Ready Player One, Because This Goes By So Fast.
Imagine Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but video games… and tons of references and cameos. Steven Spielberg takes the directors chair of this adaptation of Ernest Cline’s popular book of the same name. We follow Wade Watts, an orphan kid who doesn’t live in the most glamourous of lives. He’s forced to live in the Stacks, a trailer park that builds upwards with each one literally stacked on each other with his aunt and her abusive boyfriend.
They live in a dismal future, where the preferred escape is The OASIS, a virtual world for gaming and work. When the creator dies, he tasks his users to find 3 hidden keys and gates to win the grand prize, the game itself. Wade and his friends band together to find all of the keys, before they fall into the wrong hands.
It’s fun to explore a world that we may not be too far off from exploring in our own. Not just for gaming, you can enjoy a virtual world where you can race cars, play space polo, and climb a mountain with Batman. This also becomes a place of employment for some, what I wouldn’t give to just wake up and go to my immersion rig, as opposed to my draining commute. Instead of watching a movie, you can be in the movie itself.
***Warning: Spoilers***
The most impressive sequence is when they visit the Overlook Hotel. The crew arrives in hopes of finding their next key to progress forward. The scenery goes from a mostly CGI environment to that of the exact hotel from The Shining. From my understanding, is that they were able to use old footage and digitally recreate them, making a similar looking environment with the digital characters. They were able to recreate iconic scenes like the twins, blood elevators, and creepy decomposing lady. Whatever they did to achieve this look, it was incredibly effective.
With that positive, there is a lot of negative. Aside from trivial stuff like VR peripherals (360 treadmills, big lounge chairs, harnesses, the streets) and convenient plot devices on said lounge chair, one thing encompasses most of my problems. That thing is that this story felt extremely rushed. It feels like the characters solve problems and jump to the next part almost instantly, leaving us to wonder how they did it.
The main plot is finding things, but it wasn’t built for audiences at all. On a surface level, the characters need to solve riddles to get to their next challenge. For us as viewers, we weren’t involved with solving them ourselves, instead we watch the characters randomly solve it on their own, using random archival footage from the creator’s life. Basically, if you wanted to win the game, you had to obsess yourself with his life. This short side managed to bring down my previously mentioned highlight, by inserting a random zombie dancing platform game into the Overlook Hotel.
The plot and character development were other victims of the rushed narrative. Why hasn’t anyone just randomly driven backwards before? I guess there’s a resistance fighter group? Was Samantha really in in debt? Why was the hideous birthmark that I barely even noticed in the movie? Why didn’t anyone else try the most famous easter egg trick on Adventure? Why does the first key take 5 years to solve, but they can just breeze through the rest? I guess Ogdon logs in everyday to stand at a desk, waiting for players? Why should anyone have cared about joining the Hi-5 in the last skirmish? Why didn’t Sorento just shoot him at the end? I guess we need to spend more time outside? There were a lot of questions in addition to these that I needed answered.
Some of the cast felt randomly chosen for the most part. We get a pretty dull main character who has no sympathy for his “Mom’s Sister”, who was just blown up in a horrible explosion, along with plenty of innocent people. For the main guy, it doesn’t feel like feel like he has much of an arc. Other than the struggle to solve riddles, and trying to put a ring on a girl who he just met, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of character development for him. Remind me again why TJ Miller was still in this movie? It was purely voiceover and none of his dialogue worked for me. If they were going for a Bulk and Skull type character, then they got it, but it felt out of date. I’m surprised that they kept him, especially in this #metoo climate. Mark Rylance as Halliday didn’t work for me either. It was like watching a shy actor running through lines, while dressed up in his best impression of a Wayne’s World character. I suppose the rest of the cast was fine, but I didn’t learn much about them to criticize their validity in the movie.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of the character designs. The environments were fine, but I just didn’t understand some of the character choices. To start off, the characters looked like HD versions of Reboot ones (remember that 90’s animated series?). It would have been a lot nicer if it chose a polar end of either extremely cartoonish, or realistic. This felt like a weird middle. I think that Anorak was fine, but with the nature of The OASIS, it felt like a cluster of random looks and styles.
This is a rare case of where I “read” (Audio Book) the book before I watched it and can say that it was better than the film. Due to cramming a whole bunch of material into a one-and-done movie, it feels very underdeveloped. I feel that this would have been a lot better as a television show to get some of the more important parts integrated better. Some parts were fun, some were even impressive, but with the rushed pace, it brought down the movie for me personally.