Spielberg’s wild flight of pure imagination
Ready Player One 12A cert, 140 min
Dir Steven Spielberg Starring Tye Sheridan, Mark Rylance, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, TJ Miller, Simon Pegg
The 71-year-old Spielberg is currently enjoying an absurdly fruitful late period. This latest film is freely adapted from a cult science-fiction novel by Ernest Cline, set in a near-future dystopia in which the entire planet is hooked on escape. Following two apparently cataclysmic events, most citizens have decided what remains of the real world isn’t worth the trouble, and spend most of their lives in the Oasis, an alternate wholly virtual reality in which fantasies run wild.
Dreamed up by straggly tech guru James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the Oasis allows you to be anyone and do anything, though for the majority of users, this mostly entails play-acting and remixing favourite moments in 20th century pop culture. But somewhere in his realm of pure imagination Halliday has hidden a golden ticket-like Easter Egg, the finder of which will inherit the Oasis, and the underlying trillion-dollar business. And because of the stakes, the quest consumes everyone, from hardcore gamers like Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), whose online alter ego is a floppy-haired Final Fantasy-type called Parzival, to the IOI Corporation, whose boss Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) wants to monetise all this digital real estate until its pixels squeak.
The film follows Wade/parzival’s ongoing quest to unpick Halliday’s riddles while dodging IOI goons, with the help of a ragtag gang of fellow players, including Aech (Lena Waithe), a strapping Orc, and Art3mis (Olivia Cooke). Unsurprisingly, chaos ensues when the online and offline worlds begin to intermingle – one sequence, which owes a debt to Christopher Nolan’s Inception, sees Wade trussed up in a VR rig in the back of a speeding van, with every bump and jostle translating into an in-game body slam from unseen hands.
From AI Artificial Intelligence to Hook, cautionary tales of everlasting childhood have been a Spielberg mainstay. Ready Player One doesn’t mess with the kind of weighty ideas that underpin the first of those two films, but its vision of a world fixated on cultural nursery food has a spiky topicality and an occasionally piercing satirical bite. This is helped no end by Rylance, who makes Halliday a brilliantly compelling tragicomic figure who treats his one-time friend and company co-founder (Simon Pegg) in a way that should ring bells for anyone who has seen The Social Network.
The meta-barrage of references often ties the film in knots. But it’s a serious knuckle-whitener of a ride.