With his black cowboy hat, Mireles resembles a matinee western hero, his triumphs played out in arresting widescreen vistas to a twanging spaghetti-inflected accompaniment.
Still, the trade-off of rear-seat roominess for widescreen vistas seemed worth it as I drove through the pine forests and over towering mountain passes - worth it for those sitting in the front seat, at least.
With Andrew Lesnie behind the camera, The Water Diviner is not short on arresting images, the Lord of the Rings director of photography moving effectively between Lean-inflected widescreen vistas and more "grainy" battlefield footage.
Significant, too, that the film's bordered frame, which appears to inhale and exhale as the movie shifts moods, eschews widescreen vistas for more painterly portraits, emphasising the relationship between mountains and plains, land and water, man and his environment.
It's not the first phone-footage film (forerunners include Olive, shot on a Nokia N8 in 2011), but it's certainly the best looking, using prototype anamorphic lens adapters to capture gorgeous widescreen vistas while shooting on the fly in the streets, burger bars and doughnut joints of LA.
Its chilly widescreen vistas and adrenalin-pumping action sequences demand to be seen on the big screen.
Projection: widescreen, aspect ratio 16:9.
With widescreen, pastoral vistas dappled in golden sunlight and washed in music (by John Williams) that is somehow both grand and folksy, Mr. Spielberg lays siege to your cynicism, bombarding you with strong and simple appeals to feeling.
The widescreen desert vistas are strikingly beautiful; the performances, even the live-wire ones, are superbly restrained.
It's not quite a case of there being something freshly fantastic to gawp at around every corner, but the game's stellar sights are evenly spread across its run time, and vary from the widescreen African vistas seen in preview footage to rather darker, deadlier places, palpably alive with menace.
