steven Spielberg

Film Review: READY PLAYER ONE (USA 2018) *** Directed by Steven Spielberg

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Ready Player One Poster
Trailer

When the creator of a virtual reality world called the OASIS dies, he releases a video in which he challenges all OASIS users to find his Easter Egg, which will give the finder his fortune.

Director:

Steven Spielberg

Writers:

Zak Penn (screenplay by), Ernest Cline (screenplay by) | 1 more credit »

Stars:

Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn |

 

At the promo screening of READY PLAYER ONE, the MC who introduced the movie said that if one enjoys gaming, special effects and CGI, this is the movie, and if not…..”  His words are so true, as Steven Spielberg’s latest venture, based on the book of the same name by Ernest Cline is just that – too much going on screen for the average moviegoer to absorb.  Half of the humour and logic are completely lost, but on the other hand, half of what transpires on screen might be appreciated.

The film is set in the future of 2045 in Chicago where people live in what are called ‘the stacks’ as their cramped quarters are stacked one above the other.  The hero of the piece is an orphan, Wade Watts (Sheridan Tye) a youth of 18 who lives with his aunt (Susan Lynch) and her abusive boyfriend.

The is is the story’s premise.  The world is in the grip of many worries: energy crisis, disaster caused by climate change, famine, poverty, war, etc.  In this chaotic world, OASIS is a global virtual reality system ], accessible through head-mounted and haptic devices such as gloves and coveralls.  Originally conceived as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), it has become over time a true virtual society which all humanity uses as an outlet.  It is a place everyone wants to be in and where everyone gets to be whoever he wants.  The players win coins (shades of bitcoin) but lose everything if they are killed.  Its creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance, who now appears to be Spielberg’s favourite actor), is one of the richest men in the world.  Immediately after his death, a video is released in which he appears, explaining that he decided to bequeath his huge fortune, 500 billion dollars, and his company, GSS, to the person who will find an easter egg hidden in the OASIS.  The goal is to find three keys scattered in the OASIS and which are the preliminary to the discovery of the egg.  

The villain of the piece is Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) who for the most part wears a suit and tie.  He was Halliday’s partner who wants to own the entire OASIS, though he is not that familiar with all the pop culture that comes with OASIS.  He, comically has someone who does, connected to him via headphones so he can impress whoever he wants that he knows all.  He tries to foil Wade and his gang from finding the three keys.  Yes, there is also romance between wade and Samantha (Olivia Cooke) amidst all going on behind the action.

The search for the 3 keys and the east egg (in a film appropriately timed to be released at Easter) takes our heroes though a journey that includes, of all things, Stanley Kubrick’s horror movie THE SHINING.  Those familiar with the film will be pleased to see the twin girls and the river of blood coming from the two open doors.

The film, despite dwelling on pop culture kitsch has a few sensitive moments – a story of soul to be found in a special effects soulless film.  The film looks stunning with cinematography by Oscar winner, Janusz Kaminski (SCHINDLER’S LIST).  The film costs a huge bundle of millions to make and it shows.  The film astounds as it bores, is soulful as it is soulless, a contradiction in entertainment but nevertheless, an successful failure.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSp1dM2Vj48

 

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Film Review: THE POST (USA 2017) ****

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The Post Poster
Trailer

A cover-up that spanned four U.S. Presidents pushed the country’s first female newspaper publisher and a hard-driving editor to join an unprecedented battle between journalist and government.

Director:

Steven Spielberg

Writers:

Liz Hannah, Josh Singer

Stars:

Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson

An ideal time for a picture such as THE POST to be released is this day and time when the majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the Trump Presidency.  No matter how much President Trump tries to make it right or criticize media, he is still made fun of every night on the talk shows, and especially on SNL by Alec Baldwin.  

The timing is also relevant for two reasons.  The film is Meryl Streep’s comeback at Trump after he made the remark of her being the most over-rated actress.  he demonstrates her acting prowess at taking down the Nixon Presidency or any other Presidency for that matter.  The second is the banding of critics and other publications to take down Disney when the studio decided to ban the L.A. Times in retaliation for a scathing article written against them. 

