Spielberg’s off his game in his latest
Steven Spielberg’s latest is a shadow of his finest work – full of cultural references but without heart or appealing characters
Ready Player One Cert: 12A 2hrs 20mins ★ ★★★★
Whether we are talking earlyera Steven Spielberg such as ET or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, or more recent offerings such as War Horse or The BFG, the best Spielberg films, especially when they’re aimed at a younger audience, have one thing in common: oodles and oodles of heart.
And that, disappointingly, is exactly what’s missing from his newest production, Ready Player One. Visually it looks fabulous, and it’s enjoyably packed full of modern cultural references that take in music, film (ooh, look, isn’t that The Iron Giant) and video gaming (wow – an Atari 2600) from the past 40 years.
But emotionally it’s completely flat – the main characters struggle to make it out of two dimensions, the linear storyline is a far-from-thrilling treasure hunt, and any potential romance feels formulaic, forced and rather feeble. That’s definitely not what you expect from the director of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
But then this doesn’t always feel like a Spielberg picture. He’s usually been at his best when breaking new ground, as with Jaws and ET – or, failing that, covering old ground in a new way, as in Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List – but here, in a film that exists somewhere between Tron, The Matrix and David Cronenberg’s Existenz, he seems to be covering familiar territory in a way we’ve definitely seen before. After all, it’s only three months since the not wholly dissimilar Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle was released, and that was a lot more fun than this.
Based on a novel by Ernest Cline and co-adapted by him too, the story unfolds in the inevitably dystopian future of 2045, where rubbish-strewn trailer parks are now arranged vertically and where our young hero, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) – like so many others who live in ‘the Stacks’ – prefers to spend his days immersed in The Oasis rather than confronting the misery of real life.
And what is The Oasis? It’s a huge virtual world, an alternative online reality where players can do anything, go anywhere and, thanks to the magic of avatars, be anyone they like. Wade likes to be a rather cooler version of himself, Parzival, as in the Arthurian hunter of the Holy Grail.
Which is handy, as the megawealthy founder of The Oasis, James Halliday (Mark Rylance, gracing his third Spielberg movie in as many years), has just died. Speaking via video message from beyond the grave, Halliday announces that he has hidden a hugely valuable ‘Easter Egg’ – a gamer term for hidden extra – somewhere in his online universe. Not only is it worth more than half a trillion dollars but it will give its finder ultimate control of The Oasis.
So it’s not just the likes of Wade and his new online friends –
particularly the feisty, sexy Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) – who are after Halliday’s prize; it’s evil corporations with battalions of cultural researchers and specialist game-players too. The online race is on. And storywise that’s pretty much it. So what are the problems? More than half the story unfolds in The Oasis, where key characters are represented by stylised avatars that owe their visual origins to fantasy comics and Japanese anime and are definitely not realistic. In other words, at least half the acting is done by glorified cartoons, which doesn’t give Spielberg’s young cast much of a chance to shine. Amid a welter of nostalgic references to the Seventies and Eighties, one special device of The Oasis is known as a Zemeckis cube. Like the DeLorean car that floats by a little later, this, I’m sure, is meant to be an affectionate tribute to Robert Zemeckis, who directed the classic Eighties sci-fi fantasy Back To The Future, which Spielberg produced.
But it’s another Zemeckis film, The Polar Express, that provides a clue as to what’s going wrong here. It also used stateof-the-art animation based on motion capture, and it too struggled to inject emotional life into its story. In Zemeckis’s film, the animated eyes looked dead; in Spielberg’s, the flat-feeling end result is not dissimilar.
But even back in the real world things are little better. Neither Sheridan nor Cooke sets the world alight, and when even the likes of Ben Mendelsohn are having an off day, you know a film is in some trouble.
Yes, there is still fun spotting the cultural references that take in everything from Godzilla to Teenage Mutant Ninja Heroes, from Star Wars to The Breakfast Club. But extended sequences riffing off The Shining and Saturday Night Fever seem both too familiar and too long.
Committed gamers may enjoy it more than I did, but if anyone asks me the question Ready Player One? I’d have to say, not really.
‘Half the acting is done by glorified cartoons which doesn’t give the cast a chance to shine’