Ready Player One (2018)
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action and violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, partial nudity and language
.png)
Score: 3 out of 5
The novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is not great literature. A nostalgic love letter to '80s pop culture, its main appeal is not its characters, its treasure-hunt adventure story, or even the virtual reality world it is based in, but rather, its smorgasbord of references and homages to geeky fixations from the decade of Reagan, Star Wars, the Atari and NES, merchandise-driven Saturday morning cartoons, and Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment. It's a world where not only is knowledge power, but knowledge of pop culture ephemera, the sort of thing that people tell you to "grow out of" in real life, is the most important power of all, as the fate of the world depends on knowing all of the references that James Halliday, the creator of the OASIS virtual world, inserted into his life's work. If you're a child of the '80s who, like Cline, was raised with all that stuff, or a child of the '90s who caught up with it on VHS, it's easy to geek out over the book, but if you're not, it can be insufferable, leaving you wondering just what its appeal is supposed to be. Reams of articles have been written about the novel's celebration of many of the more controversial aspects of geek culture, particularly now that the film adaptation is coming out in a time when the darker and more exclusionary sides of that culture, generally ignored or seen as just quirky at the time of the book's publication, have since thrust themselves into the spotlight. With source material so shaky, it would take a very special talent to bring an adaptation to life on screen.
That said, when it was announced that Steven Spielberg would be directing the film, I struggled to think of a better match between filmmaker and material. You cannot talk about the '80s nostalgia that Ready Player One is rooted in without talking about the films that Spielberg had a hand in making, either as a director and/or writer or as a producer through Amblin Entertainment (which also produced this film), such that Spielberg chose to remove most of the book's references to his films just so it wouldn't look like him gloating over his iconic position in pop culture. Furthermore, Spielberg's work was itself heavily rooted in his own nostalgia for the film serials, B-movies, and comic books of the '40s and '50s that he grew up with. The Indiana Jones films were his and George Lucas' version of old "lost world" adventure films. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a contemporary take on alien flicks. Saving Private Ryan was him tackling a World War II epic that, forty years prior, might have starred John Wayne and Burt Lancaster. His many family films were based heavily around idealized '50s Americana, brought into the present day of the '80s with only minor changes. Spielberg pioneered and codified the commercialized nostalgia that has been a fixture of Hollywood since, and Ready Player One brought it all full-circle by applying a similar nostalgia to his own works. He was a man who had been on both sides of that cycle, leaving him in a unique position, like few other filmmakers save for perhaps Coppola, Scorsese, and the semi-retired Lucas (all contemporaries of his in the film-school-geek "New Hollywood" generation), to comment on it, and perhaps lend the adaptation some depth and insight that the novel lacked. Plus, it's not like he hasn't done this before; both Jaws and Jurassic Park started out as pulpy thrillers in print before Spielberg turned them into cinematic classics.
I can't say that the resulting film is Spielberg on his A-game. Even with somebody packing his talent and perspective at the helm, it's still a fairly clunky plot where, if you think about it too long, your mind paints the world as an even greater dystopia than it seems. That said, Spielberg does a great job boosting the heart of the story and giving it and the characters a bit more humanity beyond just serving as '80s movie quote machines, throwing viewers into creative situations while making the OASIS look and feel amazing. It could've been better, standing to explore the world it's based in (and, by extension, the nostalgic fixation the story is rooted in) more closely and critically, but it also could've been far, far worse. As it stands, it's two hours and twenty minutes of cinematic soul food, not that good for you but still an entertaining thrill ride that, when it hits video, is probably gonna wear out a lot of people's pause buttons as they hunt for all the references.
The year is 2045, and the world sucks. The rich have kept getting richer, the environment has gone down the tubes, and most people live in vast slums where trailers are stacked on top of each other in a living arrangement that's probably not all that safe, an all-American take on a Brazilian favela. Enter the OASIS, the massive virtual world created by James Halliday and Ogden Morrow of Gregarious Games where people can be and do anything, which sure as hell beats living in the real world. Five years ago, Halliday died, leaving behind a treasure hunt with a hell of a prize: control of the OASIS, a world beloved by billions. Players and groups across the world, from lone individuals to the conglomerate Innovative Online Industries (IOI), have poured countless effort and resources into solving the puzzle, the answers to which are based heavily around Halliday's life and most beloved pop culture. Wade Watts, aka Parzival, is a kid from Columbus, Ohio who's one of the many "gunters" -- Easter egg hunters -- searching for the prize, and becomes a celebrity when he cracks the code on the first clue, sending him and his online friends Art3mis, Aech (pronounced like the letter H), Sho, and Daito on a quest for the OASIS... if they can stay one step ahead of IOI's CEO Nolan Sorrento, who's willing to go to any length to take it for himself so he can monetize the hell out of it.
