Related image 
(IMAGE SOURCE: https://www.geekzilla.com.br/ready-player-one-novo-trailer-legendado-come-with-me/)


My first challenge with writing a review of Ready Player One, more than anything else, is working out how much I can say the movie is bad versus how much its source material is bad. It’s hard to detach it from what I've heard about the 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, which apparently reads like a sad nerd describing his pop culture obsessions and how knowing as much as he does makes him an inherently worthy hero, and from the rather nasty implications of its cultural and political subtext, to decide on the actual quality of the movie itself.

So let me start by emphasising that Ready Player One's production is marvelous in most respects. Spielberg’s talent for crowd-pleasing cinema shines through, with the action sequences and puzzles mostly being well-executed and entertaining to watch, and I can hardly say it ever really bored me. At times- particularly in the first establishing shot showing off all the worlds of the Oasis- it’s fun picking out all the little references to all kinds of series. 
The race in the early part of the film which makes up the first challenge is nicely visualized and fun to watch, with the King Kong attack being weighty and feeling fitting, and the Shining re-enactment of the second challenge is pretty well-done too, even if I did spend the whole time thinking about the Simpsons Halloween short rather than the Shining itself.
The big climactic battle also has some great moments, particularly the fight between the Iron Giant, Mobile Suit Gundam and Mecha-Godzilla, which is intense and does a good job of capturing the mood of the kind of giant monster battle vibe it’s going for.

But even this production stuff has pretty noticeable flaws. One of the most egregious ones is the final battle, which is supposed to have loads of really nice little appearances from all sorts of different franchises in the shots. I say it’s ‘supposed to’ because most of the action is seen only in long shot, apart from a few choice shots of some Overwatch characters and a Halo squad, and it’s constantly intercut with shots of the Sixers (the IOI footsoldiers) recoiling in pain because they’ve been killed in-game. A reviewer I watch praised the movie for ‘not being like Family Guy’ with egregious referencing, but what’s the point of having all the licenses to all these properties if we can’t see any of them properly on the big screen?

Unfortunately, when you get into the plot, the movie quickly develops even more problems. Wade Watts, a gamer in Columbus, ‘the fastest-growing city in the world’, spends most of his life playing the virtual reality MMO Oasis, which has taken the world by storm, to try and seek out three keys hidden in the game by its co-creator James Halliday to unlock an Easter egg which will give the finder control of the Oasis. With the help of his friends Aech and Daito and the mysterious girl Art3mis, they set out to find the Easter egg before Nolan Sorrento, head of Innovative Online Industries (IOI), can take over the game and turn it into a freemium empire.

It sounds fine, but frankly, the devil’s in the details. Probably the bleakest aspect is that the movie pretty much exists in a dystopian future- they say politicians have ‘stopped trying to make things better’ and just let people live in ‘the Stacks’, a giant shanty town comprising tiny flats crudely stacked together, living out their lives in the Oasis. You see loads of people standing in their flats with VR equipment on waving their arms around, presumably playing the game in lieu of going to work or getting an education.

The worst part is, the movie seems patently blind to the fact it’s a dystopia. The idea that Sorrento would install more ads if he took over seems a fairly mild threat given the game already sells tonnes of add-ons and in-game purchases to its players as is, and for all the talk at the end of the movie about going outside and turning off the game, there’s no sense it’s suggesting people should try and rebuild society, so it feels like a tacked-on attempt to diffuse criticisms of its worldview.

You might, quite understandably, be wondering, ‘But Tim, how can you be so harsh on this movie when you like Stranger Things so much?’ Simple: Stranger Things doesn’t sugar-coat its world, no matter how nostalgic it gets. The suffering the characters go through feels genuine and the show is good at building up the threat of its world and the emotions that drive its character development in such a way it’s easy to ignore the implications of the nostalgia.