Spielberg, director of 50 or so films as of date, goes for theatrics, clearly from the start of the film to the end.  Meryl Streep is given the grand theatrical entrance in the bedroom scene where she coughs and papers get thrown on the floor.  The camera concentrates on the performances on both Hanks and Streep, as if it were begging them to be noticed for Oscar nods.  The actual crime, the incidents of the coverups of the four governments are only briefly mentioned, with hardly any details.  The opening sequence of one failure attack in Vietnam is supposed to do the trick.  

THE POST is the drama about the unlikely partnership between The Washington Post’s Katharine Graham (Streep), the first female publisher of a major American newspaper, and editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), as they race to catch up with The New York Times to expose a massive cover-up of government secrets that spanned three decades and four U.S. Presidents.

The script goes on to push all the right buttons to give the audience a feel-good feeling of elation.  “The Government has lied about the Vietnam War for 30 years.  The way they lied has tone brought out into the open.” says  Bradley. The government is then pursuing the security breach.  The announcement of the result of the court as to whether the Washington Post would be acquitted is grandly staged.  Even the words of the judge are quoted as coming from there American fore-fathers.

It is interesting to compare Spielberg’s other political entry on American Presidents – LINCOLN.  In that film, President Abraham Lincoln was treated with respect and grandeur while in THE POST Nixon is considered nothing more than two-faced rat.  Nixon invites no Washington Post press for his daughter’s wedding as a result apart incident and later bans the Post from the White House showing him not only guilty of being a sore-loser but one craving for revenge.  His revenge is shown at the closing of the film as he Watergate scandal begins, as everyone knows.  But the scene is still a satisfying one.

THE POST and the upcoming THE GREATEST SHOWMAN are 20th Century Fox’s Oscar hopefuls, both opening at Christmas.  Both are crowd pleasers and it will be interesting to see what happens.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrXlY6gzTTM

 

 

 

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1997 Movie Review: JURASSIC PARK 2, 1997

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JURASSIC PARK 2 MOVIE POSTER
JURASSIC PARK 2 The Lost World, 1997
Movie Reviews

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Vince Vaughn, Richard Attenborough, Peter Stormare
Review by David Hammond

SYNOPSIS:

Set several years after the teething problems that occurred at the worlds first biological prehistoric amusement park, a second island full of dinosaurs is revealed to the public after an incident involving a small girl being attacked by its previously extinct inhabitants. Millionaire John Hammond has come under public scrutiny and his company has been taken away from him. He enlists the help of a team to document and study the animals that have been allowed to develop in their ‘natural’ habitat before the island is interfered with. Dr Ian Malcolm reluctantly joins the team when he discovers his girlfriend is on the island. Soon after they arrive they soon discover they are not the only people on the island when a team lead by Hammond’s nephew has come to extract the dinos in order to populate another Park in San Diego.

REVIEW:

After the overwhelming success of Jurassic Park which is rightly regarded as one on the seminal points in filmmaking due to the technological advances that were made in the creation of the creatures and the amount of realism that was injected into them; a sequel was always inevitable. The Lost World is ultimately missing the thing that made Jurassic Park so special, which isn’t dinosaurs because there’s loads of them wandering about.

Four years after the incident at Jurassic Park, a wealthy family stumble across a beautiful island and decide to take a break on its picturesque sandy beach. Soon after the tea, cakes and indeed sandwiches are unpacked the families little girl is attacked by a mob of small dinosaurs. The attack proves that not only should you never feed luncheon meat to a dinosaur but also the genetically engineered inhabitants of the island are a danger to the public. With “Site B”; the breeding ground for Jurassic Park in the spotlight, beardy millionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) has had to relinquish control of his company to his nephew Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard) who plans to remove the dinosaurs from the breeding ground and open a new park in San Diego in order to keep his newly acquired company from bankruptcy. With previous experience of the potential pitfalls of such a business venture, Hammond is naturally worried about the potential dangers involved.