First things first: the geek pandering is undoubtedly still here, though the worst edges are sanded off. The most polarizing thing about Cline's book was its long lists of all the movies, TV shows, and games that Wade is interested in, and the transition from page to film means that, instead of long paragraphs listing off these references, they fly by in a few seconds. I wasn't kidding about there being hunts for all the shout-outs in this film once it hits home video, especially given that, with the reference pool expanded beyond just the '80s to cover the last forty years or so of geek culture in general, I was myself able to catch a whole lot of them, from the OASIS having a Minecraft world to Duke Nukem, Tracer, and the Iron Giant fighting on virtual battlefields to Deadpool and Harley Quinn at a nightclub. Some funny jabs at the modern game industry are also thrown in, with the villains' plan upon taking over the OASIS being to fill it with advertisements, tiered memberships, and microtransactions at every turn, visualized in a corporate presentation as an utter hellscape designed to call to mind all the worst elements of free-to-play mobile games. (Apparently, you can fill 80% of the VR feed with advertisements before they get seizures.)
The most important change, however, comes in the role these references play in the main story. Whereas the book had the geek trivia be important in and of itself, a major change that Spielberg makes is that he grounds the treasure hunt in figuring out why these things were so important to James Halliday, particularly with regards to his regrets about his life. The second puzzle, revolving around a recreation of a classic 1980s horror film that I won't dare spoil, concerns Halliday wishing he'd taken the leap and forged a real relationship with the woman he secretly loved, while the final puzzle uses an old Atari 2600 game as a metaphor for how he treated his business partner and close friend Ogden Morrow. Halliday, despite appearing primarily in the background, is easily the most intriguing character in the film, an exploration of tech moguls and superstar video game designers like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Garriott, and Hideo Kojima and how they might look back on their careers and creations towards the end of their lives. Mark Rylance portrays two versions of Halliday, one as his avatar, the wise old fantasy wizard Anorak, and the other being his real self, a neurotic, socially awkward man who appears to have grown profoundly uncomfortable in his old age with how he had lived and worked. As the latter especially, Rylance is fantastic in selling what the generation of '80s geeks turned Silicon Valley wizards will probably look and sound like in their golden years, with both him and the writing by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline himself making him the most fascinating character in the film -- understandably so, given that he drives the plot despite never appearing "in person".
The other characters are pretty flat, however. Wade is your archetypal Spielberg boy hero of a sort that, ten years ago, Shia LaBoeuf might have played, and he largely sticks to that archetype to the very end. Art3mis gets more to do plot-wise versus the book, but her characterization too largely stays the same, while Aech, Sho, and Daito are largely supporting players in Wade and Art3mis' quest. Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke deliver fine performances as Wade and Art3mis, but they are what prop up their characters here, not the writing; neither of them changes all that much over the course of the story. This is something that kind of segues into the bigger problem I had with the film. As described above, the film takes place in a world where a virtual reality online game has become the biggest thing on the planet, played largely by people seeking to get away from the slowly degenerating dystopia that real life has turned into. It is not at all difficult to frame this setup as the plot of a Black Mirror episode, largely because that show already has, in fact, tackled very similar subject matter with the episode "Fifteen Million Merits". There, a steady diet of junk-food entertainment, in the form of reality shows, pornography, and, yes, video games, is used to keep humanity docile as they slave away for The Man, distracting them from the real problems in the world -- a point driven home (in pure Black Mirror tradition) by a painfully soul-crushing ending. The film pays lip service at the end to the idea that maybe all of humanity being addicted to the OASIS while the real world goes to hell in a handbasket isn't exactly a good thing, but by and large, it takes the protagonists' quest to save their virtual world, and their belief that it's the only thing that matters anymore, at face value. It wants us to root for them, but it never has them take a serious look at the broader world and wonder if maybe there are more important things than a video game, an issue that's made all the more glaring by the film's half-hearted attempt to have its cake and eat it too.
That said, with Spielberg in charge, you know you're getting something that at least looks good. It's like the old Francois Truffaut quote about war movies: the film seems to recognize deep down that society's addiction to the OASIS is unhealthy, but it makes the OASIS look amazing. It's Second Life writ large on a billion-dollar budget more than anything, the book's I Love the '80s style coming through but not dominating the proceedings. Our introduction says it all: it's a world where you can surf monster waves in Hawaii, snowboard down the side of the Great Pyramid, climb Mt. Everest with Batman, jump into a massive virtual battleground, and take part in a zero-gravity dance-off, all in a day's time. So much of this movie takes place in the OASIS that it feels almost like an animated film at times, especially with the exaggerated, somewhat cartoonish appearances of the characters' avatars, and Spielberg makes full use of everything the idea has to offer -- within the bounds of a PG-13 rating, of course, because in real life you know the OASIS would be filled with floating penises and swastikas in a matter of hours. (That's a point that a lot of other people have written about with how this film reflects the optimistic "geek culture ascendant" attitude of the late '00s and early '10s, before the world realized just how nasty that culture could be in real life. It helps here that Spielberg toned down a lot of the more questionable elements of Wade's personality and how the book presented him, such that I was able to actually buy into the idea that the OASIS wouldn't turn into such a cesspit; maybe Halliday drew a line in the sand at some point?)
The most important change, however, comes in the role these references play in the main story. Whereas the book had the geek trivia be important in and of itself, a major change that Spielberg makes is that he grounds the treasure hunt in figuring out why these things were so important to James Halliday, particularly with regards to his regrets about his life. The second puzzle, revolving around a recreation of a classic 1980s horror film that I won't dare spoil, concerns Halliday wishing he'd taken the leap and forged a real relationship with the woman he secretly loved, while the final puzzle uses an old Atari 2600 game as a metaphor for how he treated his business partner and close friend Ogden Morrow. Halliday, despite appearing primarily in the background, is easily the most intriguing character in the film, an exploration of tech moguls and superstar video game designers like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Garriott, and Hideo Kojima and how they might look back on their careers and creations towards the end of their lives. Mark Rylance portrays two versions of Halliday, one as his avatar, the wise old fantasy wizard Anorak, and the other being his real self, a neurotic, socially awkward man who appears to have grown profoundly uncomfortable in his old age with how he had lived and worked. As the latter especially, Rylance is fantastic in selling what the generation of '80s geeks turned Silicon Valley wizards will probably look and sound like in their golden years, with both him and the writing by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline himself making him the most fascinating character in the film -- understandably so, given that he drives the plot despite never appearing "in person".
The other characters are pretty flat, however. Wade is your archetypal Spielberg boy hero of a sort that, ten years ago, Shia LaBoeuf might have played, and he largely sticks to that archetype to the very end. Art3mis gets more to do plot-wise versus the book, but her characterization too largely stays the same, while Aech, Sho, and Daito are largely supporting players in Wade and Art3mis' quest. Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke deliver fine performances as Wade and Art3mis, but they are what prop up their characters here, not the writing; neither of them changes all that much over the course of the story. This is something that kind of segues into the bigger problem I had with the film. As described above, the film takes place in a world where a virtual reality online game has become the biggest thing on the planet, played largely by people seeking to get away from the slowly degenerating dystopia that real life has turned into. It is not at all difficult to frame this setup as the plot of a Black Mirror episode, largely because that show already has, in fact, tackled very similar subject matter with the episode "Fifteen Million Merits". There, a steady diet of junk-food entertainment, in the form of reality shows, pornography, and, yes, video games, is used to keep humanity docile as they slave away for The Man, distracting them from the real problems in the world -- a point driven home (in pure Black Mirror tradition) by a painfully soul-crushing ending. The film pays lip service at the end to the idea that maybe all of humanity being addicted to the OASIS while the real world goes to hell in a handbasket isn't exactly a good thing, but by and large, it takes the protagonists' quest to save their virtual world, and their belief that it's the only thing that matters anymore, at face value. It wants us to root for them, but it never has them take a serious look at the broader world and wonder if maybe there are more important things than a video game, an issue that's made all the more glaring by the film's half-hearted attempt to have its cake and eat it too.
That said, with Spielberg in charge, you know you're getting something that at least looks good. It's like the old Francois Truffaut quote about war movies: the film seems to recognize deep down that society's addiction to the OASIS is unhealthy, but it makes the OASIS look amazing. It's Second Life writ large on a billion-dollar budget more than anything, the book's I Love the '80s style coming through but not dominating the proceedings. Our introduction says it all: it's a world where you can surf monster waves in Hawaii, snowboard down the side of the Great Pyramid, climb Mt. Everest with Batman, jump into a massive virtual battleground, and take part in a zero-gravity dance-off, all in a day's time. So much of this movie takes place in the OASIS that it feels almost like an animated film at times, especially with the exaggerated, somewhat cartoonish appearances of the characters' avatars, and Spielberg makes full use of everything the idea has to offer -- within the bounds of a PG-13 rating, of course, because in real life you know the OASIS would be filled with floating penises and swastikas in a matter of hours. (That's a point that a lot of other people have written about with how this film reflects the optimistic "geek culture ascendant" attitude of the late '00s and early '10s, before the world realized just how nasty that culture could be in real life. It helps here that Spielberg toned down a lot of the more questionable elements of Wade's personality and how the book presented him, such that I was able to actually buy into the idea that the OASIS wouldn't turn into such a cesspit; maybe Halliday drew a line in the sand at some point?)
The Bottom Line
Both the book and film are very much period pieces -- not for the '80s, but for the age of Silicon Valley optimism when the revolution they were bringing to the world was seen as an unambiguous good thing. But while time has taken some of the shine off the story's themes, Spielberg and Cline still crafted a fun movie that improves on the book even if it doesn't fix all of its problems, one that ranks nicely in the upper half of the director's filmography. Whether you're looking for a blast from the past or just a fun sci-fi adventure, check this one out.
No comments:
Post a Comment