Future makes ’80s look good in Spielberg’s ‘Ready Player One.’
Dystopia of real world starts to infect the virtual one in ‘Ready’
In “The Post,” Steven Spielberg gave us a warning from history. In “Ready Player One,” he gives us a warning from the future — a cautionary tale, thinly disguised as a young adult adventure story.
The year is 2045, and people are still listening to Van Halen’s “Jump.” We know this because it’s the first song we hear on the soundtrack. Based on the novel by Ernest Cline, “Ready Player One” takes place in a world in which everyone is nostalgic for 1980s pop culture: Duran Duran, John Hughes movies, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” not The because 1980s represent those years a golden were age so great, to these but people, be-
cause everything in 2045 is pretty awful.
In a wrecked Midwestern city, our young hero Wade (Tye Sheridan) lives in little better than a shantytown. In voice-over, he describes his world as one in which people have given up. However, he does have a more satisfying life — a virtual one — in a place called the Oasis, where he has blond hair, calls himself Parzival and has cool friends.
The Oasis is a roleplaying platform that has become the biggest business on the planet, where people can have everything they’ve ever wanted, but virtually. None of it’s real, but it can feel real, because players wear virtual reality suits that allow them a full range of sensation.
Mark Rylance plays Halliday, the inventor of the Oasis, one of those gifted child-men who are so bad at normal human interaction that they invent a seductive alternative to it. It’s a wise touch that, though Halliday remains a sympathetic character throughout, he also seems like a creep, while his chief rival, Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), seems much more normal and thus appealing.
The script by Cline and Zak Penn is so efficient that everything you’ve read in the previous paragraphs is delivered to the audience before the credits even roll, plus this additional bit of information: When Halliday dies, he leaves behind a contest for Oasis users. The first to solve three riddles and collect three keys will inherit the Oasis business, which is worth $500 billion.
So “Ready Player One” is essentially the story of a contest, played out in the virtual world, in which people are competing to acquire the keys. But because the game has huge real-life implications, this is serious business, and so the dystopia in the real world starts to infect the virtual world, as the movie shifts back and forth between them.
Indeed, in some ways the virtual world is worse. Though the characters love the Oasis and want to preserve it, Spielberg does little to make us love it, too. Instead, he presents it as something resembling a collective modern brain, consisting of nonstop aggression, lonely selfaggrandizement and never-ending violence, a godless place in which a sentimental attachment to worthless pop cultural tropes has taken the place of spirituality.
This creates an effective distance. Sorrento is the bad guy, because he wants to take over the Oasis and control it. Wade and his friend Samantha (Olivia Cooke) are the good guys, because they want to leave the Oasis free. But, from a seat in the audience in 2018, both alternatives are horrible, because we can see clearly that every one of them would be better off if the Oasis simply did not exist.
Normally, such distance would make for a movie with no rooting interest, but there is one, anyway, because Parzival and Samantha are such underdogs that we end up caring about them. Besides, in a larger sense, there can be no distance here, because the world of “Ready Player One” seems an almost present threat. We are forced to confront this 2045 nightmare and think about it, before rejecting it entirely as no future anyone should want.
“Ready Player One” is not a movie about its performances. More than half of it’s animated, even if we don’t quite think of it in that way, with the actors providing voices for their avatars. This is more a movie about images — a bombardment of them — King Kong and Godzilla, mazelike highways, swinging wrecking balls, crashes and explosions, all against a black cyberworld screen of perpetual night.
Some of the virtual scenes stretch on too long, and at over two hours, the movie has dull spots, or rather moments so relentlessly frenetic that they become boring. Still, it’s good to see Spielberg, at 71, still finding new forms of cinematic language with which to express his humanism.
It also should be said that though “Ready Player One” wears a cheerful face, there are none of the usual heartwarming, classic Spielberg moments. That’s because, second to “Munich,” this is his most pessimistic film.