In order to protect Site B from being pillaged Hammond has put together a scientific expedition to record the animals in their natural habitat, and asks Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to be a part of it. Understandably he is reluctant due to the somewhat jarring experience that he had the last time he did Hammond a favour, but is quickly roped in when he discovers his girlfriend Sarah (Julianne Moore) is already there. Soon after the team (along with Malcolm’s stowaway daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester) arrive they are soon joined by Ludlow’s mercenaries who begin to capture dinosaurs to transport them to America. However after both the factions equipment is destroyed the rival teams must work together in order to survive the predators on the island.

Once again the creature effects in the Lost World are completely believable and therefore should be applauded. But Lost World suffers from the same problems as Jurassic Park did, but does so on a grander scale. The characters once again seem to have been put to the side in favour of the dinosaur effects. Ian Malcolm serves as both the main protagonist and the comic relief in the Lost World, but is lacking many aspects that made him such an enjoyable character in the first film. Malcolm is much more embittered in the Lost World due to they way he was treated after the Jurassic Park incident, which essentially robs him of any of the likeable characteristics that he had in the first film. Julianne Moore and Arliss Howard are lumbered with thankless roles as is true with the majority of the supporting cast; who you can identify from very early on who is and who isn’t going to be eaten and or stepped on. Only Pete Postlethwaite portrayal of big game hunter Roland Tempo who’s only desire is to hunt a T-Rex seems to raise above the materials limitations. The deep performances once again are credited to the dinosaurs.

The poor characterisation in the film is obviously a product of a shaky script. In the worst cases it makes the characters act with the shocking absence of any form of common sense. For example unbalanced hunter Dieter Stark (Peter Stormare) wanders off into the jungle to relieve himself and asks his friend to wait for him. His friend is listening to his Walkman and therefore fails to hear his friends cries for help when his is eventually attacked and eaten. Even for downtime personal cassette players should always be left at home when you plan to be navigating harsh jungle environment hunting prehistoric animals. The lack of common sense even extends to the more educated characters like Dr. Sarah Harding. After treating the infant T-Rex of its injuries Sarah’s jacket is stained by its blood, she later mentions that the T-Rex has exceptional scent detection, but is later shocked when the disgruntled mother T-Rex sneaks into camp to investigate said jacket with questions. Having theorised and witnessed the Rex’s fierce paternal instincts first hand there was only one outcome, and it should’ve been something that a behavioural palaeontologist would’ve predicted and avoided.

The aforementioned lack in judgement the characters often display lead to some impressive set pieces. One of the highlights is where panicked mercenaries run into a field of long grass, they are stalked by raptors. Spielberg shows a strange amount of restraint in the scene only showing their tails and the trials left behind as the grass is separated as they approach their prey; proving like he did with Jaws that less is more. But as with most of the Lost World while some things work brilliantly others fall flat. The climatic T-Rex rampage in San Diego feels tacked on and like a lot things in the film doesn’t make a lot of sense and seems as it’s just there for the sake of it.

What you come to realise with the Lost World is that we have seen it all before. The dinosaurs are still brilliant, but because we’ve seen them before you find yourself focusing on other aspects of the film that weren’t so important when you first watched Jurassic Park. The lack of the initial reaction of wonder to the animals means that the Lost World has to rely on the story and the script, both of which are mediocre. Even John Williams classic score fails to resonate the same epic feelings that were attained with the original and sometimes feels out of place. Spielberg falls short of topping his 1993 classic by making the same mistakes again but on a grander scale. The usually reliable Spielberg makes some strange decisions with the Lost World and the special effects fail to support this somewhat jumbled sequel.

 

JURASSIC PARK 2, 1997

1987 Movie Review: EMPIRE OF THE SUN, 1987

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EMPIRE OF THE SUN MOVIE POSTER
EMPIRE OF THE SUN, 1987
Movie Reviews

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring: Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, Nigel Havers, Joe Pantoliano
Review by Matthew Lohr

SYNOPSIS:

A young English boy struggles to survive under Japanese occupation during World War II.

