Tye Sheridan in Ready Player One

Movie Review: Ready Player One (2018) *All Pop Without the Culture*

Tye Sheridan in Ready Player One
What happens when reality gets to be too much?  Well, most of us depart it as soon as possible.  “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” (little T.S. Eliot for you) and it’s true.  Especially in the hypersaturated information age, reality is an overwhelming non-stop sensory onslaught.  People need to check out to stay sane.  Some find healthy ways of doing this, others not so healthy, but the need for escapism remains.  In Ready Player One, the enter world has escaped a depressing society into a virtual reality playground known as the OASIS.  Inside, the whole world is engaged in a treasure hunt to find three keys that will unlock the ownership of the OASIS embedded in the system by its deceased founder.  If that sounds like an awesome premise for a story, you are correct.  The book is one of my favorite of the last decade.  Whether you like Ready Player One or not, is probably going to depend on whether you have read the book or not and know just how much better THAT story is than the one Steven Spielberg delivers.

The Iron Giant in Ready Player OneI have long-standing issues with Spielberg’s filmmaking over the last 15 years.  I think he’s lost his way.  I think he believes he can still make the kind of films; the blockbusters he invented for Hollywood that now serve as its bread and butter.  He also believes he can make the kind of hard-hitting adult fare like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, etc. that transformed him from just a box office kingpin to a celebrated “serious” director.  The problem is…. he can’t do either well anymore.  The Post is an example of a serious film that should have been a slam dunk in these times, but Spielberg nearly absented himself from its direction.  Ready Player One would have made 1980s Spielberg go insane, but instead of delivering a taut blockbuster, he delivers an overload of pop culture noise.  It’s so focused on showing off nearly every intellectual property WB could get their hands on, that it drops the plot.  The structure of Ernest Cline’s novel (Cline is given a co-screenplay credit, and that’s hard to believe) is there, but that’s about all that remains intact.

Ready Player OneThe treasure hunt in the OASIS is for an easter egg (which in video game parlance, for the non-gamers, is a hidden bonus embedded into the code of the game for dedicated gamers to discover).  Ready Player One takes the easter egg concept and focuses so much on cramming appearances by as many pop culture icons as you can imagine and takes it to ridiculous lengths.  Spielberg flashes around so fast that you probably missed most of the literally HUNDREDS of easter eggs in this film, but he also takes the self-indulgent time to hail his director friends and idols, most notably by rewriting the second quest as a tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.  In the book, the OASIS is mostly focused on the video games and pop culture of the 1980s, and I can see how this would be limiting to focus on in the movie adaptation, but there’s a saturation point for cameos, and RP1 passes it very quickly.  The final battle has so many characters in it, you’d think It would be incredible, but he can’t keep the camera on any of them but the Iron Giant (who got more promotion for this film than his own animated classic received) for more than a split second.  Think I’m overstating the cameos?  Mr. Sunday Night has put together a video on as many of them as he could (and even he admits he didn’t get them all).


The F/X in the OASIS look distracting in trailers, but you quickly get used to the look while inside VR, and they really are spectacular.  My issue with all the frenetic activity over plot or character development, the F/X really do push boundaries and are an amazing achievement.  The casting, too, is also great.  I especially loved Mark Rylance as the OASIS founder.  Each character pulls double-duty both as their real-world self and their OASIS avatar.  Probably the weakest character/actor is unfortunately Tye Sheridan as the protagonist Wade Watts.  That’s less due to Sheridan’s abilities and more due to the fact that the movie script reduces him to simply a character who moves the plot along; reduces all the characters except Rylance’s to the bare minimum of development.  In the book, Wade’s journey to solve the puzzle, earn the keys, and find the egg is an epic quest that requires a lot of real-world sacrifice on his part.  It’s what makes his character so interesting is all that he gives up and goes through to solve this puzzle.  In the movie, that sacrifice is pretty much reduced to one scene.  Most real world activity feels like an excuse to get back to the OASIS, which you get the feeling Spielberg found the far more interesting place to spend time (much like the citizens in the book).


