Ready Player One (2018)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Zak Penn & Ernest Cline

Starring: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn

I should be the target audience for Ready Player One. I'm a white male who grew up in the 80s and 90s. This movie (and from what it sounds like, the book) seems tailor made for me. The problem I had with it is that the references are all this film seems to have, and when it wasn't making them it was a generic CGI filled quest to get the special thing before the bad man gets the special thing. I'll say one thing for it though, for a movie that's 2 and a half hours long, I was engaged for the entire runtime. That's gotta be because of Spielberg right?

The world sucks, so most of the planet escape into a VR video game known as The Oasis. A corporation is enslaving people within said video game and engaging in all kinds of shady business practice. It seems despite the world sucking, everyone has access to the technology required to dive into the game. Artemis makes a big deal of wanting to take IoI down because they killed her father, and when she kidnaps Percival in the real world, she says "Welcome to the resistance". This thread is completely forgotten as the finale is all about protecting The Oasis from IoI and for the heroes of the movie not to get killed by them in real life while they're trying to protect The Oasis.

At the end when they become the new owners of The Oasis, they talk about shutting down the game 2 days a week because reality is important. That's the on-the-nose message of the movie. If you spend all your time in virtual worlds, you'll miss out on what's really important in life, and that can only be found in reality (even though the rousing speech Percival makes before the final giant action setpiece talks about how he found friendship and yes, even love inside The Oasis). I can make a leap and say with more time in reality, people can start to address the problems of the real world, but it also seems that a lot of the problems of the real world are because of The Oasis and the companies that make a profit off of it like IoI.

In a lot of CGI action sequences these days I find myself tuning out. It may be because of a lack of weight to the characters and what's happening ,or it may be that too much is being thrown on screen. It all ends up swirling up into an amorphous "stuff happening" blob. The action sequences in Ready Player One are easy to read, but all I can remember vividly is King Kong in the race, and the Gundam fighting Mecha Godzilla. My favourite sequence in the whole film is when they visit The Overlook Hotel from The Shining. I think it's because I was caught off guard by the movie using a Kubrick reference as the basis for a whole sequence (most of the references in the movie are name drops or background characters). The Overlook also holds some fun character interactions between H, Daito, and Sho, who are supporting characters painted in the broadest strokes possible. After H warns Percival that Artemis could be different than she presents herself in the game, the reveal of who these characters are in the real world is deflated. Yes they're a little different, but they're still stereotypes.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy the movie, so I went in with the goal to just have fun with the experience. The theatre was full of teenagers and other movie goers, and everyone seemed to have a good time. I'd also say this is a film where the action sequences would benefit from seeing it in 3d. Maybe that's why the CGI action fell flat for me.