Nominated for 6 OSCARS – Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, Best Music, Best Costume Design

REVIEW:

After years of being pigeonholed as simply an entertainer, a populist producer of popcorn frivolity, Steven Spielberg has finally won acceptance as a serious filmmaker. His “Schindler’s List” won awards and acclaim and was cited as a milestone in historical cinema, while “Saving Private Ryan” has grown in the public mind into much more than a mere film; indeed, it more or less served the role of a de facto World War II veterans’ monument until the federal government actually got around to building a real one. Even when the public does not embrace his forays into serious cinema quite so fervently, as with the acclaimed but financially underperforming “Amistad” and “Munich”, Spielberg no longer has to fight for respect and the right to be regarded as a cinematic “artiste”.

Such was not the case when “Empire of the Sun” was first released in 1987. Though Spielberg’s previous film, 1985’s deep-Southern drama “The Color Purple”, had won him some acclaim and a Director’s Guild award, many critics charged that the picture prettified human suffering, turning true experience into mere pageantry. It was still hard for audiences to find the artist inside the entertainer, and they responded to “Empire of the Sun” in kind, greeting it with both mixed reviews and lukewarm box office. It would take a few more crowd-pleasers (another Indiana Jones picture, “Jurassic Park”) before Spielberg finally got his due with “Schindler’s List”. “Empire of the Sun” provides an interesting contrast to that film, presenting a vaguely similar subject with all of the Hollywood gloss and glamour that the later film eschews…and ultimately suffering for it.

Adapted from J.G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical best-seller, “Empire” tells the story of young Jim Graham (a pre-teen Christian Bale), a pampered son of wealthy English parents living in 1940s Shanghai. Jim is obsessed with planes, and dreams of someday joining the mighty Japanese air force. One day, however, the dreams stop when the Japanese take the city and Jim is separated from his parents. Drifting through a series of increasingly harrowing adventures, he eventually finds himself in a Japanese internment camp, where the once-arrogant son of privilege is forced to get down in the muck and learn how to survive.

It’s grand material for a cinematic treatment, but Tom Stoppard’s screenplay does not take it far enough. We never really get a clear sense of exactly what Jim learns from his experiences. Sure, he finds out that life’s not as easy as he thought it was, and that the Japanese army he so idolized is indeed vulnerable, but these lessons are never clearly articulated by the script’s events, and we’re left to piece it together later in our heads (I think this is where the playwright in Stoppard comes through; film scripts often don’t bear up to such abstraction). Jim’s plane fixation likewise seems meant to hold a metaphorical weight that it never truly assumes. What’s more, when Jim is finally delivered from his predicament, we get no scenes showing us his life after his ordeal. How can we really know how he’s changed, what he’s learned, if we don’t get to see the new Jim in action? Spielberg and Stoppard don’t bother to provide any answers, and the film becomes too remote as a result.

Bale, admittedly, makes even this truncated Jim a compelling and fascinating character. The actor holds the screen with utter command; it’s not a stretch for us to follow him anywhere. He’s equally convincing as the snobby, snide boy of early scenes and as the haggard, battle-hardened survivor of the later camp sequences. Spielberg has always been one of our best directors of children, and Bale’s performance here is some of the best work he’s ever solicited from a young actor.

The supporting cast, while impressive, is unfortunately hamstrung by insufficiently defined roles. Miranda Richardson and Peter Gale have some nice moments as Jim’s surrogate prison-camp parents, and Nigel Havers makes us wish we saw more of his dedicated camp doctor. Masato Ibu is also commanding as the cold-eyed Japanese commandant, and Emily Richard has a few moments of chilling power as Jim’s mom. Still, these characters are never given much to do by the story, and merely seem to be around to react to Jim’s actions. The only truly vividly drawn supporting player is Basie (John Malkovich), a former merchant sailor and full-time survivor who teaches Jim the hard facts of camp living while plotting an escape and a new life as a river pirate. He’s a complex and interesting character, both a pragmatist and a dreamer, and Malkovich invests him with hard-bitten smarts and a surprising soulfulness that makes his every scene compelling.

This being a Steven Spielberg picture, naturally, everything looks just great. The cinematography by Allen Daviau is gorgeous, and the production designers craft an always-convincing facsimile of World War II China. John Williams’ score is undistinguished, but the soundtrack makes use of a haunting Welsh lullaby that stayed in my head for days. And, of course, there’s plenty of Spielbergian set pieces: the harrowing moment where Jim loses his mother, a tense sequence where a Japanese gunman stalks the boy through a field of weeds, Jim saluting a band of Japanese kamikaze pilots, and a well-staged air attack on the camp, with Jim cheering wildly for the planes about to destroy him.

