Review: Ready Player One
Before we get into this review I want full disclosure, I never read the Ready Player One book before seeing the movie. I had it on my radar but part of what held me back was a lot of the criticism being placed in its overreliance on 80s nostalgia, and having the unfortunate luck of being born in the 90s, I had no nostalgia for the 80s. I still decided to see the film because I’ve been waiting to see Spielberg recapture that same Blockbuster fun that made films like Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park so memorable, and while there are some issues regarding the writing, that Speilbergian touch does enough to occasionally take the film into the realms of Totally Fucking Awesome.
Set in the year 2045 where most of Earth’s resources have been used up and life has been reduced to living in slums, in order to escape the desolation nearly every human on the planet resides in The Oasis, a Virtual Reality created by James Halliday as a way to be anyone, do anything and live an entire online life where people can work, play, learn and romance without ever leaving their homes. Following Halliday’s death in 2039 and with no living relatives to pass his fortune to, Halliday set a quest in motion for players to find three keys that have been hidden throughout the Oasis, whoever can find all three keys and unlock the secret Easter Egg will take full ownership of The Oasis and its half a trillion dollar value. However in the years since his death all that anyone has been able to find is an impossible race to get the first key and now only a group of determined Egg Hungers (or Gunters) are still fighting for the keys.
One such Gunter is Wade Watts, an 18 year old living in Ohio with his Aunt after the death of his parents, his Avatar Parzival works alongside Aech – an orc mechanic - to try and win the first keys. After their latest race once again results in failure, Wade has an encounter with a well-known player called Artemis who is trying to win the keys to keep Oasis out of the hands of I.O.I., the second biggest company in the world and its CEO Nolan Sorrento who wants to use Oasis as another revue stream. When Wade manages to work out the secret to winning the first race, he and Aech team up with Artemis, as well as two other big name players Daito and Sho, to win all three keys before I.O.I. can ruin the memory of Halliday’s creation.
As far as plots go this is a fairly simple ‘Get items A, B and C to unlock D’ but given its videogame origins it’s fitting that that would make up the bones of the plot. The meat actually takes a nice reflective look on one man’s life and the mistakes he made and how he’s trying to teach others not to follow his same path. It’s not totally unique with the power of friendship, love and respect all playing some part or another, but it does give the film a little more to it than just a fetch-quest.
Sadly where the film falls short is in its characters, while the core group of heroes are a likeable bunch they’re very uninspired and don’t seem to have much to them. Daito and San are the weakest with neither of them getting any characterisation until the end – though San does have a nice twist to his real-life counterpart. Aech fairs a little better since he’s with Wade from the beginning, acting as the voice of reason for the young hero, often going unnoticed but happy to stick by his friend even when he’s blinded by cyber-love, plus his real-life reveal is even better than San’s.
Artemis fares best out of everyone – though I will admit that is partly due to me finding Olivia Cooke utterly adorable – with her being the focal point of the revolution against I.O.I. she takes on a much more mature role than Wade, having to fight, hide and survive against a much more powerful opponent. She’s not without her flaws, her personal vendetta against I.O.I. as well as a distinguishing birth-mark on her face has closed her off to a lot of the outside world but she’s got a cause to fight for and her role in the third act takes her into the lion’s den, I’m not 100% convinced of the romance between her and Wade but as her own character she stood out a lot more than her counterparts.
Tye Sheridan – who’s come a long way in a few years, happy for the guy – plays Wade, in fairness Wade isn’t a terrible character but we’ve seen this hero-type before, a quiet dreamer with a great purpose in life, the only thing keeping him from being another Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter is that his family weren’t important, he’s basically nobody until he starts winning and he only wins because he did his research. I won’t take away from Sheridan’s performance because he managed to keep Wade likeable and change his motives – winning for greed then winning for love and then winning for something greater than himself – without taking away from his character, but his character isn’t anything we haven’t seen before.
I think one of the issues I had with the film was that because the majority of the film was spent with Wade’s Avatar Parzival rather than Wade himself there was a slight disconnect between the characters, not helped by Parzival being a completely CGI creation, designed to look nothing like Wade. I can’t complain too much because that was a deliberate choice to allow the people of Oasis to look and be anything they wanted to be, a way to hide their real lives and full credit to the animation team, the facial animations manage to stay out of the uncanny valley, probably because they are exaggerated enough to avoid being too human and looking odd as a result.
There are a few smaller roles throughout, TJ Miller lent his comedy nerd voice to I-Rok, an intimidating mercenary type. Simon Pegg had a small role as Halliday’s business partner and best friend Ogden Morrow who played more into the story than you might initially think while Mark Rylance turn as Halliday himself captured the loneliness of a man who realised he missed his chance at life when it was too late to change (though imagining a veteran actor like Rylance speaking videogame lingo and pretending to understand it all was pretty funny to think about). Sadly the worst of the film was Ben Mendelsohn as Nolan Sorrento, I’ve liked Mendelsohn in the past and I think he’s done some great villain roles but Nolan is such a cliché that he feels absolutely wasted in the role. All Nolan wants is money and power and aside from a dislike of the virtual game he needs to play to get it there’s nothing else to his character to make him a worthy antagonist.
Spielberg in the director’s chair might not be the draw it once was with a lot of biopics and serious dramas in the last few years but if you have a movie about the 80s there’s really no-one else that could’ve taken the part, on a technically level Spielberg improves upon what he used on Tintin to create the Oasis with the look and feel of the whole place being something to behold, it’s definitely not immersive with the amount of references and characters all reminding you of that it’s an illusion and that’s not even talking about the animated aesthetic, but as a place for escapism you can see why it works so well, any place that allows you to personally fight Jason Voorhees in your ninja battle armour has to be doing something right.
Which brings me to the main selling point of this film, it’s ability to be Totally Fucking Awesome, not a badge you can throw out randomly but this flick definitely deserves it for a variety of reasons. The initial race that kicks everything off is wild and varied and exciting but it’s a little too chaotic, as much fun as it is to watch the Delorean, the Akira bike and a spring-loaded monster truck fight against a T-Rex, wrecking balls and King Fucking Kong, the amount of carnage onscreen was overwhelming, I wasn’t immediately sold on the film if that was going to be its go-to action type, litter the screen until you can’t really tell what was happening. Thankfully they quickly fixed that with the second act which was based heavily around Kubrick’s The Shining in a way that was hilarious to those who have seen the movie, and therapeutic for those traumatised by it, easily standing out already as one of the best sequences of the year.
The final battle brings everything together for one glorious brawl with the Oasis inhabitants fighting off against I.O.I’s army with a barrage of characters, the 80s staples are there with Ninja Turtles, Battletoads, Gundam and even Chucky who results in the films’ perfect use of it’s sole F-Bomb drop but there are more modern characters for a wider audience including Overwatch, Halo and The Iron Giant who plays a big part, and all of them charge into battle with Twisted Fucking Sister blaring on the soundtrack. It’s big and it’s ridiculous and it’s so much goddamn fun that you can just sit back and let the spectacle wash over you.
How people feel about Ready Player One is going to depend on what they want out of it; if you want a deep examination of 80s culture and the dangers of only looking to the past filled with great twists and 3-dimensional characters then you’re going to be disappointed, while the risks brought on by an overreliance of escapism are touched upon, the plot is overtly simple and the characters fairly unmemorable. On the other hand, if you want to watch Mecha-Godzilla take on The Iron Giant on the middle of a snow-covered battlefield outside a literal Doom-Fortress then your inner-child will be jumping for joy through the whole damn thing. While I would’ve liked a little more meat to the whole thing, I can’t deny that I had fun with it.
7/10