Time and time again, Steven Spielberg has left a defining mark on generations of moviegoers.
In 1975, he created the summer blockbuster with Jaws. In the 1980’s, he gave us both Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. He made us believe in dinosaurs again with 1993’s Jurassic Park. And now, with Ready Player One, he’s done it again.
No other living director has so often, and so perfectly, captured the exuberance of youth, the importance of imagination and the resilience of hope quite like Spielberg.
That’s not to say every film he’s directed has been perfect. Far from. And even Ready Player One is not without its flaws, or its unchecked flights of fancy that could be trimmed to produce a more muscular and lean movie.
Adapted from the novel by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One is the story of a game-changing technological advancement, the OASIS, a limitless virtual world where humanity seeks refuge from the wreckage of reality in the year 2045, a time after the "corn syrup drought," when cities are comprised of vertical "stacks" of recreational vehicles, pizzas are delivered by flying drones and people exist almost entirely online.
A handful of disparate youth — including Wade (Tye Sheridan), Samantha (Olivia Cooke) and Helen (Lena Waithe) — band together as High Five to fight the evil conglomerate IOI (Innovative Online Industries), headed by the equally evil Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), to unlock three puzzles that will gift the victor ownership of the OASIS. IOI wants to monetize the OASIS, which should sound eerily familiar if you’ve followed the recent Federal Communications Commission decision to end net neutrality, thereby creating a playground for the wealthy and privileged whose cryptocurrency subjugates innovation.
The OASIS was created by man-child genius Halliday (Mark Rylance) and his more pragmatic partner Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg). For five years, following Halliday’s death, scores of "gunters," digital treasure hunters, have been trying unsuccessfully to locate three clues deposited by Halliday deep within the OASIS framework.
Much like James Cameron’s ground-breaking Avatar, the majority of Ready Player One involves watching digitized versions of Spielberg’s cast. Each character has their own OASIS handle and avatar, which often change. Wade and Samantha are Parzival and Art3mis, respectively, whose avatars reflect human teenagers. Helen is Aech, a hulking orc, whose soft, expressive eyes welcome in viewers. The remaining members of High Five are Sho and Daito, who resemble Japanese shogun warriors. Sorrento’s avatar looks like a cross between Clark Kent and Li'l Abner on steroids (if he were a villain), and his main henchman is I-R0k (voiced by T.J. Miller), a deadly and brutish assassin, who gets some of the best and funniest lines of the film.
While it takes some adjustment to watch — and root for — what are essentially animated characters, don’t fret. You do come to care about both the human players and their digital sleeves. I found I preferred Parzival to Sheridan’s live-action performance.
And that’s where Ready Player One both succeeds, and stumbles.
Spielberg has crafted a big, wet kiss of a love letter to eighties pop culture, and while advance interviews have leaned heavy on insisting that Ready Player One is devoid of self-reference to the director’s canon of work, there are glimpses, including a Raiders of the Lost Ark movie poster in one scene and a towering T-Rex that terrorizes the Oasis during Wade/Parzival’s quest to obtain the first key.
This is 100-percent a movie meant to be watched on the largest screen possible, but I’m already salivating for the chance to own a 4K Ultra-HD disc so I can freeze-frame specific scenes to pick out all the references. From catching a glimpse of Boba Fett lounging at a nightclub to watching Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Chucky and The Iron Giant doing battle on Planet Doom, Ready Player One overwhelms with a phantasmagorical slew of holy shit moments.
Parzival drives Doc Brown’s DeLorean from Back to the Future. Art3mis roars along on the crotch rocket from Akira. A key weapon is called the Zemeckis Cube. You get the idea.
So much nostalgia packed into two-plus hours might sound exhausting if not for the fact that so many of Spielberg’s instincts work flawlessly. If for nothing else, go see this movie in a theater to fully appreciate the near 20-minute-plus sequence set entirely inside the film version of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. It’s possibly one of the most inspired things I’ve seen on a big screen in the past 10 years.
Unlike other uber-confident directors (I’m looking right at you, Michael Bay), Spielberg knows how to stage an action sequence to allow his audience not to get lost in sensory overload. That car chase/race that’s featured prominently in the film’s marketing? That’s just the tip of the brilliance that’s in store.
Another master-stroke involves the way characters die in the OASIS. They don’t bleed, they simply burst into hundreds of tinkling tokens, which can be scooped up by other players.
But sometimes too much is simply too much, and Ready Player One does suffer at times, particularly during an extended trip to the virtual nightclub at the heart of the OASIS. Spielberg commits a rare error in showing digital avatars literally dancing on air, which he later recreates in almost the same fashion at The Overlook Hotel — only it doesn’t pack the same punch because now it’s familiar.
When the film opens, viewers are given a verbal history lesson to catch them up on all that’s happened to reach the year 2045. I wanted something more visual to bridge that gap. Wade’s parents are both dead, and he lives with his aunt and her good-for-nothing redneck boyfriend. We know times are tough because the aunt threatens to kick Wade out forever if he dares touch her virtual gear, but we don’t feel the overwhelming crush that such surroundings must have on a teenage boy’s psyche.
Which brings me to my biggest criticism — the casting decision that landed Sheridan the lead role.
If you took every '80s movie heartthrob icon and blended them together, you would get a close approximation of Tye Sheridan, who is not a bad actor (see Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse).
Here, he’s part Marty McFly, part Daniel LaRusso and part Mikey Walsh. He has that perfect Spielbergian look of abject wonder at just the right times, but he’s a too-safe choice, an almost-bland narrator who doesn’t distract from all the imagery around him. I found myself wishing and secretly hoping to see just a smidge of John Bender creep in to give him some edgy unpredictability.
Such quibbles shouldn’t keep you from lining up to see Ready Player One. This is the best that Spielberg, now 71, has been in years, especially working within this arena, and it’s exciting to see and feel his enthusiasm flow from the screen like a tether, holding you transfixed.
Make no mistake, this is the movie that younger viewers will remember with the same love and joy that older viewers recall feeling when they first discovered each new release from Amblin Entertainment during its early heyday.
In short, prepare to be awed once again.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 5, 2018.