Still, should a film like this even HAVE set pieces? “Schindler’s List” had memorable moments, to be sure, but none of them seemed to be there just so the director could show off; everything emerged naturally from the events of the story, and thus became organic parts of a whole, not “big scenes”. “Empire of the Sun” gave Spielberg a serious subject matter and a broad canvas to explore, but the populist was still too much at play. It would take a few years and a few more films, but Spielberg finally got it right, proving that even the most financially successful director of all time can learn a few new tricks every now and again.This film won Best Director and Best Cinematography, and was nominated for five other categories. The screenwriter was nominated, and rightly so. Taken from a short story that first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1933 by Maurice Walsh, Green Rushes, Frank Nugent was able to weave a story rich in subtext and conflict.

The collector’s edition of the DVD includes an interview with Maureen O’Hara where she reminisces about filming The Quiet Man, and is well worth watching.

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EMPIRE OF THE SUN, 1987

1977 Movie Review: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, 1977

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, 1977
Movie Reviews

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Bob Balaban, Lance Henriksen
Review by Steven Loeb

SYNOPSIS:

Cableman Roy Neary is one of several people who experience a close encounter of the first kind, witnessing UFOs flying through the night sky. He is subsequently haunted by a mountainlike image in his head and becomes obsessed with discovering what it represents, putting severe strain on his marriage. Meanwhile, government agents around the world have a close encounter of the second kind, discovering physical evidence of otherworldly visitors in the form of military vehicles that went missing decades ago suddenly appearing in the middle of nowhere. Roy and the agents both follow the clues they have been given to reach a site where they will have a close encounter of the third kind: contact.

REVIEW:

In the early days of science fiction movies, beings from other planets were often used as a symbol of fear and destruction. During the Red Scare of the 1950s, aliens were often used as a representation for the invasion of Communism. They came, they saw and they destroyed everything in their path. By the late 1970s, though the Cold War was still going strong, the Red Scare was long over, and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) had improved relations between the United States and Russia, leading to a reduction in the number of missiles that each country would be allowed to keep in their arsenals. It seemed that the two super-powers might be coming toward some kind of resolution to their decades-long war; of course this would not actually happen until more than ten years later. Nevertheless, if there is one film that shows a prevailing optimism in the direction that the Cold War, and the world in general, was taking at the time, it was Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the third film directed by Steven Spielberg.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the story of a small town electrician named Roy, played by Richard Dreyfuss, who experiences a seemingly random encounter with a UFO. After the experience, Roy becomes obsessed with aliens and UFOs. His behavior becomes extremely strange and erratic, including drawing the same mountain over and over. When he is unable to explain his behavior to his wife, she leaves him, and only then does he realize that he is drawing Devils Tower in Wyoming, the site where the UFOs are about to make contact with humans. As he races to get there, the government, having made a list of people who will be allowed to visit the aliens, apprehends him. After being questioned, Roy is added to the list, the aliens return the numerous people who had been abducted over the years, Roy and the others on the list enter the spaceship and are taken away to make contact with the friendly aliens.

Close Encounters was a film that Steven Spielberg had been working on for almost a decade by the time it was finally released. After shopping the film around, Spielberg was finally able to sell the script, and get creative control of the project, following the massive success of Jaws (1975). Based on a story he had written as a teenager, it is one of the few scripts for which Spielberg gets full writing credit, even though the script went through numerous changes and numerous other writers worked on different drafts of the story. Despite the contributions of other writers, in many ways, this is the first real Spielberg film, as this is where he began to incorporate themes that he would use in many of his later films, some of which reflect his own life and would come to define him as a director. This is the first of Spielberg’s films to depict an unhappy marriage; Spielberg’s own parents had divorced when he was a child and he often incorporates broken families, or single parent homes, in his films. Roy and his wife have a tempestuous relationship to begin with, and they see their marriage become even more strained as a result of Roy’s obsessions, ultimately leading to the collapse of their relationship. Spielberg would use this theme most famously in E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982), a film about a lonely boy who finds friendship with a lost alien. Spielberg’s films also often incorporate the themes of wonder and child-like innocence, seen here as Roy enters the spaceship at the end of the film. Though he is unsure of what is going to happen, he is excited and awed instead of afraid. This motif was used again in the Indiana Jones movies and, perhaps most successfully, in Jurassic Park (1993).

