Movie Review: 'Ready Player One'

On March 29, 2018, Warner Bros. released Ready Player One, director Steven Spielberg’s ambitious and visually stunning adaptation of Ernest Cline’s eponymous science fiction novel set in a dystopian near-future in which virtual reality and pop culture from the past are the only means of escape in a crumbling post-Information Age world. Co-written by Cline and Zak Penn (The Last Action Hero), Ready Player One combines live action sequences with immersive video game-inspired computer graphics – making this one of Spielberg’s most complex movies in his storied career.

The film is set in 2045, with the world on the brink of chaos and collapse. But the people have found salvation in the OASIS, an expansive virtual reality universe created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance). When Halliday dies, he leaves his immense fortune to the first person to find a digital Easter egg he has hidden somewhere in the OASIS, sparking a contest that grips the entire world. When an unlikely young hero named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) decides to join the contest, he is hurled into a breakneck, reality-bending treasure hunt through a fantastical universe of mystery, discovery and danger. – from the Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Ready Player One page

Ready Player One is set in two “worlds.” The first is mid-21^st Century Columbus, Ohio, which was once one of the “Six Best U.S. Cities” (per a 2016 Money magazine article) but is now a post-apocalyptic metropolitan area with huge tracts of “stacks’” – futuristic trailer parks where mobile homes are literally stacked on top of each other to give the city’s masses of poor people affordable housing. The wealthier residents probably live in nicer sections of the city that are not shown in the movie, but they, too, have been affected by several calamities that include the Corn Syrup Riots, a global energy crisis, and the effects of climate change.

To escape the woes of the 2040s – economic stagnation and escalating social problems – millions of people around the globe turn to the OASIS, a simulated virtual world that is in turns a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and an alternate digital existence. Created by a brilliant but introverted gamer-turned-inventor named James Halliday (Mark Rylance) and his friend Ogden Maxwell (Simon Pegg), its Bitcoin-like currency is the most stable – and desirable – currency in a world with rising oceans, depleted fossil fuel supplies, and a humanity that is losing the desire to solve its problems.

The movie – like many sci-fi/fantasy stories set in a dystopian society – is about the conflict for control of the OASIS between two factions: the huge multinational corporation Innovative Online Industries (a movie villainous version of Microsoft) that seeks to gain control of the lucrative online “world; and a small group of young gamers led by Wade Watts/Parzival (Tye Sheridan), Samantha Cook/Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Helen Harris/Aech (Lena Waithe), Zhou/Sho (Philip Zhao), and Toshiro/Daito (Win Morisaki).

Initially, the gamers (known as Gunters) act independently, but as Ready Player One’s main conflict begins, they join forces in a perilous “Easter egg hunt” that pits them against the ambitious and evil Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), his aide F’Nale Zandor (Hannah John-Kamen), and IOI’s indentured servants, known colloquially as the “Sixers.”

My Take

Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is Ready Player One's equivalent of Marty McFly or Indiana Jones. Photo (C) 2018 Warner Bros. Pictures and Amblin Productions

Like most of Steven Spielberg’s “just-for-fun” movies – think of E.T., the Indiana Jones series, Jurassic Park, and his directed-by-Robert Zemeckis Back to the Future trilogy – Ready Player One is a plot driven adventure centered around a Spielbergian hero (Wade Watts, in this instance) a love interest of sorts (Samantha Cook), and sidekicks on a quest. Like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, there is a McGuffin for Wade to search for – Halliday’s “Easter egg.”  And like in Back to the Future – which is referenced both visually and musically in Ready Player One – there’s a mean antagonist who Wade must contend with in his quest. In this movie, screenwriters Cline (who adapted his 2011 best-selling novel) and Zak Penn substitute Thomas F. Wilson’s Biff Tanen with Ben Mendelsohn’s Nolan Sorrento, who is essentially a more realistic, down-to-Earth version of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’s Commander Orson Krennic.

Ready Player One – a title derived from a visual prompt seen in many 1980s era video arcade games – is a story that has been told countless times, especially in many of the games, comics, TV shows, and movies that are visually referenced in both the source novel and this adaptation. Its message – or moral – is telegraphed early on in the film, and it’s not a especially profound one, at that. And although its characters are played by a cast of great actors from various countries, only four (Wade, Samantha, Sorrento, and F’Nale) are developed with any cinematic depth.

Yet, for all that, Ready Player One is a fun movie to watch, partly because it is a throwback to Spielberg’s “just-for-fun” crowd-pleasing movies from the cultural era that he and his friend George Lucas helped define – and inspired Ernest Cline to write the source novel, which itself is chock-full of pop culture references to the late 1970s and early 1980s.

If Warner Bros. had hired another director to make Ready Player One, chances are that the producers would have needed to negotiate with Spielberg and Amblin Productions to allow the movie to reference the three-time Oscar winner’s many 1980s era films and TV shows. Cline’s novel is filled with such nostalgic nods to the culture in which Spielberg was still a Hollywood “wunderkind” and kids played with Atari 2600 game consoles, collected Kenner Star Wars action figures, and watched music videos on the then-new MTV cable channel.

Fortunately, Spielberg got the job of directing Ready Player One, and although he – out of personal modesty – cut most of the book’s references to his own works out of the movie, as one of the movie’s producers, he was able to negotiate with several companies and movie studios for the rights to use images and even scenes from movies and other media that Cline refers to both in the novel and in Ready Player One’s screenplay.

As in most book-to-movie adaptations, Ready Player One presents Cline’s story in a more compressed and concise fashion than the best-selling young adult novel. Not only are there less references to Spielberg films than in the book, but scenes that work well on the printed page but would have bored movie audiences were dispensed with. And because Spielberg could not get the rights to Blade Runner – Blade Runner 2049 was made at the same time as Ready Player One – Cline and Penn had to add in a pivotal sequence that takes place in The Shining’s main setting : the haunted Overlook Hotel.

Purists who did not like the changes made to Ready Player One are entitled to their opinion, but unfortunately that’s one of the realities of movie adaptations. Running time, budget limitations, and other factors often require screenwriters and directors to focus on a story’s central plot and strip out the excess parts. Otherwise, instead of watching a 140-minute movie, audiences would have had to sit through an eight-hour one. And no one, from the theater owners who exhibited Ready Player One during its springtime theatrical run to the average moviegoer, wants to endure a marathon slog through a dystopian future and a cornucopia of cultural references.

Say what you will about the limited depth of the characters or the predictability of Ready Player One’s story, but this is a fun movie to watch, albeit a shallow one that won’t have you thinking about its moral implications for days to come. It’s essentially The Last Starfighter, Back to the Future, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World rolled up into a slick mix of live action and computer graphics magic peppered with nods to Asteroids, Buckaroo Banzai, the 1966 Batman TV series, the original King Kong from 1933, Star Wars, and Dungeons & Dragons, just to name a few pop culture references. Gamers – especially male ones – will see Ready Player One as the ultimate gamer wish fulfillment fantasy-come-true, while 40 and 50-year-old viewers (including your Humble Reviewer) will love seeing artifacts from their childhood and teen years.  Ready Player One is not a Spielberg film on the same level as Schindler’s List, The Post, or Saving Private Ryan, and it’s not meant to be, either.

Ready Player One is, like the OASIS it depicts so well, is a vehicle for escapist fun – lean, mean, and as fast moving as the souped-up DeLorean that Parzival drives throughout the hunt for Halliday’s Easter Egg. It’s also full of joy, excitement, and hope, themes that are reflected in Alan Silvestri’s rousing 1980s-style score.