‘Ready Player One’ is a minor improvement on the worst book ever written
“We have determined that we’ll be able to fill 80% of the user’s display with advertising before inducing seizures” proudly proclaims Nolan Sorrento, the corporate suit and principle antagonist played by Ben Mendelsohn, to his company board in one of Ready Player One’s rare catch-your-breath CGI-free sequences. It’s an attitude shared, I’m sure, by the people who made this film.
The opening 2 minutes exposes us (to the gentle tune of Van Halen’s “Jump”) to a single-take blast through key locations of the OASIS, the virtual simulation that acts as McGuffin, Holy Grail and also location for this story. We see a giant Minecraft ad. We see a poorly-rendered Batman rock-climbing with a user’s avatar. We see pixels going bip and boop and flying around an IMAX screen. And we think to ourselves “Mr. Spielberg, who hurt you?”. Not 2 months ago was I watching The Post, the best film the director has released in over a decade. And yet, here we are: Ready Player One, a violation of everything cinema should stand for; a film that sets a dangerous precedent for the blurred lines between passive and active forms of visual entertainment. Perhaps it’s fitting that Spielberg, who killed the New Wave with his stupid shark movie 40-odd years ago, should be the one to usher in another dark age of hyper-populist, sub-creative cinema.
Back to the project at hand. Oh yes: Ready Player One. In this film, Mark Rylance plays James Halliday, a Steve Jobs/Willy Wonka hybrid who never kissed a girl so decided to ruin humanity by inventing the OASIS. He posthumously launches a contest to handover control of the platform to whoever solves a series of challenges based around knowing as much about his life and his interests as possible. Halliday, played so shoddily by Rylance that the man’s Oscar should be revoked, comes across as a horrid narcissist barely worth some smalltalk, yet the entire world population seem to spend their days researching precisely what movies and books and games he enjoyed during his lifetime. It is sad.
Our hero, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) uses his encyclopaedic knowledge of this scruffy old engineer to impress a pretty girl, and from that moment it’s impossible to take him seriously as a heroic character. Believe me, Wade Watts, if girls were impressed by smart-ass pop culture facts, we’d all know by now. Ready Player One The Book, which I took a sadistic pleasure in reading cover-to-cover — it’s easily the worst book I’ve ever read — canonises Wade as an idol for weird gamer nerds the world over. Having no social skills because you’re in your house playing games all day isn’t a good thing. The film dilutes this significantly: Sheridan’s Wade is actually pretty charismatic once he’s released into the real world, striking up a flirtation with Olivia Cooke’s Samantha (after some unlikely virtual groping in a nightclub), and the script makes an effort to highlight that “Nothin’ Beats Being Outside!”. Removed in adaptation is a portion of the book wherein Wade locks himself in a hotel room, shaves all his body hair and buys a sex robot: apparently that wouldn’t quite work in this PG-13 film. Yet somehow an extended sequence in a simulation of Kubrick’s The Shining (which was no-way-okayed by his estate) is? And a cameo by Chucky that provokes perhaps the most puerile F-bomb in film history? The kids will love that stuff.
Even when the entire frame is aggressively oversaturated with video game aesthetic, there is one shining beacon of hope that makes this film just about watchable: Olivia Cooke. Oh, Olivia Cooke, I’ll never doubt you again. Her warmth and genuineness do wonders to work against the cold cynicism of Spielberg’s grotesque visuals and Tye Sheridan’s spectacularly bland performance. In 2018, you can just about justify a straight white male lead in your movie if he’s an interesting, complex figure, but Wade is dull as a brick. The lead of Ready Player One could easily have been either Samantha or one of the Japanese kids who help them on their quest, far more exciting performers than Tye…. Sheridan…
Ben Mendelsohn is a relatively fun presence, but it’s hard to compliment him for the non-acting he contributes: he is the Australian Christoph Waltz, and there are only so many blockbusters left for him to villain in. Simon Pegg shows up as the book’s most interesting character, here reduced to 2 scenes. T.J. Miller’s role has clearly been reduced in light of assault accusations; we never even see his face. Lena Waithe from Master of None makes an impression in the final act, but her character is compromised by the refusal to overtly acknowledge her sexuality, which even the book dealt with up front.
Ultimately, Ready Player One is simply the opposite of Spielberg’s last movie: he made The Post in a fit of urgency, to highlight the worrying parallels between the Nixon and Trump White Houses, and the importance of free press to a free America. This movie merely promotes technical innovation for the purposes of vegetation at a time when young people should be engaging in real-world activism. The heroes’ decision to shut off the OASIS “on Tuesdays and Thursdays” is certainly an improvement on the book’s moral messaging, but it’ll do little to dissuade the hysterical pre-teen viewer from going home and plugging into a VR console for a full week. Ready Player One has so much going on that it doesn’t really feel like a war crime when you’re watching it. But it’s profoundly moronic, and a pretty irredeemable creation by the so-called “inventor of blockbuster cinema”. We shan’t allow this to be a reinvention. Oi Steve! Go reinvent something else.
