, Fantastic Fest, and yes, Cline, some guy who did “slam poetry” about being a nerd, and wrote a script about STAR WARS fans trying to break into Skywalker Ranch so their friend with cancer could see EPISODE I early. Harry was a character in the script, and according to Wired it was his review on Ain’t It Cool that put it on the radar in Hollywood. Harry also read Cline’s 2011 novel Ready Player One early, and Cline said that “The character of Aech is partially based on my friend Harry Knowles (but not entirely).” Random House bought the book (there was a bidding war!) and Warner Brothers bought the movie rights the next day. Cline wrote the first drafts (later rewritten by Zak Penn [story credits on LAST ACTION HERO, X-MEN 2 and THE AVENGERS]).

In fairness I must say that I haven’t seen FANBOYS – I think I only got about ten minutes in before I had to call it. More importantly I haven’t read Ready Player One, and I know you can’t judge a book by wanting to jump off a bridge when you hear the premise, or by having someone chase you around reading excerpts out loud to torment you because there’s a part where he literally spends a page listing off all his favorite bands, TV shows, movies and directors like some unfortunate cross between a MySpace page and the journal of John Doe from SE7EN. (Tip: You didn’t have to tell us you liked They Might Be Giants and “Youtube videos of cute geeky girls playing ’80s cover tunes on ukuleles.” We pretty much figured that.)

It’s clear that the book was written to pander to a very specific audience, and I might be of the same generation, but I don’t really care about video games or see BACK TO THE FUTURE and GHOSTBUSTERS as the pinnacles of the era. Sure, I like ’em, but they’re not movies that strike the kind of chord in me where I get excited about combining the cars from them into one vehicle (as Wade does in the book and Cline does in real life). So I’m not the target audience.

Or maybe I am now. When Harry rose to power, his favorite things were thought of as kind of niche and looked down on, a secret handshake between misfits happy to find that rare person who understood what they were talking about. That era is reflected in READY PLAYER ONE by the sad detail that the hero knows he’s in love because a girl correctly identifies his fucking Buckaroo Banzai cosplay. But the movie was born into the world that Harry predicted and precipitated, the one with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and perpetual STAR WARS, where you’re more of a weirdo if you don’t know who Gollum is than if you do, where a book like this could be made into a $175 million summer blockbuster directed by Steven fucking Spielberg. The garage band went platinum. So now when you see all this stuff on screen it doesn’t feel like “Holy shit, they have a bunch of my favorite stuff!” It’s more of a “Yep, there’s all the stuff.”