Steven Spielberg made a name for himself in the 70s and 80s by being the director who could make movies that were not only poignant and long-lasting in the zeitgeist of pop culture, but that were also very fun. He's the guy that brought us Jaws and E.T. and Indiana Jones and Hook and Jurassic Park and that's the just movies he directed. There's hundreds more you love (like Back to the Future) that he produced. Most of the pop culture references we reference from 80s movies have, in some way, to do with Spielberg. Then... he decided he wanted to become a "well-rounded" director and brought us things like Schindler's List and Munich and (ugh) War Horse. In his later years, Spielberg has stopped really continuing his legendary run of films. He's become more of a paint-by-numbers "that guy used to be so great" kind of director. It's not that his movies lately have been bad, but they're just not as ground-breaking as they used to be. It used to be an EVENT when a new Spielberg movie hit the marquee. Did anyone think The Post was an event? So, it's nice to see Spielberg getting back into the fun of movies. And what better movie than one who's every reference harkens back to the time when Spielberg was the king of pop culture?
Let's put this out there immediately-- Ready Player One is, by no means, groundbreaking. It's not that "holy shit Spielberg is back!" movie. But it is very, very entertaining. I wasn't expecting it to be, especially in the first twenty minutes or so. The film begins with some very loose exposition from our narrator Wade-- who is also our main character. The year is 2045 and people LIVE online. Everyone has a VR mask and suit and live in the Oasis. They work in the Oasis. They make money in the Oasis. They game, they dance, they date, they spend their entire lives online only breaking to eat, pee, or sleep. The creator of the game, Holliday (Mark Rylance), now dead, has placed an easter egg somewhere in the system so that the person who finds it (after passing a series of tests) becomes the rightful owner of the Oasis. Of course there's a competing company, the IOI, who want control of Oasis and their evil CEO Sorrento has been training an army of gamers to figure out Holliday's clues and gain control of the one thing that runs the world. Okay-- back to Wade. He's a gamer who lives in "The Stacks", a poverty-stricken trailer park community that's basically just trailers stacked on top of trailers as high as skyscrapers. For unexplained reasons, he's an orphan and lives with his abused aunt (who we get hardly any story around). He's hellbent on finding the easter egg. He works in a team with Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), and three faceless others. The film is them trying to beat the IOI guys from finding the easter egg. Back to the beginning-- this is all given to us from Wade's voiceover. It's so explanatory-- Spielberg uses his words as the entire backstory instead of building up this incredible new world for us. While I wasn't really left with any begging questions, I was really disappointed I didn't get to see more into the world other than the brief "let me catch you up" narration he gives us. Then we get to see Wade's avatar in the Oasis: Perzival. He's an anime looking weirdo who, everyday, drives in the same race (heh heh with a Delorean) to try and get a clue to the egg. And then... it's just kinda like watching someone play video games. Which, if you've ever done that... it's not that entertaining.
But then the movie started to suck me in a little bit. After really disliking watching Wade's avatar, the real world starts to become integrated in the conflict. And I started to care. A little. Once the adventure begins, I was hooked. Spielberg was entertaining me in a way that I hadn't been entertained since I was a kid. There's a lot of cool stuff in the movie and some really impressive CGI and an entire sequence involving the main characters and the hotel from The Shining that was really, really cool. But all of this entertainment was very surface-level. There weren't any complex characters. There weren't any underlying or internal struggles that each person has to overcome. There wasn't even really a ton of heart in the movie. It's just pure "forget everything else" entertainment. When you're not engrossed by the adventure, your eyes are darting all over the screen looking for all the 80s movies and music references scattered about. You're rooting for these characters, even though you're not wholly emotionally invested in them as people. And the games they have to play, the puzzles they have to figure out, and the way they overcome adversity is all very clever. But, that's about it. Don't think about it too hard after because Ready Player One definitely leaves you wanting much, much more-- which is weird because it's 140 minutes long. You'd think they'd given you everything you needed. I didn't read the source material the movie is based on-- so this review is purely from a blind cinematic experience, but in my opinion, I feel like it would've worked better as an HBO mini-series than a one-off movie.
For all the good in the movie, there's the "less good". One of the puzzles they figure out is very, very easy. Yet, we're told experts have been trying 24 hours a day to crack the code for nearly five years. I figured it out before Wade even does. That strained credulity a lot (though I'll give them this-- it was the only one. The others are pretty clever). Spielberg has his characters explain things-- a lot. It's explained enough that a decent audience should understand what's happening, but it feels like Spielberg doesn't his trust his audiences enough anymore and it's explained further and further as if to a child-- yet, the people doing the explaining already know what's going on, so there's no reason to explain it to each other. It bothered me. Several times. The "love story" part of the movie is actually kinda creepy. Wade is smitten with Art3mis after meeting her once. He tells her during the second meeting. She reveals that she's not the same person in real life that she is in the game. They meet. He's still in love with her.... so she now loves him? There's not much chemistry between them and the way he keeps PUSHING with the whole "I found love you guys" starts to become a little... I don't know... yeah, just creepy. And because we don't get a whole lot of underlying emotional groundwork laid for any of these characters (other than Wade doesn't have parents for some reason), we can't really understand their reasons for doing anything. Finally, there's the pop culture references. Some of them are really, really fun (especially the Zemeckis cube-- I loved that). But, in the battle at the end, when all the characters from all the 80s references collide into one big battle-- Spielberg is all over the place too quickly. You can hardly rest your eyes on any single character. The fun of the film is seeing all the different characters you watched during your childhood, but the camera work is so frenetic all you're able to make out is a hodgepodge of animated characters battling an army of assholes. If you're going to make a movie devoted to 80s pop culture, let us bask in it a little bit and point to the screen and go "hey! That's Terminator!" or "Hey! That's Rambo!" But it was too difficult to see much of anything other than the fight.
Ready Player One is very enjoyable and extremely entertaining, but I do believe Spielberg in the 80s was more qualified to direct this film than Spielberg today. There's a fair amount of action and humor in the movie and if you turn your brain off, then it's a solid way to spend nearly three hours in a theater. But it will definitely leave you wanting more. The good news is-- that "more" you want can be satiated by just watching all the movies referenced in the film. I can get what I want out of Ready Player One by going home and watching Back to the Future. I can get my fun and excitement with character depth by popping in Jaws or Jurassic Park. It's not good enough to declare "Spielberg's back!", but it does give make us hope that Spielberg can churn out a few more sci-fi adventures before the end of his career. And if you're a video game/80s nerd... this movie will be like porn to you. But you already knew that.
Oh-- and Simon Pegg with an American accent-- totally diminishes what we love about Simon Pegg. We'll let it slide this time, Pegg. Don't do it again.
B-
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