For anyone who came of age in the 1980s and surrounding decades, the film "Ready Player One" should stir up sweet memories of video games and pop culture references that delighted them in innocent, youthful days.
But against this backdrop of Atari, Asteroids, the "Say Anything" boombox, Iron Giant, King Kong, a DeLorean time-traveling car and "Star Trek," all cleverly populating this pleasant popcorn paradise of a movie, there's something more sinister at play.
Based on Ernest Cline's popular 2011 novel of the same name, the new Steven Spielberg-helmed movie just opened with a strong first-weekend box office. The sci-fi flick explores a 2045 dystopian world where the environment outside is ghastly, people living in squalid conditions. Stacks of trailers serve as neighborhoods.
To counteract this depressing reality, a dreamy, spellbinding virtual reality provides a dazzling universe where people can ostensibly live their lives. It's where everyone, it seems, is playing inside the OASIS, a game world where one can adopt any look, any personality, and set out for adventures that offer soothing succor in a grim world.
Created by James Halliday (the great Mark Rylance), the OASIS contains one grand gaming adventure he reveals only after his death, where the winner will own the OASIS and do with it as he or she sees fit. Winning the game, called Anorak's Quest, would bring so much power that the malevolent Innovative Online Industries will stop at nothing to achieve victory.
Our hero, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), adopts the avatar persona of Parzival in OASIS and seeks with other Gunters, as these gamers are called, to win it all and save the world from IOI and its legion of game-playing Sixers. Stuck in a terrible home life, he's a sharp kid who knows his Halliday history.
While Watts is a savvy kid, as a hero he's sort of weak, an "every nerd" (male nerd, that is) that's not developed as firmly as he is in the novel. This is the movie's central dilemma: weak characterization. It's particularly true with Wade's friends (Aech, Daito and Sho) and his blooming romantic interest, Art3mis (Olivia Cooke).
In the Cline novel, Watts gets the girl, but it's only after a long series of victories. This fantasy fulfillment is problematic, teen-dream stuff, but at least in the novel it feels somewhat earned. In the film, it happens far too quickly after Art3mis, quite rightly and logically, dismisses his romantic protestations, only to save his hide and relent.
Other characters, too, suffer the same fate of flat characterization with little growth in "Ready Player One," including Wade's best friend in the OASIS, Aech, who turns out to be radically different in the real world. Instead of mining that difference to say something deeper about this dystopian world, Aech is just a pawn to prop Wade's ultimate glory. Daito and Sho are much the same.
These problems aside, there's much to enjoy in "Ready Player One," which skillfully weaves the many strands of this VR adventure together to thrill us with the visuals and expert pacing. As always, Janusz Kaminski delivers with exquisite cinematography, and the overall look of the film is seductively fun.
Spielberg and Cline, who co-wrote the screenplay, deserve bonus points for hilarious "Alien" and Chucky references in here, but an over-reliance on nostalgia trivializes characterization, weakening the final third of the movie. Curiously, the book's weakest part was that section, too, with an over-reliance on gamer talk.
As such, "Ready Player One" misses a chance to explore more fully this sort of dystopian world where everyday people are slaves, either to corporate goons like IOI or to their need for escape inside the OASIS. Ultimately, it's a shame the sly humor of "Ready Player One" as a fun ride through an alternate world isn't buoyed by stronger character arcs.
If it were, "Ready Player One" might be worth more than a few stacks of quarters brought to the arcade. Still, like a good video game, it's a welcome diversion for a couple of hours of entertainment.