I feel like one of those angry male fanboys complaining about “accuracy” and being “faithful” to source material. While Ready Player One maintains most of the plot points of Ernest Cline’s novel, it often feels like a completely different story. Masturbatory and overwritten though it may be, the book Ready Player One at least took its fandom seriously. Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation is a sugary pop culture smorgasboard. It’s empty, overstuffed and bland where it should be awe-inspiring. And instead of a virtual reality world filled with wonder, Spielberg’s latest vision of the future looks corny even for him.
Ready Player One has been the subject of a lot of backlash, much of it deserved. Cline’s adventurous sci-fi novel celebrates ‘80s pop culture but does so trivially. And in the process it overlooks art made by and for women and champions insular, nerdy dudes who view the whole world as a video game and have become the model for hateful trolls on the Internet.
If Spielberg’s movie were half as problematic it might be interesting. It cheapens the Willy Wonka sense of discovery you got from reading the book and simplifies the idea of the OASIS, an infinite, game-like universe to “a place where you can climb Mt. Everest…with Batman!” Cline’s book isn’t celebrated for his prose, but even he never wrote a line that bad (he’s a co-screenwriter on the film). And better luck next time to any tech guys who thought this movie might put VR headsets on the map. For every remarkable thing that happens in the OASIS, Spielberg can’t help but cut back to someone in the real world looking like a total dweeb.
Ready Player One is set in 2045 when a virtual world called the OASIS has become the primary form of commerce and lifestyle in a polluted, overcrowded reality. The OASIS’s creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), hid a secret known as an Easter Egg within the world. And upon his death, he decreed the first person who could decipher his ‘80s themed clues and find the egg would win his multi-billion dollar estate and total control of the OASIS. After five years of hopeless searching, a young teen named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) becomes the first to find one of three keys that unlock the egg.
From my vantage point, that’s a remarkable premise, and the book is written at a breakneck pace that makes examining the countless ins and outs of the OASIS and the clues leading to the egg endlessly fascinating. It’s weird to say it, because Spielberg was the inspiration for so many of the book’s touchstones, but Spielberg doesn’t seem to have any interest in feeding that same curiosity.
The film jettisons many of the early specifics of Cline’s story and opens with a chaotic and impossible race that will reveal the first key. Wade’s DeLorean zooms past wrecking balls, dinosaurs, booby traps and King Kong in a frenzied mess. Much of the film is animated taking place within the OASIS, and Spielberg’s camera isn’t so much liberated as it is dizzying and erratic. Another scene finds Wade dancing with his crush and biggest rival Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) in a floating night club. Wade busts out some Saturday Night Fever moves to the tune of “Stayin’ Alive,” and the spiraling color and light show makes the scene goofy and inert.
Spielberg’s films have always had a sentimental side, so it would be cheap to just say Ready Player One feels childish, corny and just empty spectacle. But some of these set pieces are gobsmackingly dumb. They hardly look like the product of a world Spielberg fully believes in visiting.
One of Ready Player One’s best moments involves the characters’ avatars stepping inside another ‘80s touchstone movie, and I won’t spoil which. For a moment it’s everything the possibilities a trip to an ‘80s-themed fantasy promised. And then we have to sit through a hulking cartoon monster clunkily stomping through a horror classic. What sort of bastardized vision of pop culture is this? What are we even watching anymore?
Ready Player One might be one of Spielberg’s worst films, and it’s a tough sell to say the film’s failings are in spite of the book’s already prominent flaws, especially when we’re talking about Steven friggin’ Spielberg here. But I would’ve loved to see someone like Edgar Wright take on Cline’s source material. Spielberg’s been down this nostalgic road before and created all the blockbuster, franchise touchstones he needs. There’s a rich virtual world in Spielberg’s Ready Player One, but his heart isn’t in it.
2 stars
always problems with spielberg, at least for me, but as dystopian fantasy i’d rank this with AI and MINORITY REPORT as one of his better cautionary efforts * and a lot of it’s simply overwhelming, as orchestrated technical feat–yes, things come at you helter-skelter, but an enormous amount of craft went into creating this encompassing blanket of chaos * a lot of times i’ll watch a film thinking “this doesn’t HAVE to be, somebody’s actually put some THOUGHT into it,” a bit outside the commercial box, in other words–specifically now i’m remembering one interior distance shot involving ben mendelson that’s so UNUSUAL for what’s generally a throwaway (for anyone but armando iannucci, let’s say), that would typically be done in crosscutting close-ups or something equally nonreflective and routine, that i almost had to admire it singly, as an isolated elegance: this is SPIELBERG, does he actually DO this sort of thing? * from my point of view there’s thought aplenty in the technical execution: thing is, it’s doing the OPPOSITE of what you’d EXPECT it to–awe and wonder, i suppose, but in the service of something less than awesome and far from wonderful … from the filmmaker’s point of view, i’d emphasize, whose strong suit has never been irony * which i suppose is a caveat, or ought to be–but … immersive?: just soak yourself in this at your peril
though maybe i’m the one who’s soaked, simply WRONG on every count! * but in the immediate preceding context of LINCOLN, BFG, BRIDGE OF SPIES, and THE POST, i’d take this one any day