Ready Player O…cool, a thing I know! (Review)
There was a time when having a working knowledge of pop culture wasn’t something you’d loudly exclaim at social gatherings. Arguing the merits of Han shooting first was usually a discussion reserved for Friday the 13th marathons or late night D&D sessions. This knowledge often went hand in hand with geekdom, a subculture that, for a while, was considered the highpoint of social exclusion.
Skip forward to the early-to-late 2010s and what was once considered nerd ephemera now dominates the entertainment market. Roughly 6 out the 10 highest grossing films of all time are either part of the Marvel or Star Wars franchises. Wearing matching t-shirts with the words “I’m the Dungeon Master” and “I’m banging the Dungeon Master” is publically acceptable, and bound to get you more high-fives than shoulder punches.
So obviously this is the time to release a film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. It’s basically Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, except you replace whimsy with pop culture.
In short, it’s 2045 and the world is a kinda-sorta dystopia where everyone lives in crowded shanty towns (except the rich because dystopia). But where you live in the real world doesn’t matter, because everyone, for the most part, prefers to spend their time in the OASIS, a massive virtual world the likes of which William Gibson couldn’t even imagine.
When its eccentric creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), passes away, his last message to the world is a challenge: inside the OASIS he has hidden 3 easter eggs, and the first person to find all 3 gets complete control over the OASIS. This naturally intrigues Wade Watson (Tye Sheridan), a.k.a Parzival and his plucky group of online friends, as well as corporate bad guy Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) who seeks complete control over the OASIS because you can’t have a cyberpunk-esque sci-fi and NOT have an evil corporation.
The OASIS itself is the film’s visual centrepiece, and is lovingly packed to the rafters with pop culture references, iconography, and avatars. Nearly every scene panders to the fanboy/girl in all of us. Sure, you might miss Beetlejuice in the background, but only because you were paying attention to Freddy Krueger duking it out with Jim Raynor. The latter is also a point of praise, since while the film does exude an obvious love for all things 80s (as does most of post-2010 Hollywood), it recognises the broader evolution within its own sphere of influence. It’s not just Superman, Batman, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; it’s also Tracer, Reaper, and guns with chainsaw bayonets. As expected, this lends each of the film’s big set pieces a unique charm, especially the finale, which is just an eye-popping exercise in geek themed Where’s Wally.
But while the outer coating might be tongue-on-cheek references and sly nods, the beating heart is still Spielberg. This seems like a story engineered for Spielberg, a director responsible for a goodly portion of our nostalgia and collective cinematic experiences, and the choice pays off. He still has an energy the matches the frenetic pace at which this movie zooms ahead, but also knows when to slam the breaks. While the temptation was clearly there to just cram the movie with non-stop fan service, Spielberg knows you still need to tell a story. So amid all the fanfare you’ve got a pretty straightforward “boy in a magical land” tale that ticks all the Campellian boxes. Whether or not this is a success, given the potential inherent in the source material, is up to you, but grounding the film in familiarity does make it accessible to a larger crowd than just the “I get it!” sly-wink geeks. It’s not 2016’s Warcraft: The Beginning, where having a Mastermind-level knowledge of the games was paramount to really enjoying it.
This isn’t to say the story doesn’t have some relevance outside its own playpen. The way Sorrento and his corporate cronies attempt to co-opt nostalgia to further their exploitative business practices seems eerily similar to the way big game publishing companies of today view players as payers. One need only turn to the recent Star Wars: Battlefront debacle to see the similarities. It would be a stretch to call it a cautionary tale, but it does highlight the fact that our nostalgia and pop culture are valuable properties, not just for us, but also to corporations.
But, what matters the most, is that it’s fun. There is enough visual excess, and references both obscure and well known, which distract you from the pretty boilerplate story. The moment you want to cringe at the ham fisted romance subplot someone throws a hadouken, and you quickly remember why you’re watching the film in the first place.