Ready Player One (2018)
In the year 2045, orphaned teenage Columbus, Ohio resident Wade Watts (Sheridan, X-Men Apocalypse) lives, like seemingly everyone else around not working in the upper echelons of a corporation, in squalor (called ‘The Stacks”, which are essentially trailer park homes stacked on top of one another) with his aunt and her latest abusive boyfriend. As a means of escape the poverty, many, if not most, of the world has taken to spending all of their life, and all of their money, into playing a massive multiplayer online role-playing game named OASIS that promises the potential to win great prizes to those who complete tasks in the most rapid fashion. Some players have taken to corporatize their pursuits, including the nefarious IOI (Innovative Online Industries), led by corporate douchebag Nolan Sorrento (Mendelsohn, Darkest Hour), who intend to not only fill their coffers with all of that money, but to use the OASIS to further squeeze out more dollars from already impoverished players through their own expensive game enhancements, in-game advertisements and a pay-to-play requirement to a game just about everyone is already addicted to playing.
The game’s motives change for a bit upon the passing of James Halliday (Rylance, The BFG), the creative genius behind the OASIS, who built a Willy Wonka-esque grand plan (reportedly, Spielberg wanted for Gene Wilder to come out of retirement to make his Wonka allusion come full circle) within the game to kick-start a competition to find someone to inherit his massive fortune, as well as take the reins of the OASIS, from within the players who’ve made the game a way of life for so many years. The game, dubbed the Easter Egg Hunt, requires players to find the three keys hidden somewhere within the game, with the only hints coming from introductory riddles, and a vast library of information in regard to the game’s creator and his personal life. Wade, going under his gamer tag of Parzival (we’re told that it is taboo for gamers to reveal their true identities), ends up joining forces with a crew of other young OASIS misfits in order to grab the golden ring they’ve never dreamed could actually be theirs.
An Easter-egg hunt if there ever was one, perhaps not coincidentally released on Easter weekend in 2018, Ready Player One adapt Ernest Cline’s best-selling sci-fi adventure novel of 2011 that was read with relish among those who yearn to become completely absorbed into 1980’s nostalgia. A director known for molding cinema in the 1980’s is a serendipitous choice to helm the feature film version, incorporating nods to some of his own produced properties, like Back to the Future and Jurassic Park. Cline is still on board as a co-screenwriter, along with veteran comic book property scribe Zak Penn, though much has changed from print to screen, greatly abbreviating the timeline, while expanding the scope of the challenges for something more grand and cinematic in effect, yet also more personal to the character of Halliday in each clue’s discovery. Alas, the weakness is in the plot itself, which relies on extreme contrivances and near-impossible instant discoveries that are symptoms of a mode of short-order storytelling where more emphasis lies in getting characters from plot point to plot point, making sure to inject the requisite action sequences and sometimes distracting pop-culture referencing, and less emphasis goes to characterizations that would make for a more emotional and personal connection beyond the potent thematic material.
To say this film is a love-letter to everything 1980’s is a bit of a misnomer, as it just as readily incorporates 1990’s properties, including The Iron Giant. One could say that it goes right up to this new millennium as well, with allusions to World of Warcraft (not only the MMORPG nature of the game, but W.O.W. is also protagonist Wade Owen Watts’ initials). The “O” as middle initial in books and films also signifies an empty shell of a person inside, and certainly, the character isn’t exactly built up beyond his life situation to get us on board, as we root for a poor orphan with big dreams to rule the day over a corporation that isn’t afraid to do all manner of evil acts to get control of the biggest cash cow on the planet.
However, the 80s are especially strong, if not exclusive. There is an entire sequence that is a giant homage to the work of another director that Spielberg greatly admire, Stanley Kubrick (Spielberg even used a Kubrick screenplay to craft A.I.), with a jaunt into the hotel and among the characters found in 1980’s The Shining. Fan service thought it may seem, it actually weaves into the overall theme of love, loss and regret, as well as the Citizen Kane-ian notion that no amount of wealth, fame and power can erase the youth one once was, as well as those early hopes, dreams and imaginings that we considered so important during formative years of our lives.
Anyone that has seen Minority Report can attest that Spielberg certainly knows how to build a world in grand and lush cinematic style, and the one to be found within Ready Player One is complex and completely immersive, both in the so-called real world as well as within the artificial realm of the game itself. The orphan wunderkind known as Wade Watts is written for geeks to try to identify themselves within, as the nerdy video game player who identifies more with figures from popular culture than other living and breathing human beings due to his introversion as well as his desire to escape his often intolerable home life. Scenes of that home life feel very much like a typical blockbuster movie fantasy, as does Wade’s real-world interactions with friends he meets from online, though they all pale in comparison to the IOI corporation’s scenes of how business gets done, with the vast and ornate offices substituting for the movie heavy’s lair, complete with henchmen, goons, and yet another idealized kick-ass female right-hand enforcer with a banged haircut to provide a foil (see Blade Runner 2049 for this new archetype).
Though the film is not overtly political, it was also made during a period in which Spielberg also worked on The Post, which, though also not set in the modern day, also used another era in order to comment on the current environment in which we all live. Despite being a work of fantasy, it’s hard to push out thoughts that Spielberg isn’t making a connection with dialogue in politics today, as the IOI determine that loyalty trumps integrity, and that anyone who isn’t blindly loyal is an enemy that needs to either be combated, or coerced into compliance. Morality and ethics are obstacles to the ultimate prize, which is control of the rules of the board in the game in which we all play.
Ready Player One is a film that will likely run the gamut of reactions, as how much one is entertained by it all will likely be determined by how much one identifies with the movie’s pervasive allusions and connections to iconic films and video games of the last few decades. Obviously with a film that has this many Easter Eggs for fans of pop culture of their youth will vary as to its overall effect, and I will come up front in stating that I grew up a child and teenager in the 1980s, obsessed with video games like Atari’s ADVENTURE (and yes, I “discovered” the infamous Easter Egg within the game), was scared by The Shining at a time when I actually found some movies scary, and know what it’s like to find escape and comfort in the characters if a film or game, especially at a time in which one desires, above all else, to have a real-life friend.
Ready Player One is a film that gets me, so I get it, and, despite nitpicks as to its length, inherent navel-gazing, its homogenized notions of society, and characters that aren’t given enough exploration to feel genuine compassion for. It’s about what the internet meant for geek culture, as the connectedness among those who made computers and computer games our obsession could rewrite the new “world”, the online world, the way we saw it, full of comic book characters, anime iconography, and film and video game references galore. To hate it would be to hate who I once was, and deep inside still am, so if you want an unbiased opinion, look elsewhere, because this one hits too close to home for complete objectivity. If you’ve ever understood what’s it’s like to find importance in things that truly have none (which is, to me, the definition of ‘geek’), you’ll likely relate as well. As you’ve just read a lengthy review on a fictional sci-fi action blockbuster, I’m guessing you already do.
Qwipster’s rating: A-
MPAA Rated: PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, partial nudity and language
Running Time: 140 min.
Cast: Tye Sheridan, Ben Mendelsohn, Olivia Cooke, Mark Rylance, Simon Pegg, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Hannah John-Kamen
Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Zak Penn, Ernest Cline (based on his novel)