Tom Tykwer is a German-born auteur who has made serious inroads into the US — though a previous film, Cloud Atlas, defeated many critics who shrugged and moved on. This foreshortened version of a 2012 novel by Dave Eggers tells as simple a tale as any folk story, moving from failure and gloom to what may even be a happy ending. It’s middle-of-the-road, yet not without satirical side-barbs at how America is being outpaced by world rivals, particularly China.A Hologram for the King is set in the world of 2010 — with the US still grappling with its Great Recession, and Alan Clay (Hanks, playing a worn, middle-aged businessman), sent to Saudi Arabia to help launch an IT centre in a proposed modernist city that the king wants to build in the desert. Clay finds the fantasy city little more than a tabletop model surrounded by windswept rubbish where a magnificent Dubai is expected to rise. Can he do it?He finds his computer team abandoned, bedraggled, exhausted, hot and lacking Wi-Fi and a...
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