READY PLAYER ONE
Race For The Prize
Ready Blu-ray player, hun: the egg hunt extravaganza is coming to shiny disc.
released 6 august (download out 23 July) 2018 | 12 | Blu-ray (4K/3d/standard)/ dVd/download Director steven spielberg Cast tye sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, lena Waithe, simon Pegg
A lot of derision was aimed at Ready Player One before it even came out, mostly because a lot of people hated the original book. This is understandable: the novel is clunkily written, its nostalgia for ’80s pop culture is fun but self-indulgent, and its narrative voice is often self-satisfied.
Yet underneath all this the book has a clever premise and a compelling story. As author Ernest Cline says in the special features here, it’s an SF take on Willy Wonka – what if a Steve Jobs-type figure bequeathed the virtual reality paradise he’d invented to a competition winner? – and the resultant race between teenage underdogs and a megacorp looking to commodify the prize is page-turning stuff. When it was published, your reviewer wrote in this magazine that it’d work better as a movie – and it does.
The film could have been directed by someone who loves the ’80s era of Spielberg-dominated popcorn films as much as Cline does. Instead it’s directed by the actual Steven Spielberg. This has the welcome effect of toning down the nostalgia, because Spielberg feared too many references to his own work would come across as self-congratulatory. (It’s notable that a major set-piece, which is entirely new to the film, pays tribute to Stanley Kubrick, Spielberg’s favourite director.) There are still plenty of pop culture references, but while in the book they often dropped with a disappointing CLANG, they come across much more subtly in an audio-visual medium.
While the core of the book is still present, the film (co-written by Cline) takes quite a different line, coming across as being more about the joy of gaming than WOAH DUDE THE ’80S WERE AWESOME. The first set-piece, a giant multiplayer race through New York streets filled with traps and monsters, is a thrilling look at what gaming might become. The film also eliminates the aforementioned narrative voice, and its hero, Wade Watts, is more appealing than he is on the page.
It does carry through some of the book’s flaws: for example, the main female character, Art3mis, takes a backseat to Wade despite being explicitly more competent than he is. The film raises the idea that her real-life form might not be as sexy as her avatar, then predictably reveals she’s beautiful but with a prominent birthmark, which feels a bit lame. It’s also a little too long (a lot of Spielberg’s 21st century work could stand to lose 20 minutes) and the colour palette is a bit dull. But it’s full of excitement and imagination, and the theme of fighting corporate monopoly, though cheesy, is timely. So if you dismissed Ready Player One on its cinematic release, give it a chance now.
The giant multiplayer race through New York is thrilling
Extras The main 57-minute documentary feature, “Game Changer: Cracking The Code”, is a light but informative piece which contains one really striking moment. Spielberg is in a studio set up for motion-capture work, standard for this kind of movie – but he’s wearing a virtual reality headset that enables him to see a working model of the CG set that will later be rendered over this space, and holding a camera that shoots test footage of the virtual reality world. He’s then able to walk his actors through the space and show them where their characters are and what they’re doing. It feels like a startling glimpse at how movies will eventually be made, where the virtual set is built first.
This process is shown in more detail in “Effects For A Brave New World” (25 minutes), and Spielberg’s glee is lovely to see, his enthusiasm for adding new toys to the cinematic toy box undimmed after five decades in the business. “Level Up: Sound For The Future” (eight minutes) looks at the sound design, including the processing for Aech’s voice, while “High Score” (10 minutes) shows Alan Silvestri going about composing the music for the film. “Ernie & Tye’s Excellent Adventure” (12 minutes) puts author and star together for some anecdotes about the production.
The weakest feature, “The ’80s: You’re The Inspiration”, is just 10 minutes of cast and crew talking about how amazing ’80s pop culture is, with no insights whatsoever; this is the only feature included on the DVD.
Cline’s script originally left out the book’s zero-g club scene, on the grounds of cost. Spielberg told him to put it back in.