Ready Player One, by contrast, drives through character drama and human connections at 88mph in a DeLorean and zaps straight through them, leaving only firey tire tracks in its wake. The reveal of Samantha, Art3mis’s true identity, hardly carries any of the implied weight of her claim Wade would be ‘disappointed’ by her real appearance because she just looks like a pretty girl, albeit with a birth mark over her eye that makes her look like she could be Prince Zuko’s sister. And even if it did, it’s derailed by the meta question of how she got hold of all the guards in her employ and by Wade insisting he loves her even though he’s only known her for a few days.

Irritatingly, Aech, Daito and Shoto are fairly superfluous. Aech gets the most screentime and is probably the most interesting character- it’s revealed around the middle that she’s a girl in reality, but her avatar is a guy, although it kinda makes me wish they’d set up some chemistry between her and Wade given that they’ve been best friends for years to make the reveal more interesting. Shoto is even more skated over, with the reveal he’s only 11 but a badass being nothing more than a joke. Like I said, the matter of people faking their identities which could make for a nice message about trusting someone you’ve gotten to know even if something about them isn’t what it seemed, is mostly ignored.

And Wade. Oh God, I hate Wade. Probably because he reminds me of everything stupid about geek culture; a weird obsession with girls, the assumption that his nerdiness makes him interesting and skilled, a hatred for outsiders who don’t know as much meaningless trivia as him, a ‘nice guy’ attitude towards women (he literally asks his aunt ‘why are you with that guy?’, for Christ’s sake), you name it, he’s got it. Worse, the movie never critiques his character in a way that doesn’t aim to make us feel sorry for him, and it just gets aggravating seeing how blissfully ignorant the movie is of the main protagonist’s unpleasant behaviour.

Nolan Sorrento is little better, mostly because he’s a superfluous villain. His aim, as mentioned, is basically pointless- IOI already sells services to the Oasis as it is, and if he pushes ads to the maximum he’ll probably drive people away from the company. Gamers aren’t overly keen on constant microtransactions, after all. On top of that, other than his obsession with corporatism, the only other trait to make him a bad guy is his use of aides to tell him about references while the heroes can recite stuff off the top of their heads. Why does not knowing much about pop culture make you a villain? I have no idea. Maybe I should ask Ernest Cline if he thinks I’m Satan because I’ve never seen a John Hughes movie that’s not Home Alone.

 Then there’s Halliday himself, who, when you really look at it, is kind of a pathetic person. He catalogued all his memories and programmes in a museum to make people work out what was special to him (and on a side note, the fact most people have given up by the time the movie begins doesn’t exactly say nice things about the gaming community). 

And they don’t really say good things about him as a person. He expresses his desire to ‘go back, really really fast’ to his business partner Morrow (played by Simon Pegg, who gets one nice scene right at the end but is otherwise utterly wasted) when he wants to expand the business, because apparently he’s deathly afraid of things changing a lot. He was too cowardly to ask a woman he dated to dance, and when she dated Morrow instead and eventually married him, he wiped all but one trace of her from the archives. Vindictive much?

Finally, while the sequence around the last key, which is about finding the first ever Easter egg in the Atari 2600 game Adventure, does feature a nice message about the true meaning of gaming being playing rather than completing, it doesn’t exactly make it seem like Halliday knew much about gamer culture, which this movie is obviously trying to be a love letter to. Easter eggs spread like wildfire once they’re discovered, and it seems pretty far-fetched that this one guy figures out almost all the puzzles with only a little help without anyone else having done so despite the challenge being around for years.

Ultimately, while Ready Player One is a decent popcorn movie with an aesthetic I can definitely understand liking- pop culture references blended with 80s nostalgia and a bombastic soundtrack- when you look deeper there’s hardly anything to it. It’s not satirising or dissecting pop culture or gamer culture. It’s not a dramatic romp through a geeky world with a nasty underside. It’s not even a particularly fun take on the concepts it uses the way things like Who Framed Roger Rabbit or The Lego Movie are. 
If you enjoy it, more power to you, but to be honest, I get why it’s prompted a considerable amount of backlash. For a movie trying to be this big, and encompass so much pop culture, it doesn’t really seem to be advanced to a very high level of self-awareness or acceptance of the geek culture it inhabits. And that’s a crying shame.

TAGS : | | | |