For Spielberg Addicts
Ready Player One is peak Spielberg. It’s perfect popcorn pop. Endless entertainment. It has a thousand things it wants to show you, gleefully, and a million references it wants to throw at you. Every time it seems to take a detour into a slightly serious territory, there’s a perfectly timed joke to break the mood.
Adapted from the popular Ernest Cline novel of the same name, Ready Player One is set in 2045—“after the bandwidth riots,” as the protagonist Wade Watts says in the opening narration. Wade lives a precarious life in a dizzy, vertical shantytown on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, and spends much of his life, like a million others, escaping to a vast virtual world called OASIS.
OASIS, accessed by strapping on a VR headset, and with enough distractions (and casual consumerism) to fill out a lifetime, is the creation of the enigmatic oligarch and “trillionaire” James Halliday.
Halliday, who is revered as a geek god, hints that he’s hidden an ‘Easter Egg’ in the game’s sprawling virtual universe. Find it, and you gain a controlling stake in Halliday’s company, and by extension, a remit to run OASIS itself. Cue adventurers, thrill seekers, profit-driven corporations, gangs and all sorts of unsavoury types—all desperate for the prize.
The setup makes for a dizzy, breezy film. The film’s kinetic energy is insatiable. It jumps and bounces, much like a video game, from one stunning location to the other, joyously sprinkling references to everything from ’80s cartoons to ’90s video games to 00’s internet memes.
And yet, all of the fan service feels a little hollow. Plenty of directors revel in pop culture references (e.g. Quentin Tarantino), but they also filter them to fit their own unique vision. Ready Player One is just two-dimensional collage—an endless parade of treats. An early scene set in one of the film’s evil corporations shows a plan to ‘monetise’ OASIS with blaring, intrusive advertisements. Ready Player One ends up doing just that, feeding us like consumers seeking a sugar rush.
Pop culture’s staying power comes from nostalgia, and nostalgia comes from an act of co-creation. From Star Trek to just about any video game franchise, fans have always helped build the universes alongside their creators. The film ignores that, and it can feel cynical… like a giant productplacement machine. It’s pure entertainment candy, and like all candy, perhaps best eaten in moderation.
READY PLAYER ONE IS A TWODIMENSIONAL COLLAGE—AN ENDLESS PARADE OF TREATS