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Tripwire Reviews Ready Player One

Published

8 years ago

March 29, 2018

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Virtual Drama

♦ Tripwire’s senior editor ANDREW COLMAN takes a look at Steven Spielberg’s latest sci-fi movie Ready Player One, out today in cinemas in the UK…

Ready Player One
Director: Steven Spielberg
Stars: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn

Ready Player One is an odd little effort from Steven Spielberg, a heavyweight director prone to unwinding with the occasional popcorn project before recharging his batteries. Of course, the scale of this mostly CGI’d effort is anything but little – its focus being the garishly outsize, hyperreal video game which contains the film’s key motif, the Easter egg, a mandatory feature for gamers. Ironically, the movie is more of a curate’s egg than anything else – an assured slice of hyperkinetic entertainment from the master of the form, yet as shallow an exercise as the games themselves.

It’s Columbus, Ohio and the year is 2044. The post-urban sprawl of teetering shanty towers is all that’s left of a civilization that has found escape in the “better than life” haven called OASIS, an immersive, fully habitable virtual reality. This has led to most lives being lived there, along with the resultant hierarchies and subcultures, such as the Gunters and Sixers. The Gunters (Egg hunters) are, in real life, regular citizens, while the Sixers are indentured workers subservient to IOI, a corporation keen to control OASIS. The devil in the detail is that OASIS’s creator, the recently departed James Halliday (Mark Rylance), has created a game called “Anorak’s Quest” hidden within the virtual world. This involves Easter eggs that, if collected, grant ownership of OASIS to the winner. IOI’s CEO, Nolan Sorrento (a suitably dastardly turn from Ben Mendelsohn) is rather keen to get hold of the eggs before the competition, stopping at nothing to get his way (as super-villains tend to do).

Our protagonist is Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a somewhat nerdy and gentle soul who transforms into the idealized Parzifal once he enters OASIS. With his friend and partner Aech (Lena Waithe), a virtual mechanic, he is immediately galvanized into locating all the golden tickets, I mean Easter eggs. Entering the seemingly unfinishable car race that is a focal point of OASIS, he encounters Art3mis, a rebellious avatar who joins forces with him. And from there, the drama kicks off.

In a sense the film is, quite simply, a superannuated video game – very well put together, with as much pop culture references that can be shoehorned into 140 minutes (yes, it really is that long). It endeavours to capture the soul of vintage geek culture while taking us on a rollercoaster ride. A Disneyfication of nostalgic icons and signposts, it’s both wondrous museum and brilliant logistical exercise, yet despite all of that, it’s also a confection that is far less than the sum of its parts.

Perhaps the best example of this would be the sequence featuring The Shining (I can’t imagine Kubrick allowing his horror extravaganza to feature had he been around, regardless of AI). A genuinely funny bit of derring do, and beautifully executed, it adds nothing thematically to the movie, and little to our understanding of Halliday’s character, despite its centrality to the plot. It’s almost the Scooby Doo take on Kubrick’s classic, the pesky kids avoiding the horrorshow to get to the next level.

As matters progress we learn a little of what motivated Halliday, and his regret over parting company with former partner Ogden Morrow (the inevitable Simon Pegg), through the databanks available in OASIS – again, this is all very clever, but isn’t explored enough. What with the plot accelerating as it eventually has to, such conceits, which might have conferred a bit more depth to the story, are sacrificed as the mandatory endgame hoves into view.

Without giving too much away (the finale being the entire point of the film, so I won’t reveal anything else) this is a film that falls between two stools, uncertain of who it’s aimed at. It wants to namecheck everything in film, television and pop music that was either beloved or fascinating to Spielberg, I mean Halliday, while structuring the proceedings around a hokey storyline –maybe that was the point, although it was made clear that Spielberg didn’t want the project to be perceived as self-indulgent or self-referential, despite the presence of the De Lorean (yes, he only produced that trilogy), and Jurassic creatures. (Ironically he wasn’t given permission to use Close Encounters, even though he directed that one). If the film was really meant for dedicated older nerds like himself, he would’ve gone for a more subtle, more layered tale rather than this superfluous blockbuster, which is really what this movie is. I suspect that half the references will go over the heads of the film’s target audience, and as for oldies like myself, nothing is satirized, or expanded upon. Like the soundtrack that you gradually tune out, everything arrives and quickly departs.

There are other minor quibbles, such as the lack of character development or arcs, even in the principles, and the unwieldy combination of fantasy and reality, which culminates in that aforementioned Disney Ending. Not that it wasn’t a thoroughly enjoyable romp, with some dazzling set pieces (it looked hugely impressive at the IMAX screening, at which Mr. Spielberg himself was present, natch). It’s simply a case of the movie evaporating once you exit the auditorium, like so much fairy dust. There’s even less to it than the previous cartoon event flick, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, that he produced, although at least it doesn’t have an incredibly irritating title character. Still, it’s worth seeing once, and you can take the kids. Just leave the reference explaining until after the movie.