Review – Ready Player One

Growing up, there was always a video gaming system in my house.  It started with SEGA Genesis, then went to Nintendo 64, and then PlayStation 2, and then finally, PlayStation 3.  My older brother and I would play a lot, especially in the early years on SEGA and N64.  But towards the PlayStation days, I didn’t play nearly as much.  One, being the competitive man that I am, my brother was generally better than me in almost every game and therefore, I hated losing to him every time.  Two, I was never really one for first person games, like Call of Duty, and since those games were becoming more and more popular, my interest in the gaming thing dwindled.

My brother continued to play them, however.  Whether is was Call of Duty or even MLB the Show, my brother would play these games regularly.  He would play them in our basement, where I would usually be on my computer working on school papers or just messing around on the internet.  Having him play in the background was always cool and I sometimes watched him from time to time.  He was generally good at the games he played, and watching my brother play out the game’s story was always cool, especially with him being so invested in what was happening and the graphics of games continuously getting better and more realistic.  But, whenever he died in the game or lost, a furious rage came over him with a number of unique and vulgar expletives coming out of his mouth.  All that he worked for at that moment was gone and he had to do it again.  For me, on the other hand, I didn’t care because I wasn’t invested in any part of the story or any of the characters.

Watching Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One gave me that exact same feeling.  This is a cool and fun movie to watch with dazzling visuals and imagination that made it feel like we were in a video game.  But due to the poor world building and lack of actual character development, it was hard to care about anything else besides the fun and visuals, leaving an emotional emptiness that usually doesn’t happen in a Spielberg movie.

Ready Player One takes place in 2045 in the fastest growing city on Earth; Columbus, Ohio.  Columbus is an over-crowded wasteland, where people live in shipping containers stacked on top of one another.  People here are miserable, which is why, instead of hoping and trying to make a better life, everyone just goes into the OASIS, an immersive virtual universe that is only limited by one’s own imagination.  You can be a video game character, drive your favorite car from your favorite movie, whatever you want, as long as you have the coins (currency you get by defeating other gamers in the OASIS) to do it.

The OASIS was created by the socially awkward genius Jame Halliday (Mark Rylance), who has passed away, but not without leaving one major mystery left unsolved; an Easter Egg that will give whomever finds it full ownership of the OASIS and an immense fortune.  This causes are stir amongst the people in Columbus – and I assume everyone else in the world who uses the OASIS – as everyone is trying to find this Easter Egg.  When Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a.k.a. Parzival, a nobody in the OASIS world, conquers the first challenge, he and his group of friends set on to a journey of discovery and danger to save the OASIS.

Spielberg has had an interesting decade.  Ready Player One is his seventh of the decade.  Four of the were perennial Oscar favorites (War Horse, Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, and The Post, even though War Horse is awful) and then we got The Adventures of Tin Tin and The BFG which felt like Spielberg-lite.  Ready Player One is part of that later group.  There are flashes of typical Spielberg, especially inside the OASIS, but where the movie faults is usually what Spielberg is great at doing; emotion.

What makes Spielberg so great as a director is how he understands his characters and how he manipulates emotion in all of his movies.  He builds his characters and he builds their worlds so we understand everything about them and begin to feel for them.  But that isn’t the case in Ready Player One.  Spielberg skates over all the emotional pieces in order to focus on the vast OASIS.  Majority of the movie is spent in the OASIS and we only get about a quarter of the film in the actual real world.  We know barely anything about Wade and his family, only that his parents are dead and lives with his aunt and her rotating boyfriends, or anything else about his life.  There really isn’t an arc for Wade, but more-so for Wade’s OASIS alter-ego, Parzival, as he tries to go from zero to hero.  But as Wade is our real world hero, he doesn’t learn anything or try to improve anything in his life.  And when tragedy strikes in Columbus, there was never a moment of sadness, it was just a brief pause until we got back into the OASIS.

But inside the OASIS is an absolute marvel and Spielberg is the perfect director for what this world is.  The OASIS is a world that heavily references 80’s and 90’s pop culture, a culture that Spielberg was a key part in making.  There are dozens of references to movie characters, musicians, and video games that you can’t help but love.  You’ll find yourself yelling at the screen whenever you see someone you recognize.  I also loved that they made certain characters bigger players, like the Iron Giant, or Chucky from Child’s Play, and my favorite part of the movie, the Overlook Hotel from The Shining.  The Overlook Hotel scene is incredible and really highlights the creativity and of the source material.  It’s also Spielberg pretending he is Kubrick again, which you can see he enjoys a lot.

The action is explosive, most of the humor lands, and the final battle is a feast for the eyes.  Ready Player One is a lot of fun and if that’s all you’re look for, then this is the perfect movie for you.  But if you’re like me and are hoping for more an old school Spielberg film, you’ll be slightly disappointed.  He brings the visuals and technical imagination, but he doesn’t bring the emotion, which is something I always look for from Spielberg.

Did you see Ready Player One?  What did you think?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook by searching Kevflix.