“Steven uses cranes like other people just use cameras. He’s got big cranes, little cranes, medium cranes. And he’s swooping all over the place.”

EGOT legend Rita Moreno tells Parade of maestro Spielberg’s penchant for grandiose, sweeping and at-times audacious camerawork when discussing this, remarkably his musical debut, over five decades in to his illustrious career.

They’re superlatives that can be laid at West Side Story as a whole.

The industry took a collective intake of breath when the master of the blockbuster announced he’d be helming a remake of the seminal 1961 Sondheim-Bernstein classic.

That critical and audience favourite – sitting ‘pretty’ in the history books with 10 Academy Awards including Best Picture and a Best Supporting Actress statue (for returnee Moreno) – is regarded as amongst the finest of screen musical adaptations. Did it even need a remake? With the fifties period having been etched in early on as staying, there was no chance of it being a modernised take on what was already a rejuvenated spin on Romeo and Juliet, translocated to the West Side of Manhattan, that exchanges its Capulets and Montagues for toe-tapping, soft-shoeing ‘Jets’ and ‘Sharks’. Familial honour and dynasty clashes making way for turf warfare and racial tensions.

The answer, as Moreno rightly alludes, lies in Spielberg himself.

And, yes, those cranes.

As Story 2021 opens, with a stunning extended span over the crumbling remains of Manhattan’s impoverished slums of yesteryear, with trademark visual gusto Spielberg and DP Janusz Kamiński take in birds-eye sweeps of nigh-dystopian vistas of urban collapse, pushing through to frames suffocated by wrecking balls and detritus, eventually soaring from the vast to the intimate, as the director’s impacting one-shot hones right down to – quite literally – street level.

“A master of film taking on a dynamic, emotional story and infusing it with his borderline-unmatched mastery of camerawork and the visual language of cinema.”

It’s a litmus for what lies ahead; a master of filmmaking taking on a dynamic, emotional story, and infusing it with his borderline-unmatched mastery of camerawork and the visual language of cinema.

Every beat, set piece and sequence of West Side Story positively crackles with this same level of scope, vitality and vision. See as ‘America’, already modified back in ’61 to be an infectious to-and-fro between Puerto Rican lovers, here bursts from its original rooftop confinements to take in what feels like the entirety of the Big Apple; stopped traffic, sky scraping verticality and all.

But it isn’t all bombast, either. Late-game favourite ‘Somewhere’ is put in the hands – and soothing, delicate vocals – of Moreno (playing an alternative, beefed-up take on Kevin Young’s pharmacy owner from the original) and what was once a rousing – if slightly discordant – duet between the story’s doomed young lovers becomes here a tender, affecting reflection on societal divide, and a tinged hope for a better tomorrow, as second reel deaths and disasters compound upon themselves.

“It’s almost unprecedented to say this is actually better than its predecessor in pretty much every regard.”

Spielberg has gone on record to say that every musical number had him both chomping at the bit in excitement and simultaneously chewing his fingernails in trepidation to get them right, and does it ever show. It’s almost unprecedented to say this is actually better than its predecessor in pretty much every regard.

It’s a long list of boxes to tick, but the musical arrangements, truly stunning choreography and stuntwork, and potentially MVP Kaminski’s gorgeous, vintage palette that borrows from Daniel L. Fapp’s Oscar-winning work on the original in heightening and saturating the moments between Maria (Rachel Zegler) and Tony (Ansel Elgort) to a point of almost ethereal radiance, all harmonise and hit the same staggeringly high bar that their ship’s captain manages to catapult over throughout.

On Zegler and Elgort, they head up a cast quite stupendously good. It’s perhaps a tad rote to wheel out the ‘star is born’ homilies for newcomer Zegler, but it’s a film debut of such startling confidence and power that little else seems fitting. Pushing any external conversations about Story’s leading man aside, he is undeniably on point, switching between boyish naivety and commanding ex-con on a dime, and the chemistry between the duo lights up the screen – and tugs on the heart strings – throughout.

Supporting, Ariana DeBose dominates every moment she appears as the fiery Anita – dancing, singing and acting up a storm in a turn that deserves to do for her exactly as it did for her co-star Moreno. She’s beautifully met by a brooding, dangerous David Alvarez as Shark leader Bernardo, the two practically setting the screen on fire during any of their (thankfully numerous) musical pair-ups. A repeat of Moreno and George Chakiris doing a rare Supporting Oscars double-dip could well be on the cards for their successors, and it would be more than deserved.

Elsewhere, Mike Fast is excellent as ‘Jet’ leader and Tony’s best friend, Riff, all derision and barely-contained rage at what he perceives to be the dual evils of gentrification and migration, whilst Corey Stoll is suitably odious in a bit part as a Lieutenant assigned assigned as overseer of both. Ezra Menas carries a lot of the film’s less showy but pivotal moments on his shoulders in a sensitive and well-observed update to the character of ‘Anybodys’, and the ever-reliable Brian D’Arcy James is suitably put upon, yet never parodic, as the officer desperately attempting to keep order between the vying factions.

But in truth there are no weak or middling links – and the buoyant ensemble get to shine in moments of Spielbergian invention even where there are no leads about; see, for instance, the transmogrifying hijinks of ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’.

It isn’t really a spoiler to say that West Side Story ends on much the same technical note as it begins; with another trademark crane, only this time somberly panning up and out, to take in the emotional and physical fallout of the what has unfolded.

The audience, likely breathless, devastated and overjoyed in equal measure, become grateful for one final, considered beat to exhale and take in what has just played out. Eventually, Bernstein’s glorious score picks up the ante and kicks the end credits into a more rousing gear, but, played out as they are over images of the film’s dilapidated locale, it’s almost impossible to shake the feeling you’ve been privy to something very special indeed, guided by one of the finest filmmakers of all time somehow at the absolute peak of his powers.

Somehow, someday, somewhere.

Today, here.

A magnum opus amongst masterpieces.