Virtually terrific
Having only a few months ago taken us to the tensionfilled early 1970s with the largely excellent, historydrenched Oscar nominee “The Post,” director Steven Spielberg returns to thrust us back to the future with the highly impressive and enjoyable “Ready Player One.”
Adapted from author Ernest Cline’s 2011 science-fiction novel of the same name, “Ready Player One” is an eye-popping and generally thrilling adventure blending live action and animation that’s chock full of popculture references — one of the most prominent being the Delorean from the “Back to the Future” movies, directed by Spielberg’s longtime pal Robert Zemeckis.
Speaking of 1980s cultural hits, Spielberg opens the proceedings by hitting us with the energetic sounds of Van Halen’s 1983 smash “Jump” as the film’s lead character, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), introduces himself to us and his world. It’s 2045, and Wade — born roughly two decades earlier, after the “corn-syrup droughts” and “the bandwidth riots” — lives in Columbus, which is still “the fastest-growing city on earth.”
Ohio’s capital is so crowded, in fact, that Wade’s family and many others live in “The Stacks,” mounds of mobile homes on top of one another and accessible via scaffolding and ladders. A nifty tracking shot follow’s Wade through a part of The Stacks, showing us someone receiving a pizza delivered by drone but, more importantly, illustrating that many people spend their hours wearing virtual-reality headsets — devices that in 2018 already are becoming increasingly commonplace.
“These days, reality is a bummer,” Wade tells us. “Everyone is looking for some way to escape.”
They escape to the OASIS, an incredibly immersive virtual universe where, Wade says, the only limit is your imagination. (To illustrate this, he shows us that not only can you climb Mount Everest within the OASIS — but you can do it alongside Batman.)
There are also myriad games to be played there, and Wade is a major player, about as talented as they come. You can understand why Wade — who plays under the name Parzival and, like everyone else, is represented by an avatar of his design — spends the majority of his waking hours there.
You go to the OASIS to do something, he says, but you stay to BE something.
Not surprisingly, Wade’s hero is the late creator of the OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance).
“James Halliday saw the future, and he built it,” Wade says. “He gave us a place to go.”
Halliday left behind a way for a successor to prove himself or herself in his world and, then, inherit it. Wow, wouldn’t that be something, Wade and many others think. However, five years in, nobody has completed even one of Halliday’s three challenges, the first two of which lead to keys and clues to keep going.
Among those trying to complete the quest is Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who long ago was an intern at Gregarious Games, the company Halliday ran with longtime best friend Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg). Now, he heads the large, greedy Columbus-based IOI, which no doubt would take the OASIS in a direction Halliday never envisioned. (Wade refers to Sorrento by a derogatory term that ends in “weed.”)
Thus, Wade is determined to complete Halliday’s first challenge, an insane urban road race complete with a changing course and, among other dangers, King Kong. (Nobody makes it past Kong.)
It is at the race that we meet the virtual object of Wade’s desire, the beautiful Art3mis, who rides a motorbike and is about as talented as Parzival, who commands the famed Delorean.
After Art3mis’ bike is damaged in the challenge, Parzival gets a friend to fix it for her. She appreciates it — and seems interested in
READY PLAYER ONE
In theaters: Now. Rated: PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, partial nudity and language. Runtime: 2 hours, 20 minutes. Stars (of four): 3. him as he is in her. However, the pair form what at best could be considered a loose alliance.
That will change as the story “Ready Player One” deepens, of course, as the stakes become bigger than at least Wade initially realizes.
The aforementioned road race is just one of the exhilarating and visually impressive sequences in “Ready Player One,” its best parts coming via digital animation and motion-capture performances.
The buffet of pop-culture references are a blast, too, even if they seems heavy on Warner Bros. properties — “Ready Player One” — and apparently differ greatly from the books. There were surely rights issues for the studio, and, apparently, Spielberg wanted some of Cline’s references to his films removed. (That probably explains the multiple references to Zemeckis.) But, hey, regardless of how he got there, it’s great to see the Iron Giant walk again, as he does during the climactic stretch of “Ready Player One.” And you may want to prepare yourself for a weird, fairly deep dive into the 1980 horror classic “The Shining” in the middle of this film.
Speaking of legendary geek Cline, he adapts his own novel — with the help of screenwriter Zak Penn (“X-Men: The Last Stand,” “The Incredible Hulk”) — and does a fine job. (At least one prominent online posting proclaims the movie an improvement over the book, but we’ll leave that one for the book’s fans to decide.) While just a little bloated, the story keeps you invested through the conclusion. Heck, even the film’s exposition-heavy opening few minutes — we’re talking about a serious data download here — doesn’t weigh things down.
As for the on-screen talent, whether fleshy or pixelated, Sheridan (“X-Men: Apocalypse,” “Mud”) helps make Wade/Parzival a fairly compelling hero, and Cooke (“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” “Bates Motel”) complements him nicely as Art3mis and, eventually, a young woman named Samantha. The actors share solid chemistry in both realms.
On the one hand, Mendelson could play his role in his sleep — Sorrento is just a slightly different version of the actor’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” villain, Director Orson Krennic — but he’s nonetheless effective as the big bad here.
Meanwhile, Rylance — a Spielberg regular in recent years, having appeared in 2015’s “Bridge of Spies,” for which he won an Academy Award, and 2016’s largely ignored “The BFG” — is distractingly odd as Halliday. Sure, a creative-genius type can be weird, but the talented actor doesn’t exactly feel right for the part.
Spielberg has been better, too, as recently as late last year with “The Post,” and “Ready Player One” doesn’t really have the emotional impact you might hope. However, this movie is a big task, and it’s really well-executed. The veteran filmmaker undoubtedly is as responsible for that as anybody.
On the big screen at least, Cline’s story works as both cautionary tale — “Ready Player One” feels at times a bit like “The Matrix” and other dystopian-future films — and celebration of video games and pop culture. It wants us to enjoy gaming, as well as “Back to the Future,” “The Iron Giant” and Batman, but within reasonable limits.
That’s a winning idea, so, by all means, plug in get ready to play.