Movie Reaction: Ready Player One

Formula: Tron / (The LEGO Movie * Wreck-It Ralph)

I almost never read books before movies. There's a lot of reason for this. Many aren't flattering. I've never been a disciplined enough person for the engagement required for a book. I'm a slow reader. That certainly doesn't help. I'm ashamed of how little I do read, and it's a constant self-improvement goal of mine. There is some reason for it though. I'm not a man of varied interests. I'm more for obsessions. My obsessions are TV and movies. And even those battle for my time in a way that I consider dropping one to better focus on the other. I listen to music some, but I gave up on ever being knowledgeable about that. To an extent, I've accepted that I'll never be someone with a large library of books either. I'd honestly rather be well watched than well read. I get more out of how all the elements of a movie or show come together. I can understand how one person can write a great book. However, the idea of dozens or hundreds of people somehow making a great movie or show is magic to me. And I hate depriving myself of the thrill of that. The few times I've read a book before seeing a movie, I've come out of the movie disappointed. The discussion becomes more about the adaptation than the filmmaking. I know some people love that and more power to them. I actually prefer the opposite, reading afterwards. I've always liked research more than interpretation.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that I haven't read Ready Player One. And I'm really happy that I didn't.

Ready Player One is based on the novel by Ernest Cline, who assisted with the screenplay as well. It takes place in the year 2046. The world is falling apart as people retreat to an all-purpose virtual world called the Oasis. There, people create avatars, make and lose money, and live lives they can't in the real world. A few years before the book begins, the creator of the Oasis, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), before he dies, leaves his incredible fortune, including control of the Oasis, hidden deep inside the Oasis as an Easter egg. Halliday buried this Easter egg so deep that only the most skilled and determined players are still actively searching for it. By the time the film begins, there are mainly two camps on the hunt: Lone wolf Gunters (Egg hunters), like our protagonist Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), known as Parzival in the Oasis, who want to win for personal riches/glory or to keep the freedom of the Oasis in tact, and employees at IOI, your typical evil super corporation, who want control of the Oasis so they can milk it for maximum profit. IOI doesn't play nice though. In addition to using their almost unlimited resources toward beating the challenges that Halliday has left to find the Easter egg, IOI also goes after people in the real world in severe and fatal ways. After Wade becomes the first person to ever complete Halliday's first of three challenges, he gets put on IOI's radar, and finds himself at the center of the battle for the Oasis.

This isn't a simple premise. I only covered the basics in that last paragraph. I imagine the most difficult part of this adaptation was finding a way to explain this world without turning it into a series of exposition dumps. Mostly, Stephen Spielberg and company do this very successfully. A lot of effort is put into visualizing everything as it's explained. The film doesn't get bogged down in the details more than it has too. It tells us just enough to get going and fills in the blanks as needed. This is Spielberg at his most playful. Like Jurassic Park, Minority Report, or Raiders of the Lost Ark he introduces this new world without it feeling like homework and takes advantage of all the fun that can be had there.

This is a pop culture obsessed movie. 80s pop culture in particular. Spielberg is an interesting choice for the movie. After all, 80s pop culture owes more to Spielberg than anyone else. At the same time, this isn't really his pop culture. I'm sure he knows of all the things being referenced in the movie, but I don't think these are the things in his DNA the way they would be for someone born in the 70s. It's the different between knowing something is important on your own and knowing because someone told you. It doesn't make a huge difference, but it can be felt in places. For example, I suspect that Spielberg is an Iron Giant fan more than a Gundam fan. There's also the fact that they had to work around some intellectual property rights. We've been spoiled by the anarchy of The LEGO Movie and its ability to pull from almost anything. I don't know what the novel does and doesn't reference, but it's strange to watch something this much about nerd pop culture of the 80s without any Star Wars (owned by Disney). Little omissions like that can be felt if you are looking. Overall though, there's still a dizzying number of references from Atari to A ha to The Shining and beyond. Kline has built a canny explanation for the specific pop culture references in the story. The reason why everyone is obsessed with 60 year old pop culture is because the Oasis is built in Halliday's image both intentionally and accident. Obviously, Halliday's initial design ideas come from that period, so they are built into the foundation of the Oasis. His death perpetuates it though. To be able to find Halliday's Easter egg, people have to understand him better. As a result, most people have basic if not scholarly knowledge of his era and interests.

I was impressed by the way they cast the movie. They cast for fit, not star wattage. Tye Sheridan has an impressive filmography for a 21 year old, but I'm not sure he'll be leading a lot of action movies. His greatest strength in this is that he's able to be pretty anonymous. Olivia Cooke plays Art3mis, one of Wade's main allies. Between Me & Earl & The Dying Girl, Bates Motel, and Thoroughbreds, I'm all in with Olivia Cooke. She's great at using sarcasm without sacrificing sincerity. She's introduced problematically at first, somewhat by design, but gets a fleshed out character by the end. At first, I thought Mark Rylance was a weird choice for Halliday. Rylance is so steely and determined in Dunkirk. Spielberg uses him differently though. In Bridge of Spies he plays his character aloof, like he's only half-paying attention at any moment. In TheBFG, he's very gentle. That fits Halliday, who Rylance plays as a thoughtful and spaced-out creator. It made me laugh at first, but by the end, it was very sweet. Ben Mendelsohn plays the evil CEO of IOI. It's a natural role for him, easily a cousin of his character in Rogue One. Sometimes, obvious casting is the right casting. He's a businessman who got into IT without knowing about computers and doesn't respect the culture of the business he works in. A couple other familiar faces (if not familiar names) show up too, like Simon Pegg and Lena Waithe, and they happily lean into their characters.

Look, I had a blast watching this movie. Spielberg's execution of this world is genuinely impressive. Going into the movie, I was worried about the idea of the Oasis, because it's so vast and chaotic. It needed a master like Speilberg who wouldn't be intimidated by the size of the playground. He is fully engaged and has a lot fun with it. The story in the screenplay is admittedly a little lacking. Or rather, there's too much. The film tries to stick to the bare bones of the story (the quest to find the Halliday's Easter egg) as much as it can. It's less successful when it expands beyond that. There's a love story between Parzival and Art3mis  that I didn't buy at all. At one point, we meet all of Wade's Oasis friends in person, and I realized that half of them meant nothing to me. There just wasn't enough time to get to know every character beyond the broad strokes. The same goes with parts of Halliday's backstory. There's just too much for the movie to handle. I'm not sure that there would've been enough to justify breaking it into two movies, but you could definitely feel the struggle to fit it all into one.

Much like the movie, I'm having trouble fitting all my thoughts into this post. I had such a good time watching this. The world is well realized. More importantly, it is nostalgia done right. A lot of shows and movies these days play on nostalgia lazily. It's a matter of using a known brand to get you to buy into something not as good. Ready Player One is more about the affection itself. It's pop culture crazy because of a love of pop culture, not because it gets a bigger audience. Even if you don't care about pop culture, it's a well-paced adventure movie with relatable protagonists and easily detestable villains, made by a director who's made a career out of making familiar structures feel like magic.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend