Ready Player One (AKA "Pop Culture Easter Eggs: The Motion Picture")
Pop Culture Easter Eggs: The Motion Picture
Ready Player One (2018)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline
Based on the novel by Ernest Cline
Rated PG-13
I don’t really know when it happened but in the 11-12 years since I actually started to watch cinema not only as entertainment but also as an art form, I gradually fell out of liking a majority of the works of Steven Spielberg. Apart from the first three Indiana Jones films (1981-1989), Jurassic Park (1993), Minority Report (2002), and maybe a few others, he is no longer a filmmaker whose work I revisit all that much. He’s a very prolific filmmaker and very much like Ridley Scott or Tim Burton he has more far more misses than hits as far as I’m concerned. Whereas when Ridley Scott can come back with something great after a string of misses (for example The Martian (2015) was an excellent film he released after a string of duds from Body of Lies to Exodus Gods and Kings) that shows me that he’s still got that magic touch, I have yet to see any of that out of Spielberg since he made Minority Report. Being prolific is not a bad thing per se but unless you are Akira Kurosawa or Martin Scorsese, who I feel are among the few prolific filmmakers whose hits far outweigh their misses, any artist runs the risk of having their creative juices run dry.
My disinterest in Spielberg has grown to the point that I have not even bothered to see his serious dramas like War Horse (2011) or Bridge of Spies (2015), and that 117-minute piece of visual valium called The BFG (2016) almost turned me off from seeing the crowd pleasers he puts out. However, with Ready Player One being released I kept hearing that this is the crowd pleasing side of Spielberg truly returning to the screen so I decided to give it a fair shake. I can say that while it’s occasionally amusing and certainly not bad it was what I feared it would be which is “Pop Culture Easter Eggs: The Motion Picture” with a predictable “defeat the evil corporate bad guy” plot. Lame.
Wade Watts, AKA Parzival, (Tye Sheridan) is among millions of people who escape from the real world (which suffered from some sort of vague economic collapse leaving millions impoverished to one degree or another) by going to the virtual world of the Oasis which is essentially a very high tech virtual reality version of the internet. The Oasis is so powerful that it is practically the most important economic resource in the world. When its creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance) dies, he leaves an Easter Egg in the Oasis that would bestow upon the finder a huge fortune as well as complete control of the Oasis. Wade has to team up with other users in the Oasis such as Samantha, AKA Art3mis, (Olivia Cooke), Helen, AKA Aech, (Lena Waithe) and others to win the Easter Egg and to keep control of the Oasis away from IOI CEO, Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelson).
Plots that are too familiar and predictable can make any film a chore to sit through if they don’t have a good cast of unique and memorable characters to elevate the material and unfortunately Ready Player One suffers from this set back. As the protagonist Wade is about as bland as they get and unless he is in his Parzial avatar in the Oasis he has exactly two facial expressions; confused and somewhat sad. Heck, he goes through a pretty traumatic event about 40 minutes or so into the film and he seems to shrug it off within minutes of it happening. It’s not that he was unlikeable or really incompetent but there wasn’t that much in him for me to root for. For a movie that has tons of throwback to the 80’s, you would kind of expect it would also include a protagonist that has charisma and a lot of spunk but alas I need to look for those qualities in another movie.
Olivia Cooke’s Samantha started off as rather spunky and possibly interesting when we meet her in her avatar form at the beginning but that seems to dissipate when we see her in the real world where she acts more mellow. And her growing romantic relationship with Wade seems to be cemented about half way through the film with no real work between the two characters to develop it. We do get some moments at the beginning where they flirt and such, but I was never sold on their romance completely. We also have Ben Mendelson’s Nolan Sorrento who is the typical evil CEO character who just want to control everything and will do anything to reach his goal.
There are other characters like Aech, Sho and Daito who assist Wade and Samantha in their quest and we even have villain characters like T.J. Miller’s I-R0K but the one character I wanted to see in much more detail (or heck give him his own movie) was Mark Rylance’s James Halliday. His character is an extremely introverted, socially awkward genius that places clues to finding the Easter Egg in the Oasis which involve looking into his past to finding special keys. While watching the characters uncover Halliday’s secrets which includes his deepest regrets and personal preferences in regards to playing games and engaging in pop culture or even his personal habits (which point to him possibly being on the autistic spectrum…well that was something I at least noted) I kept thinking to myself “why am I watching a movie with Wade and his friends going on an adventure in a pop culture saturated virtual world when I could get a possibly better film about James Halliday?”
We get portions of what happened to him before he died. From his falling out with his friend Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg), to a missed opportunity at romance with a woman he loved called Kira and some other things, those tiny details could have been better material for a movie than what we got. Instead, all of those events in Halliday’s life that we see Wade and his friends go through all end up serving to provide a lesson that people need the real world with real people and that the Oasis is just fantasy and such. That is a good lesson but unfortunately there really isn’t all that much build up for it to really have any real impact. We go through an entire film where we are shown how amazing and fun the Oasis is, how depressing and boring the real world is and how important it is to save the Oasis and then the movie just drops how important living in the real world is without taking the time to show the characters and by extension the audience the benefits of staying in the real world even if life sucks sometimes. It just feels like the movie is giving mixed signals in that regard.
It would have been a more poignant story to follow a character like Halliday (who admits in the film to having trouble connecting with others) learn the lesson and that way we can see a film that actually features satisfying character growth. Mark Rylance is a good actor and really is the best part of the movie which made me wish even more that we would’ve gotten a movie about him. The reason I go off on this is because I was thinking about this in a movie that features an elaborate adventure in cyberspace complete with huge races and a huge battle at the end. That is bad.
Visually the film is great to look at both in the Oasis and the real world and further proves that Spielberg, his cinematographer and his visual effects team know how to deliver visual spectacle. There is a lot of CGI used in this movie and apart from the racing sequence at the beginning which I thought was overkill as it was too noisy and frenetic for me, I actually didn’t mind the use of CGI all that much. Besides it does mostly take place in the virtual world so it fits (also in most cases I don’t mind what kind of visual effects methods are used as long as I get a good story and as long as it doesn’t look ugly).
Now we come to what the movie seems to have been primarily sold on; the nostalgia factor. The movie is filled to the brim with pop culture references from movies to video games going back from the 80’s to recent years. I don’t have anything against referencing old movies and such in movies or TV as long as it is worked into the story in a clever way that doesn’t feel intrusive. For example, I really like the movie Wreck-It-Ralph (2012) and while that movie had plenty of characters and Easter Eggs relating to video games both old and new they came at all the right places, didn’t distract me from the story and it still managed to deliver a great message (and so did far better than this new movie could with theirs) on top of having fun and memorable characters the audience wanted to take a journey with.
As for the Ready Player One, 10 minutes in and I was already sick of all the references and gags relating to pop culture. I know this is in the future where we have a VR internet where all kinds of nostalgic stuff could be worked in but there is only so much that I could take. All the tiny references put into the movie whether it was delivered by the visuals or in the dialogue actually began to distract me. “Ok there’s the pulse rifle from Aliens…Oh there’s the DeLorean…there’s King Kong…there’s a theater in the background playing a Jack Slater movie…ENOUGH ALREADY!!!!” is more or less what screaming internally while watching Ready Player One. There’s even a whole sequence where our heroes go into Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) to find another one of Halliday’s keys and all I was thinking was I would rather be at home watching the actual Shining movie. On the whole I just don’t equate incorporating tons of pop culture into the plot of a book or movie to being really creative or witty especially when the plot isn’t all that inspired and most of the characters are bland. It just feels shallow and constantly incorporating too much pop culture into new works of fiction stifles creativity. It’s not that I didn’t geek out once or twice while watching the movie. For instance, Samantha when she is in the Oasis rides the iconic bike from Katsuhiro Otomo’s landmark 1988 anime Akira (which is one of my favorite movies ever by the way) and I noticed that not only did they mispronounce the name of the character who rode that bike in the 1988 anime (and manga as well) but the bike had all the wrong decals and stickers on it.
So yeah, I did not like this one and I wouldn’t watch again. I’m not easily amused or suckered in by nostalgia and despite hearing reports of this being Spielberg really getting back to his crowd pleasing glory I walked out of this movie feeling completely meh. But if any of what has been advertised and talked about in the press or from others is up anyone’s alley then I imagine they will go for it. I know that this one will be for anyone who enjoys seeing all their favorite nostalgic stuff from movies to video games (serious gamers will very likely get a kick out of this too as there are lots of jokes about online games and even includes characters from Overwatch, Halo and I can swear in a scene at the beginning, Duke Nukem makes an appearance) on the big screen as that really does seem to the movie’s biggest selling point. Speaking of all the pop culture stuff that appear in the film, I wonder how much of this movie’s budget went into securing the rights and such to get the massive amount of characters and such from all the IPs that are popular. Just something I thought about a lot even before the movie officially came out.
