I want you to look closely at the picture I used to promote Ready Player One. How you respond to the picture will tell you what you will think of the movie. If you go “Holy Crap! It’s a DeLorean, sweet” then you’re gonna go ape sh*t over what you’re about to witness. If you go “Wait, who’s getting into the car? Who is that?” then you’re probably not interested in what Steven Spielberg is about to give you for the next 2+ hours.
Wade Watts (Ty Sheridan) is a ho-hum poor kid from the Stacks, a series of high rise apartments in Columbus, coincidentally where the brilliant video game creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance) built and staged the OASIS. What is the OASIS? It’s a virtual world where everyone goes to change who they are, to escape their lives in the real world to be something better. Watts goes as Parzival, a Final Fantasy looking avatar, who hangs out with his best friend Aech (Lena Waithe), Daito (Win Morisaki) and Sho (Philip Zhao). Things get exciting in the OASIS when Halliday announces he’s left Easter Eggs in the game, which lead to keys, which leads to a golden egg, which leads to the winner inheriting the OASIS and Halliday’s massive fortune. Also excited to win the prize is Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), CEO of IOI, a rival to the OASIS who wants to monetize the place and price out the poor. In attempting to retrieve the keys, Parzival runs afoul of Sorrento, but also meets Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), a legend in the game that Watts has been infatuated with for some time.
Ready Player One is Steven Spielberg’s ode to fanboys and fan service that have made his career what it is today. I’m pretty sure the director went to his fans directly (and mildly consulted Ernest Cline, who wrote the novel) and asked what they wanted to see in the movie. So that’s what we get. There’s an adventure story that’s basically Willy Wonka for gamers. There’s an insane amount of references to any possible pop culture people geeked out at (I appreciated the GoldenEye Oddjob callout). Each car, each monster, each setting will have some sort of significance to some fanboy somewhere. The best use of this is a well executed Shining sequence. And how should a fanboy movie end? With an all out digital war with crazier callouts while the little underappreciated gamers stick it to the corporations who want to profit off of them. Perfect done! I’m being a little condescending, but the stuff in the Oasis is Spielberg just having a blast putting stuff onscreen he (and probably all nerds everywhere) has probably talked about being onscreen together since he was a boy. As much as this is fanboy service, Spielberg himself is as much a fan as any of them (the dude clearly loves Robert Zemeckis, who knew?), and Ready Player One is as much for him as it is for the fans (ok…it’s pretty self indulgent when he references his own movies).
There’s just one thing lacking in Ready Player One, the movie for fanboys….it’s essentially empty at its center. I was all on board for exploring the dual world of OASIS and the reality in Columbus, but the movie explores NONE of this. Spielberg keeps giving us these shots of people in VR glasses en masse, and I kept thinking to myself, wait, why is everyone like this? What drove everyone to the OASIS? Why do I think that? Because the movie sets up the story as every person have a double life, so I should care as much about the real world one as the OASIS one in order to care about the characters. But with Spielberg planning out his next crazy pop culture chase sequence to dazzle the eyes, he forgets to give us any information and arc to any of his real world characters, who are either soulless corporate types, fanboys and girls, or nonexistent until the final 30 minutes. The big battle at the end could have been this intense Inception like double chase that was happening, but instead, because none of us care about the real world people, we’re just watching avatars fight each other with zero stakes. Oh they died in the game? How terrible, now you have to….start over? It’s empty and meaningless. And the ending is so overtly schmaltzy that it borders on Lifetime movie levels of nonsense. If Spielberg weren’t as dazzling a filmmaker as he is, a 2+ hour movie with zero characters would sound like hot, hot garbage to me, but damn if that guy doesn’t make fun out of something so empty.
It’s really hard for me to review Ready Player One. This movie is so in my wheelhouse I was bound to like it, even though it’s empty calories. Want me to prove it? I got real pissed that Slappers Only! was Halliday’s favorite GoldenEye mode. Serously???????????? Anyone who’s anyone knows Proximity Mines makes the games way more fun. Come on!!!!