Ready Player One
Spielberg gets his game on
Love it or loathe it, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One remains the most successful book about gaming and geek culture ever written. A literal easter egg hunt in a virtual world, it features countless cameos, from Mortal Kombat’s Goro to Mass Effect’s FemShep, making any live-action adaptation a logistical and licensing nightmare. Unless you’re Steven Spielberg, of course…
Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is a nobody who becomes a legend in the ‘Oasis’ when he finds an easter egg left behind by its fabled creator, James Halliday. Discover all three eggs and ownership of the lucrative virtual world is yours. But Wade isn’t the only one hunting Halliday’s treasure, the main threat being Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the nefarious CEO of a company who wants to exploit players for every penny.
Splitting its time between a dystopian ‘real world’ and the dazzling Oasis, RPO is a technical marvel, like PlayStation Home on steroids. After years of worthy dramatic work, this is Spielberg in pure popcorn mode, a thrill-ride touched by the magic of his early crowd-pleasers. Kicking off with a helter-skelter race through a city, and culminating with a colossal battle, as a piece of spectacle it does not disappoint. Less successful is the half-hearted message about online addiction, and anyone with a low tolerance for gratuitous nostalgia may find the constant parade of familiar faces tiresome. But press Start and you’re unlikely to regret it. Jordan Farley