Ever since I saw the first trailer for Steven Spielberg’s latest, Ready Player One, I was excited. A movie set inside a massive virtual world, picking up on Easter eggs and references to a whole host of other movies, books and video games, it sounded right up my street.
While I had never read Ernest Cline’s now much lauded novel of the same name, my interests were definitely peaked so I headed down to see the film opening night.
What followed was an action adventure romp which evokes everything from Willy Wonka, to Wreck It Ralph, to The Hunger Games, while deftly meshing the ultra-futurist world of its Oasis (the virtual world at the films centre) with the nostalgia we all feel for the simplicity of our childhoods.
We join Wade Watts, very clearly the Charlie Bucket character if we extend the Wonka metaphor out, a struggling poor boy from The Stacks, a literal trailer park where trailers are piled on top of one another because of the immense over population and crowding in this slum. He and his friends live their lives within The Oasis, which they use as a virtual escape from their troubles. In the Oasis we are told, anyone can be anything, and it’s using this prism that the films references come through – Wade drives the DeLorean, while his friend Aech has built working replicas of everything from the Iron Giant to the Galactica.
The story of the film sees our heroes attempting to find 3 keys hidden within the game by its reclusive creator James Halliday before he died. Halliday (again like Wonka), wanted to find someone worthy of taking over his company and his creation after his death, so he has set up various challenges for an eventual winner to overcome.
From an epic car chase with obstacles as varied as wrecking balls and spikes right through to Jurassic Park’s T Rex and King Kong; through to a challenge set inside the infamous Overlook hotel from The Shining, Spielberg has effortlessly woven a tapestry with these characters.
With the sheer amount of properties on display here this could have felt forced under a lesser director. Very much an exercise in “hey, look how many things you recognise that we managed to get”. Instead though rather than making too big a deal out of them, the film just puts these things on screen and then moves on. These things simply exist in this world. Its actual movie world building at is best.
With the sheer amount of properties on display here this could have felt forced under a lesser director. Very much an exercise in “hey, look how many things you recognise that we managed to get”. Instead though rather than making too big a deal out of them, the film just puts these things on screen and then moves on. These things simply exist in this world. Its actual movie world building at is best.
The movie works though not because of its flash or its spectacle, but because you believe in the characters at its heart. Wade is far from a perfect hero, his arrogance and his desperation to rise above his current station nearly derail his efforts on several occasions – its perhaps fitting that he of all the characters is the one with the DeLorean, as he is evoking Marty Mcfly in that regard.
The other central members of the group are well fleshed out too. Art3mis, a young activist who’s reason for wanting to win the contest are far purer than Wade’s, gives the film its emotional resonance. He wants to win, she needs to win because she understands the power that this place they have all created together has, and the dangers of allowing it to fall into the wrong hands.
It’s a nice metaphor for the internet at large right now. The vast majority of its users are there to create a vast, interconnected community spreading its way across the globe. You don’t have to have met these people in real life to feel connected to them. At the same time there are those who’s corporate greed would seek to destroy the community and instead simply turn it into a bottom line figure.
On that note, Nolan Sorrento, the films central villain, and owner of IOI, Halliday’s leading competitor, who wants nothing more than to finally destroy his enemies vision and turn it into a for profit machine. He’s perhaps a little pantomime (there is a sequence in which he genuinely talks about how many ads they can flood someone’s headset with before they go into full blown seizure), and for my money this is perhaps the films weak point. When everyone else feels so real and so well rounded, we could perhaps have done with just a moment of looking at why Sorrento became the way he was.
It’s a minor quibble though. The film tears along at a rip-roaring pace, and really works hard to pack every sequence with as much emotional heft as they can manage. It feels, perhaps fittingly given the nostalgia factor at the films heart, like it fits into the old Amblin canon. It’s just as fun, and explores ideas just as lofty as its predecessors like ET. It doesn’t hold quite that high watermark admittedly, but then comparing much of anything to ET would leave an unfavourable view.
Ready Player One though feels like a real return to form for one of cinema’s greatest creators. He’s created a visual and emotional paradise, and one I cannot wait to return to.
The other central members of the group are well fleshed out too. Art3mis, a young activist who’s reason for wanting to win the contest are far purer than Wade’s, gives the film its emotional resonance. He wants to win, she needs to win because she understands the power that this place they have all created together has, and the dangers of allowing it to fall into the wrong hands.
It’s a nice metaphor for the internet at large right now. The vast majority of its users are there to create a vast, interconnected community spreading its way across the globe. You don’t have to have met these people in real life to feel connected to them. At the same time there are those who’s corporate greed would seek to destroy the community and instead simply turn it into a bottom line figure.
On that note, Nolan Sorrento, the films central villain, and owner of IOI, Halliday’s leading competitor, who wants nothing more than to finally destroy his enemies vision and turn it into a for profit machine. He’s perhaps a little pantomime (there is a sequence in which he genuinely talks about how many ads they can flood someone’s headset with before they go into full blown seizure), and for my money this is perhaps the films weak point. When everyone else feels so real and so well rounded, we could perhaps have done with just a moment of looking at why Sorrento became the way he was.
It’s a minor quibble though. The film tears along at a rip-roaring pace, and really works hard to pack every sequence with as much emotional heft as they can manage. It feels, perhaps fittingly given the nostalgia factor at the films heart, like it fits into the old Amblin canon. It’s just as fun, and explores ideas just as lofty as its predecessors like ET. It doesn’t hold quite that high watermark admittedly, but then comparing much of anything to ET would leave an unfavourable view.
Ready Player One though feels like a real return to form for one of cinema’s greatest creators. He’s created a visual and emotional paradise, and one I cannot wait to return to.
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