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Here's the thing about Steven Spielberg: He's good at what he does.
In Ready Player One, the acclaimed director turned a pretty bad book into a mostly entertaining movie. Your enjoyment hinges to some extent on your level of fluency in the geekier edges of pop culture, but its chief success is as a work of popcorn-munching spectacle.
SEE ALSO:Here's what other critics think of 'Ready Player One'Ready Player Oneenvisions a world in which the geeks inherited the Earth, sort of. Overcrowded cities and mass poverty leave the global population hungry for an escape, and that escape comes in the form of the Oasis.
Imagine an online platform that combines all social networks, all video games, and almost all human interaction, really, into a globe-spanning virtual reality space. That's the Oasis. It's the creation of a man named James Halliday (Mark Rylance), a brilliant programmer and inventor who is equal parts Steve Jobs-ian wunderkind and a walking, talking, '80s pop culture-obsessed subreddit.
The story follows a young orphan and Halliday scholar named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan). Wade is one of many who are trying to crack the code to a contest that kicked off with Halliday's death. Whoever finds three keys hidden deep within the Oasis will unlock an Easter egg, giving them control of both Halliday's creation and Gregarious Games, the trillion-dollar company that built it.
Credit: Jaap Buitendijk / Warner BrosWade's journey is fundamentally a geek power fantasy. It's clear from moment one that he'll eventually win this thing. He starts out with nothing, living with his aunt and her abusive boyfriend in a futureworld trailer park, secretly borrowing their VR gear because he can't afford to maintain his own.
But he's also a Halliday adherent who knows the Oasis creator's life story backwards and forwards. The path to each key is inextricably tied to moments from Halliday's past -- all of which are colored by the programmer's '80s pop culture obsession -- and Wade's encyclopedic knowledge of the same is a powerful asset.
The biggest obstacle to Wade's progress is IOI, an "evil" corporation that pours resources and an endless supply of disposable employees into the Easter egg hunt. IOI wants control of the Oasis so it can do away with Halliday's vaguely socialist "everyone is equal" philosophy and replace it with things like ad-driven experiences and tiered membership plans.
The movie never pauses to ponder the broader implications of a privatized global internet. Halliday built the Oasis with the best of intentions, merely wanting to offer people a live-your-best-self alternative to reality where wealth inequality is tied to a person's progress in the overarching game. But his death opens the door for capitalistic endeavors to reshape the Oasis, and IOI fills that role.
Wade's journey is fundamentally a geek power fantasy.
The certainty that Wade will eventually prevail is never in doubt, especially as his group of virtual friends -- BFF Aech (Lena Waithe), fellow Halliday adherent and love interest Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), and sibling egg hunters Daito (Win Morisaki) and Sho (Phillip Zhao) -- link up outside the Oasis and the IRL stakes become clear.
Wade's clanmates, and even Wade himself, never really become more than one-dimensional tools for driving the plot and its cascade of largely visual spot-the-reference moments. But that's fine if you're just here to be entertained. Set piece moments buzz around gorgeous visual effects and exceptional staging.
It's just a shame that none of it holds up under closer examination. The movie falls apart as soon as you sit back and reallythink about what this story is at its foundation: A group of kids fighting a bad corporation to help a good corporation that made a game they all like.
The book on which Ready Player Oneis based wasn't ever about much more than that, but it was also published in the vastly different world of 2011. Before GamerGate. Before Trump. Before data privacy became a hot-button issue.
The movie does address the fact that the book's view of geek culture seems to end in the early '90s -- you'll see nods to more modern works like Overwatchand Minecraftpeppered throughout. But it never spends any time pondering how a story like Ready Player Onefits into our culture as it exists in 2018.
The world that Wade lives in is undeniably dystopian. That brand of fiction usually bathes in subtext, offering a picture of what the world we know might look like if certain things don't change. Ready Player Oneglosses over all of that, however. In spending most of its time focused on the Oasis and Wade's quest to save a video game, it fails to sell the grim future that exists on the outside.
We know the movie's world sucks on an intellectual level because we're told as much. But we never reallysee it, or consider it as anything other than slightly layered set dressing. If anything, the movie is much more concerned with capturing Ready Player Oneauthor Ernest Cline's geeky deluge in a way that works on screen.
Credit: Jaap Buitendijk / Warner BrosIn that regard, Spielberg is clearly having a blast. This story gives him a chance to create homage moments of his own, and the level of care that went into capturing cinematic masterpiece moments from examples like Saturday Night Feverand The Shining-- neither of which take center stage in the book, to be clear -- is plainly evident.
Ready Player Onealso lets Spielberg shine in the way he always has. The movie is filled with jaw-dropping blockbuster moments that are all the more rich because of the way they're drenched in winks and nods to many familiar touchstones of pop culture.
The incessant geekery that gets to be grating in the book feels perfectly natural here, largely because so much of it is visual. If you see it, great. If you don't, you miss out on nothing. There are shreds of dialogue here and there that lean toward the book's grating tone, particularly when Wade and Art3mis engage in a rapid-fire "show me your geek credentials" back-and-forth. But for the most part, Ready Player Onelets the references speak for themselves.
Taken all together, we're left with an entertaining roller coaster ride of a movie. It doesn't have much more to say in the end than "the real prize is the friends we made along the way," and it completely fails to engage with the underlying and culturally relevant subtext. But it's also a fun time at the movies.
Not that any of us should be surprised. Blockbuster spectacle is Steven Spielberg's wheelhouse. For all of the source material's shortcomings, Ready Player Oneis a geeky, visceral pleasure.
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