“Ready Player One,” Steven Spielberg’s dizzying foray into ’80s pop culture fandom, is a return of sorts to the pure pop escapism that pervaded his filmography in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with such films as “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T.” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The sheer playful joy in filmmaking displayed by Spielberg in this sci-fi riff has not been seen from the 71-year-old filmmaker since the cat and mouse hijinks of 2002’s “Catch Me If You Can.”
Tackling Ernest Cline‘s nerdgastic 2011 novel of the same name, Spielberg sets his meta-y sights on a dystopian feature brimming with Easter Eggs, virtual reality, and an endless layer of discoveries which pay tribute to ’80s pop culture nostalgia, the latter of which Spielberg clearly left an indelible mark on. Dazzling in form and a chase film at its heart, “Ready Player One” is exhilarating, but it also can’t sit still. Fitting to the content perhaps, the movie still arguably suffers from troublesome A.D.D. with its hyper fast cutting and its tendency to wander narratively.
The film opens in a dystopian 2045, where most citizens of the world are poor and make up for their misery by jacking themselves up in a fantasy world known as the OASIS. In this virtual reality realm anything goes, people can be whomever they choose, as long as they can afford to buy it with the coin system in place. Every location in the OASIS seems to be tailored from personal experience by its recently deceased creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance) who has an affinity for ’80s pop culture and infuses the OASIS with nostalgia at every turn. Yes, it seems that the decade of parachute pants, leg warmers, and headbands are all the rage some 60-odd years later, all thanks to its maker, who makes it fashionable to escape and be washed over by all of its glory.
Following Halliday’s death, it is announced that the inventor had secretly created a quest within the OASIS where three separate keys are hidden in the virtual world. Everyone, from corporations to normal people, hunts for the three keys, and eventually, the prized Easter Egg. And the person who collects the Easter Egg inherits OASIS and Halliday’s multi-billion dollar company.
Enter the film’s main protagonist, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), living in a makeshift skyscraper-esque trailer park. Since society has all but turned virtual, Watts himself burns time away by immersing himself in the OASIS. Wade chooses as his avatar Parzival, a cool-looking fella with frosted hair and a jean jacket to match his attitude. Parzival’s car of choice is the DeLorean from “Back to the Future.” The girl of his dreams is another avatar, Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), a spiky, red-haired girl that has eyes that remind you of a Margaret Keane portrait. Parzival’s best friend in the OASIS is an avatar named Aech (Lena Waithe), a tall, broad-shouldered, uber-tanned orc-like figure. Wade and crew hop into the OASIS, looking to win Halliday’s competition as “egg-hunters,” committing to the task with full-time zeal. They all want the prize for their own personal reasons, but Spielberg, oddly enough, refrains from really conveying their motivations, which undermines the story and puts the audience at a distance.
Although Wade is one of the best at this game, nothing seems to come easy for him, especially since he has to compete against the merciless Nolan Sorrento, a high-ranking official of Innovative Online Industries played by a scene-chewing Ben Mendelsohn. Innovative Online Industries is a company that wants to gain control of the OASIS so they can commercialize it and syphon the profits.
Spielberg doesn’t waste any opportunity taking advantage of Cline’s vision to craft a love letter to not just pop-culture but the cinema of yore. Best of all is a sequence that takes place in the famous Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick‘s “The Shining,” which has our main characters scrambling around its eerie hallways looking for one of the three keys. The famous, blood-pouring elevators, the black-and-white New Year’s Eve photograph and, of course, the infamous Room 236 are all included in a magnificent sequence that will have cinephiles mouths watering at every turn. This and many more blink-and-miss-it references come at the viewer at a near-frenetic pace; Michael Jackson, John Hughes, The Iron Giant and even Spielberg’s own films show up to add to the metatextual layers.
Rylance, who has become a Spielberg mainstay these days with “Bridge of Spies,” and “The BFG,” plays the mysterious Willy Wonka-esque Halliday figure in flashback scenes. And Spielberg makes Halliday resonate in a way that the director fails to fully achieve with his other characters, including the lead protagonist. Perhaps, Spielberg relates to the character personally; Halliday also created, molded things from scratch, and is a highly successful visionary because of it.
Just like the film’s characters, the audience is immersed into the OASIS in the very same way one would be playing a video game. However, here it feels like someone else is manning the joystick for you. There’s investment and texture to the world we see, but the film lacks a human element for added layers and nuance. Crucially, one wishes that Spielberg would commit to Wade’s backstory in the same way he has committed to Halliday’s. Alas, that is an already-present flaw in Cline’s book and hasn’t been reckoned with here either. And so, therein lies the main problem with this virtual world that Spielberg creates in “Ready Player One.” Although brimming with the director’s best use of special effects since “Minority Report,” there’s a coldness to the surroundings that diminishes any of the emotional heft that could have made it more than just empty escapist fare.
“Ready Player One” is such an extravagantly conceived product that one feels pummeled by the end of its 140 minutes. Spielberg infuses every frame with countless details that will invite repeat viewings for those who want to catch every last drop of nostaglia. If that’s the sort of thing you place a premium on. In this hyperkinetic world Spielberg has created, “Ready Player One” pays faithful tribute to Cline’s novel and for that, it will please its ardent fans. For the rest of us, there are enough breathlessly realized sequences that may help you forget that you don’t actually care about any of the characters. [B]
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