‘Player’ a superficial dazzler of video game reality
The mega-action computer-generated imagery spectacles on 21stcentury screens are not really films but, rather, noninteractive video games. The arguable “benefit” of home and arcade games is that the players can at least make choices, learn strategy and hone their handeye coordination. Not so the movie incarnations, for whose audiences the lack of a joystick is compensated by the added dimension of sen surround sound and visual size if not the actual 3-D process.
With “Ready Player One,” Steven Spielberg has made just such a thing out of — and into — the thing itself. You could call it “Close Encounters of the Atari Kind” — or maybe “Forward to the Past,” with apologies to Robert Zemeckis.
It’s based on Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel, which, in turn, is based on the oxymoronic concept of retro-futurism. It’s the year 2045, just down the road in Columbus, Ohio (not Oklahoma City, per the original). There, people live in the dilapidated Stacks, a collection of high-rise salvage-yard slums, amidst poverty, pollution, over population — oy veh.
Reality is such a bummer, everybody’s looking for an escape and finding it in the nostalgic virtual reality realm — the Oasis. That’s the addictive wonderland of hypedup 1980s games, created by the late eccentric genius James Halliday, who posthumously challenges his millions of worldwide followers to