GAME ON! J
Reality bytes in the year 2045 — so people escape into a digital dreamland in Spielberg’s lively new sci-fi flick
UST in time for the holiday, the ’80s-obsessed “Ready Player One” serves up a fun cinematic Easter egg hunt.
Don’t know “The Last Starfighter” from “The Last Dragon”? Not to worry, you’re welcome here too. Director Steven Spielberg has calmed the feverish fanboy prose of Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel, so for every obscure sci-fi nod, there’s a crowd-pleasing Spielbergian trope: Scrappy hero crushing on an independent gal? Check. Friends banding together? Got ’em. Greedy corporate villain? Yep.
Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) was born in 2027, “after people stopped trying to fix problems.” He lives in the Stacks, where mobile homes are piled atop one another into makeshift high-rises. Real life sucks, so everyone’s escaped into the OASIS, a virtual-reality playground with ample room for everyone’s fantasies — the PG-13 variety, anyway.
The Willy Wonka-esque premise is a video challenge from late OASIS creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance, channeling the loopy Garth of “Wayne’s World”): Find three virtual hidden keys and you’ll win ownership of the company.
The offer’s irresistible to gamers like Wade and competing tech CEO Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who deploys an army of searchers so he can turn the OASIS into ad space (“We can sell up to 80 percent of a user’s visual field before inducing seizures”).
Wade’s virtual alter ego is Parzival, whose name refers to a questing Arthurian knight and whose bland human avatar looks as if it’s been resurrected from a middling late-’90s video game. It seems at odds with the OASIS’ supposedly cutting-edge graphics, but then, selling you on the immersive feel of virtual reality
isn’t this film’s strong point. There are two exceptions: a gravity-free dance club where Parzival and love interest Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) flirt and spin in a lovely, candy-colored riff on the famous “Saturday Night Fever” dance, and a key-finding foray into “The Shining.” This is the moment when Spielberg finally nails the potential magic of VR, placing Parzival and his pals inside what feels like the actual footage from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic.
Lena Waithe shines as Wade/Parzival’s tough best friend, Aech, as does Philip Zhao as the diminutive Sho, a gamer whose abilities belie his age. Cooke’s rebel-hearted Art3mis makes a worthy love interest for Parzival, although Wade’s insistence that “I’m not disappointed” when he meets her in real life (never mind that she might be disappointed in him) is an inadvertent nod to sexism in real-life gamer culture. (The other nod, however unintentional, is T.J. Miller, the recently fired “Silicon Valley” star accused of sexual assault, who here voices a gamer mercenary named I-R0k.)
At its heart, however, the OASIS is an optimistic spin on the Internet: It’s a place where people can celebrate pop-culture obsessions by literally diving into them, rather than, say, dissecting them on Twitter. And if there isn’t much of a larger message here — Wade’s take-away that “only reality is real” rings a little hollow when his reality is so wrecked — it still makes for a decent escape.
My main beef is with Spielberg’s choice to mostly leave out his own work, both as producer and director: “I didn’t corner the ’80s market,” he told Entertainment Weekly. But yeah, he kind of did. Yet all we get here are a couple of “Back to the Future” winks, a T. rex and a well-hidden gremlin. To quote one of Spielberg’s best-known characters: Ouch.