Ready Player One : Classic Spielberg!
Spielberg’s latest gig is a virtual reality game turned blockbuster movie high on nostalgia
Before I begin, a heads up for the people who have read the book. The movie changes a lot of things to simplify the plot and adjust to the non-gamer, non- 80s audience. I felt it was really not a bad move as things worked out well in the end. Adapted from a novel of the same name by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One is a movie set in a 2045 where humans are living a dystopian world raging with overpopulation, depleted environment and extreme corporatization. As quoted by the lead character , humans have stopped looking for solutions to problems and started to look for ways to circumvent around them. As a result, they spend majority of their time in OASIS, a VR game created by the late James Halliday (played by Dunkirk’s Mark Ryland) and his best friend Ogden Morrow (played by Simon Pegg). OASIS is a spectacular land which is only limited by one’s imagination. It sincerely worships the 20th century with numerous pop culture references, especially from the 80s, the time Halliday grew up in. The OASIS is filled with cartoon avatars of gamers, where you can do whatever you want as long as you have enough coin (which apparently is only possible to earn when you blow up other people).
The story begins with the announcement of a treasure hunt through a video Halliday shot just before he died, claiming that he has placed a digital easter egg in the game and the first one to find it will be inherit a trillion dollars and complete control of the OASIS. The only way to find the egg is to crack a series of clues and find three keys which will lead to the egg. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) spends most of his time strapped on his VR headset inside the OASIS as a mythic avatar named Parzival (after Percival). He and his friends including Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and Aech(Lena Waithe) call themselves gunters which basically means egg hunters. The rest of the story follows how Parzival and his gang clan up to find the easter egg battling against Nolan Sorrento(Ben Mendelsohn) and his team of sixers who belong to a rival company IOI looking to take over OASIS.
The movie is filled with lots of pop culture references from the 20th century. Starting with the car from Back to the Future, to King Kong , Harley Quinn, The Joker, Gundam, Child Play’s Chucky and many more including an entire scene from The Shining. The movie changes a lot of things from the book but the things which it picked up were handled better. For example, the movie features the same car De Lorean but in a context that improves it significantly. The mastery of Spielberg here is that he doesn’t have to talk the audiences through the specs of the car. Nor does he spell out the references. He just slaps down the car down in the middle of a high-adrenaline action scene, where it is prominent, distinctive, and memorable. The fans who want the full nostalgia trip can always examine the movie frame-by-frame through it, looking for the flux capacitor on the dashboard, checking the plates, and scanning for extra bonus material. But even to people who’ve never seen the Back to the Future movies and aren’t vibing on the connection, the car doesn’t need explaining. It’s just a sleek piece of visual energy, one breathless element among dozens of others. The action is so tremendous and effortless, that everything is integrated so smoothly without requiring any citation. The movie’s version of The Shining pulled out a few of the iconic moments of the original and brought them into a hilarious action scene in the movie. And I liked how this scene and others gave bigger roles to Aech and Art3mis than they had in the novel.
Coming to the book, I agree that there were so many delightful pieces of the book that were left out; like Wade’s impoverished life and his discovery of the first Dungeons & Dragons puzzle and his struggle with the video game Joust. Oh, and the extra life coin story from the book was definitely ten times cooler. But here is the thing, my theory is that the lawyers probably had a tough time over securing rights to properties used in the film. Besides that, the book author Cline was a co-screenwriter on the film with Zack Penn, and if he is OK with the big changes, then we should be too. After all, it would be really boring to watch somebody play a video game in a movie. That being said, Spielberg did have a big ally in Warner Bros., but they could’t score all of the important licenses like Ultraman.
But the film improves significantly on the book in some ways by prioritizing the story over the players. The pop-culture crowd that is this movie’s ultimate intended audience will have plenty to complain and pick apart in this film. But the story moves briskly enough, and with enough giant-sized, screen-friendly excitement, that it doesn’t feel like it’s aimed solely and specifically at them. This is what makes Spielberg, well, Spielberg. Even though the film cut short a lot of the story, quests, and details of book, the essence was well captured. The disco scene where Parzival tries to imitate John Travolta’s gyrations from Saturday Night Fever was hilarious.
Coming to the falls, there were few in the book, few in the movie and some in both. Cline’s book is a fast-paced adventure but at the same time tries to fit in the nostalgia. The end result creates a weird lump of mix and match. In both the movie and the book, there was no explanation as to why Wade finds specific objects appealing, out of the all options available to him. The book assumes that the readers would find everything as unbearably cool as Wade does, and that just running down an exhaustive list of his favourite things is enough to make him appealing and relatable. The movie also makes no attempt in changing that. The characters were certainly one-dimensional, especially Sorrento. He is portrayed as a hideous corporate clown, a stony-faced idea-thief which feels very plastic. My biggest problem was with the love story of Parzival and Art3mis which was supposed to be one of the central themes of the movie version of the story. It operates on mostly fulfilment and apathetic inevitability leaving no room for a nuanced narration. Some significant emotions like death are also shrugged off within seconds as one scene cuts to other. The screenwriters did try to take the story a little deeper from the book and give the smaller characters some context. Spielberg’s signature style can be seen in full force here, as he tries to builds up a huge symbolic confrontation solely for the feelings of triumph and justice, only for all of it to come down to exactly nothing in the end. And in places, the story jumped forward so quickly that it felt like necessary connective scenes were missing.
Spielberg must have seen an opportunity to make the ultimate CGI spectacle in the book. It did feel like it was intended to surpass the work of Michael Bay, Guillermo del Toro and all those Marvel/DC directors which he certainly accomplishes in a sense. The movie transcends as a CGI spectacle and the same time shows the perils of virtual reality. Spielberg manages to keep the flow very crisp and economical even though the frames were cluttered with so many elements. There’s not much wrong with the movie on its own terms. It’s a film in which Spielberg’s attraction towards the wonder and idealism of youth ends up compromising with the wised-up survivalist toughness. But what is brilliant is that how the film conjures up extraordinary visuals and remarkable sound effects without drifting too far from the (virtual?) reality.
