Ready Player One

I really wanted this film to be the be-all end-all in the nerd lexicon. Sadly it’s not, but it sure is a hell of a lot of fun to watch!

Based on the novel of the same name and directed by the one and only Steven Spielberg, Ready Player One takes place in the year 2045 in a world that has traded real life for virtual reality. Dubbed the OASIS, this virtual world allows people to do whatever they want and become whoever they want without the limitations and dangers of the real world hindering their imagination. When James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the original creator of the OASIS, passes away, users stumble across a hidden quest inside the world, one that promises full control of the OASIS and the fortune associated with it should the player acquire all three hidden keys. Locked behind what seems to be three impossible tasks, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), or Parzival as he’s known in-game, makes it his mission to find a way to “beat” the OASIS in order to leave his poverty-stricken and overpopulated life in the “stacks” behind him. But with the evil corporation known as IOI and their CEO, Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), hell-bent on taking the keys for himself, it’s only a matter of time before IOI claims the OASIS, and if Sorrento has his way, the digital lives of as many gamers as possible to get what he wants.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I sorta expected a bit more from Spielberg in what I was hoping to be his return to form in the “pop-culture” genre of filmmaking. For a while now, Spielberg has almost solely focused on more grounded projects that delve into biopic and true story tales, leaving his Minority Report/Jurassic Park/Indiana Jones type of directing by the wayside. He always had a knack for bringing the heart and humor to his more out there films, while still finding ways to build and create worlds that we all wished we could live in, and unfortunately, even though Ready Player One seems like a perfect fit for him, this film isn’t exactly the homecoming I was expecting. Luckily, it does allow Spielberg to show that he’s still got what it takes to make some truly interesting and unique set pieces, while still giving us enough of his old magic to call this film a middling success.

Even though most of this movie can technically be filed under the animated film banner since everything in the OASIS is computer generated, Spielberg wisely focuses on the outside world when needed, giving at least two of the main characters something worth acting over. Tye Sheridan as Wade Watts, and Olivia Cooke as Samantha Cook/Art3mis are really the only people who have anything of importance to do in the script, and while the film follows five players on their quest for the keys, none of them leave a lasting impression and could have easily been removed entirely if it weren’t for the source material having them all front and center throughout the story. Ben Mendelsohn is solid as usual, but some odd deviations from the book make his character less menacing and more…corporate? Point being, the spectacle of this film and the corners cut to make it fit into a single movie by far outweigh the actual content of the story, character development and attachment to what’s going on up onscreen, and it’s a shame because there’s so much here that could have been mined for gold, but instead, we got a bunch of silver in return.

As for the overly hyped cameos by what seems like every pop culture, video game, comic book, television and film character known to man, I’d have to say that I was slightly underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of shit to unpack in any given scene, but I couldn’t help but feel like the most generic route possible was taken to fit these Easter eggs into the film as opposed to making them matter in the grand scheme of things. I get that the film isn’t all about the cameos like how, say, Wreck-It Ralph was able to use most of theirs to service the plot or build the world, but it would have been nice to see that outside of a few choice selections, the filmmakers do something more with all of the nerd-ness going on at any given moment. The way it stands, they’re all essentially ineffective in doing anything but having the audience point and say “Ooooh, look at that!”, and gave me the feeling that they could have been swapped out for literally anything the filmmakers could get the rights to, regardless of whether it made sense or not. To some extent, I blame myself for the way I watched the film as I tried to find every reference in each shot as opposed to paying more attention to the movie itself, so my mindset going in might not have been the best way to look at it, but either way, by the time the credits rolled I was hoping for something a little more.

Completely average in more ways than I’d like to admit, Ready Player One is inherently fun and thrilling at times, but also tries one’s patience when it comes to telling a coherent and worthwhile story with characters worth caring for. There’s simply too much crammed into a film that already changes a whole lot from the source material, and while I really enjoyed all of the Easter eggs and nerd references, their inclusion felt more like hollow eye candy rather than something of substance. Either way, anyone who hasn’t read the book should enjoy this film just fine, even if the final product ended up leaving me a bit wanting.