Ready Player One – 3 out of 5
About 5 years or so ago, I read the novel that Ready Player One was based on. It was essentially the novel equivalent of a popcorn action film. The premise was simple, the writing wasn’t very intricate or complicated and it was an extremely easy read. I actually read it over the course of a day. I enjoyed it. The years have gone by and I’ve learned that the author Ernest Cline is predisposed to saying dumb things on the internet and has some underlying sexism in his life but I’m not a Cline fan. I just enjoyed his book. Since then, however, my views on the primary aspect of his story; nostalgia, has changed greatly and I’ve come to see this trait as toxic. I’ve grown to a point where I’d rather be excited for what tomorrow offers than share memes about how “kids nowadays will never know” or “only 90s kids will understand” or talk incessantly about how everything from my childhood is inherently better than anything now just because I just so happen to experience it during my formative years (spoiler alert: sometimes those things we thought were amazing were actually pretty crappy. I made the mistake of revisiting the original Transformers cartoon in college and realized it was just a horrible mess). I haven’t read Ready Player One since this evolution in me but was still excited to check out the film. Overall, it was okay but my impatience for nostalgia definitely hampered my experience.
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| "Alright, let's hit Pornhub with this thing..." |
In the future, the population escapes to a virtual reality world called the OASIS in order to cope with the misery that is everyday life. The creator of this world; James Halliday (Mark Rylance), announces a game after he passes. Three keys are hidden in the world and whoever collects them will grab the Golden Easter Egg and become the owner of the OASIS. The contest has everyone hunting for the keys and it has the interest of Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn); the greedy CEO of the evil corporation Innovative Online Industries (IOI). One of these key hunters (these hunters are nicknamed Gunters), the humble Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) teams with his friend Aech (Lena Waithe) and the mysterious Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and set out to find the keys themselves. However, Sorrento has an army of employees on the hunt and one freelance mercenary in the game by the name of i-R0k (T.J. Miller) on his side and is ready to stop anyone that gets in the way.
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| "Go and get the keys, my mindless virtual reality junkies! Allow me to continue to pull your strings even after I'm dead! I'M DRUNK ON POWER!!!!" |
The big thing that stands out with Ready Player One is the special effects and animation. A majority of the film takes place in the virtual reality world and there the characters are essentially video games. Everyone and all the environments are rendered 3D animation and it looks fantastic. The world that is created looks gorgeous and like a whole lot of fun to experience. Without a doubt, this is the greatest part of the film. However, RPO is hampered greatly by some lazy storytelling and my experience smeared due to my own exhaustion of nostalgia.
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| Great, now I'm thinking about the end of The Iron Giant and I'm in tears. |
I’m not going to make the argument that Cline is a bad writer. He’s just a mediocre one. This is coming from a guy who enjoyed the book but his stories are not complex and his writing style is, for lack of a better descriptive, basic. It’s by-the-numbers writing and that equals a lot of clichés and a ton of predictability. That’s why I equated his novel with a popcorn summer blockbuster because, like those movies, there aren’t a lot of surprises in them but that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t any entertainment value in it. This level is perfectly translated into the film as the characters undergo predictable development, the plot follows the predictable lines and there’s even the prerequisite love story. However, in the film, the love between Wade and Art3mis somehow feels even more forced and laughably bad. These elements are overly simplistic and can be weak but never ultimately harm the overall product. It’s just incredibly noticeable and hard to ignore.
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| Sure, when Wade first meets Art3mis here, he falls in love but we all know he would have just pulled that annoying geek card and immediately put his pop culture knowledge to the test and insinuate she's not a "real geek." |
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| Complaints about toxic nostalgia aside, this scene in The Shining was pretty badass. |
This film is absolutely jam-packed with pop culture references, Easter Eggs (the story literally centers around chasing down a Golden Easter Egg—like I said before, basic and obvious story telling), and all sorts of “Hey, remember that” moments. For a bit, it’s kinda fun seeing things like Boba Fett in the background or the fact that Wade’s avatar drives the DeLorean from Back to the Future but, after a while, it starts to get grating. Sure, there are times when the feature’s love letter to pop culture results in some amazing sequences—like the whole part in The Shining—but as the story progresses, I found myself thinking that it would be nicer if I saw some emotional development from the characters so that Wade and Art3mis love story doesn’t feel shallow but I guess seeing the Iron Giant and a Lancer from Gears of War make cameos is cool too. This element of this property (and I’m sure I’d feel this way if I read the book now) comes off like a combination of a birthday cake and an overzealous pop culture geek. The cake element is my weak metaphor about how it’s great at first but too much starts to get exhausting, like if you ate too much cake and get sick and with so much pop culture and nostalgia stuffed into this film, it almost feels like director Steven Spielberg and writers Zak Penn and (especially) Ernest Cline are just showing off all the stuff they like rather than showing off how they love it. This whole element just comes off as exhausting and something that takes away from the story rather than enhance or compliment it in any meaningful way.
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| I may complain about the nostalgia aspect but if I had an opportunity to drive the DeLorean and face-off against King Kong, I'd do it in a heartbeat. |
Ready Player One is definitely a spectacle. It’s fun and does a decent job of bringing the book to life. The nostalgia factor and the lip service it pays to pop culture will definitely delight a lot but, ultimately, got very grating and annoying for me. Additionally, the story has a lot of problems with development and the emotional arc of the characters—part of this was solved just by the way Spielberg is able to present story but there’s still no denying that the love story felt like it was treated more like a requirement than something more organic and natural. Finally, the film has a great cast with Ben Mendelsohn being a great antagonist and the likes of Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cook, and Lena Waithe being amusing protagonists. Having Simon Pegg and Mark Rylance on the cast didn’t hurt things either because they were both great as the two partners who created the OASIS. Ready Player One isn’t a perfect film (but the source material wasn’t perfection either) but it’s a serviceable piece of popcorn entertainment that delivers in a way that never feels boring…although it is a huge bummer that the only real replay value it holds is to just find all the Easter Eggs it contains.
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