Steven Spielberg’s visionary Ready Player One straddles old and new—post-modern and nostalgic—in a conceptual feat of imagination equal parts endearing and fatiguing. Guess which one wins?
Despite its loving homage to 80s pop culture, the master has crafted a check-box movie with only a modicum of substance. Loaded with retro pop music and movie-movie references, it’s a largely forgettable paen to gamer culture with some not-so-subtle assertions about cultural decline where people live, mostly, inside a virtual world. Don’t we already?
Not surprisingly, future America has degenerated into slums (do movies ever imagine a gleaming future or always a variation on garbage dystopias?) where a crestfallen 2045 Cleveland, now the fastest growing U.S. city, is home to teen Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), who spends all waking hours inside a virtual reality universe named the Oasis. It’s certainly a better place to be than reality, which here looks like a vertically stacked industrial junkyard.
Inside the Oasis players assume identities, forbidden to reveal their actual real-world names, and the digital world itself is one of pixelated people, where battles play out, victories are tallied and everyone lives as alter-ego avatars.
Yet the Oasis isn’t merely a place to while away the dreariness of real life, however, having been crafted by a genius inventor named Halliday (Mark Rylance) and containing a series of challenges and levels, and a hidden Easter egg leading to the wealth of late visionary’s empire and ultimately control of the game.
Inside the Oasis, Wade becomes Parzival, and on his quest he falls for his adventurous match, Art3mis, who in real life is Samantha (a sweet Olivia Cooke). He longs for a human connection with her, so much so that he reveals his true identity while inside the Oasis, triggering hot pursuit from an off-the-shelf corporate baddie named Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) also in pursuit of the egg and prize.
A motley group of friends and players from “inside” ultimately reveal themselves in the outside world, an appealing Lena Waithe leading the charge as a most unlikely real-life version of her fearless digital counterpart, Spielberg setting up his classic trope of ingenious, good kids banding against clueless, bureaucratic adults.
Despite clever allusions to everything from Hall and Oates to Chucky to a truly inspired nod to The Shining, Ready Player One’s techno-bubble ingenuity, where anything seems possible, is a classic example of too much but not enough, a show-stopping marvel of CGI that imagines a world that, after a time, left me cold.
Sheridan, the poised and natural young star of Tree of Life, Mud and Joe, is winning throughout, effortlessly projecting a good heartedness in a throwaway role. And while the film makes obvious nods to The Matrix and its illusory world, it never suggests that living in a virtual fantasy like the Oasis—enslaving ourselves, if you will—is anything but a good time.
Consequently, the movie has little to say.
2 1/2 stars.