Tye Sheridan in Ready Player One

The ultimate message of both the film and the book is that reality is where life really happens, and while that’s jammed in at the end of the film, it’s undercut by a lack of any emotional connectivity between the two realms throughout most of the script.  Granted, there’s a huge amount packed into that book, and any adaptation was going to be tough, but the emotional core of the story should have been Spielberg’s focus, and his direction was as scattered as a Jack Russell distracted by jangling keys.  Also, I realize due to his age that John Williams can no longer score every Spielberg film, but Alan Silvestri is one of the greats too, and this film deserved an epic score and didn’t get one.  Movie scores, in general, over the last 5-10 years have declined alarmingly in quality.  Another Spielberg hallmark was always a great score, but the only piece of Silvestri’s RP1 score I recall is when he got to use his own Back to the Future theme for a brief bit.

Ready-Player-One-BattletoadsThis is not an AWFUL film.  Ready Player One is what should have been a GREAT film made mediocre.  If you haven’t read the book and don’t mind the ADHD pace of things in the OASIS, you may love it, and never know the difference.  However, if you have read the book, you’re not going to walk out of the theater excited about the adaptation of Cline’s novel that you got, you’re going to be thinking Spielberg’s vision pales in comparison to the one that Cline’s words painted in your mind.


6.75/10

Ready Player One Poster

11 thoughts on “Movie Review: Ready Player One (2018) *All Pop Without the Culture*”

  1. An interesting take on the film. I have to say I think Spielberg is my favourite director but do agree some of his more recent films have lacked that ‘Spielberg magic touch’ that made him such hot property in the 90s. Although I think Ready Player One is his best film in years.


    Liked by 1 person

    1. He was mine too at one point before Nolan grabbed that title. It’s not bad. My beefs are more over lost potential and he has made far worse missteps than this. Most people really seem to like it.

      Liked by 1 person

  2. Another blockbuster of a review…you never cease to blow me away! You are so deep, and entertaining…your multi-layered viewpoint is so very, very intelligent, engaging, and eloquent…no one could ever do it better, Dave…thanks for sharing your gift 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  3. I am positive that at the end of AI, the highly evolved robots were lying through their teeth about bringing David’s mother back from the fabric of reality. Instead they only pretended to bring her back, and then deactivated David at the very end of the film. People thought Steve tried to tack on one of his patented feel good endings, and that he failed, and they were off by a mile. Steve’s marriage of his own aesthetic with Kunbrick’s cold, bleak vision was genius, and almost makes AI the apex of his career.

    When I see RP1 tomorrow I am sure I will like it more than you, since I have not read the book, and even if I had, I always put books out of my mind completely. Otherwise no enjoying Jurassic Park. But i’m not expecting a masterpiece, not if you say the characters and plot are that thin. Obviously the film has struck a chord, but imagine if Steve had referenced his own films, and had taken the opportunity to tell us what he makes of the culture he’s helped shape.


    His storytelling sense has failed. Specifically his self indulgence is going unchecked. This is what comes of trying to make more complicated art. He is still a master craftsman. I believe that. But he is in search of a creative vision. He abandoned his old one some years ago. And without a singular vision, his storytelling has gotten undisciplined, even a little scattershot. That’s my take, anyway. I thought there was a chance he would come back with RP1, but the people who love this film are talking about the references and little else.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Because the references ARE the film. He gives shouts out to Zemeckis and Lucas and the Kubrick diversion was really not needed. Other than that, it’s a frenetic reference-fest. It’s not bad. He does reference Jurassic Park. And in that case the movie AND book are masterpieces and completely different animals. That’s not the case here. At least for me.


      Liked by 1 person

      1. I wish the old Steven Spielberg were still making movies. I don’t blame him for anything, he’s 71. God bless him. I’m just sad that a movie like this, that could have been THE pop culture document of our era, is not. At least, you’re saying it’s not. I’ll know what I think soon. Maybe it’s the unintentional pop culture document of our era, and what it’s telling us is really dire.

        Like

  4. Having read the book and found it to be mildly entertaining due to the pop culture references but generically mediocre in terms of storytelling, I was worried that the movie would be a train wreck. I actually came out enjoying the film a bit more than I did the book. I never felt the film was pandering to me with its references, like I did with the book, and felt the messages (that being part of something is important and that we should unplug to enjoy reality every once in a while) were perfectly well delivered even if the characterizations were flimsy at best.


    Liked by 1 person

    1. Well I strongly disagree about the quality of the book, but I’m glad you did like it. It’s not like I want people to hate movies I didn’t particularly enjoy lol. The message is important, and it had moments; like I said, it’s not bad, just not what I had hoped for, but I’m glad it hit with you!

      Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s