Close Encounters was the second collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Richard Dreyfuss, the first being Jaws two years earlier. Dreyfuss, who had first gained fame for his role in American Graffiti (1973), became a major movie star after Jaws. In 1978, he became the youngest actor ever to win the Best Actor Oscar for his role in The Goodbye Girl (1977), though this honor has since been surpassed by Adrian Brody.

Unfortunately for Dreyfuss, at the peak of his success, he developed a serious drug habit and, after crashing his car and being arrested for cocaine possession in 1982, he was forced to enter rehab. He was eventually able to resuscitate his career, going on to receive a nomination for Best Actor for Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995). After Close Encounters, Dreyfuss and Spielberg would work together one more time in Always (1989), a film that is widely considered to be one of Spielberg’s worst movies.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a huge success, both critically and at the box office. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including a Supporting Actress nomination for Melina Dillion, playing the mother of an abducted child, and Spielberg’s first for Best Director; the film would walk away with two Oscars, for cinematography and sound editing.

close encounters.jpg

THE BFG (USA 2016). Directed by Steven Spielberg

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the_bfg.jpgTHE BFG (USA 2016) **
Directed by Steven Spielberg

Starring: Mark Rylance, Ruby Barnhill, Penelope Wilton, Jemaine Clement, Rebecca Hall, Bill Hader

Review by Gilbert Seah

THE BFG (big friendly giant) premiered at Cannes this year in the out-of-competition category to rave reviews. So expecting a lot from Spielberg, the director who is reputed to be a creator of dreams, I went into the BFG film (a film with a story of a giant collecting dreams in a bottle) expecting a lot but was duly disappointed.

The film based on the Roald Dahl children’s novel, deals with an orphan named Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) who lost her parents when she was a baby. Sophie is kidnapped from the orphanage one night by the BFG (Oscar Winner Mark Rylance from Spielberg’s NEST OF SPIES) and brought to Giant Land. There, Sophie befriends the BFG. The book and film fail to give a satisfactory reason of Sophie being kidnapped. The BFG turns out to be one who captures dreams and delivers them to children in the human world. In Giant Land, Sophie meets the other nasty evil human-eating giants. Going back to London, she convinces the Queen (Penelope Wilton) to capture the evil giants. That is the story, a simpler one compared to other Dahl’s stories.

Spielberg opts to leave out Sophie’s orphanage life. Nothing is shown about her life there, except of a mention by her to the BFG that the matron Mrs. Conkers is nasty and gives out lots of punishments such as locking children in the cellar which is rat infested. Not one other child is shown in the film leaving out a key element in the film – the human element. Other characters like the Queen’s Head of Army and Air Force, the King of Sweden and Sultan of Bagdad are largely left out. There are no ‘real’ human beings in the film except for Sophie. Everyone else like the queen and her men are shown as clowns and just pawns for the story’s movement.

At least the special effects animation and Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography are nothing short of stunning. The look of Mark Rylance as the BFG looks very close to Quentin Blake’s illustration in the Dahl book. From the very first frame to the last, there is always the feeling of awe. But the basic human story is lost. Special effects have undermined the simple pleasure of a Roald Dahl book. There can always be too much of a good thing. After being in Giant Land for an hour, the special effects animation begin to look normal.

Spielberg keeps his film in family mode. There is not gore or any scene in which a giant gobbles a human being. When Sophie is eaten by a giant in her dream, she is seen thrown into a dark black hole. Spielberg also resorts to cheap laughs like fart jokes The BFG offers Sophie a fizzy drink called frobscottle that causes noisy green-coloured flatulence. The flatulent humour is revisited when the Queen herself drinks the frobscottle.

The film is dedicated to Melissa Mathison, the scriptwriter (she also wrote E.T.) who passed away during the film’s production.

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