☆☆☆
Ready Player One takes place in a future America that has become such a miserable place to live that people would much rather spend all their days in a virtual reality universe called The Oasis, where they can be whomever they want and live all sorts of wild adventures they couldn't possibly experience in the real world.
The hero of the movie is a boy named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), who lives with his aunt in a near-future Columbus, Ohio, which according to his narration is the fastest-growing city on the planet and has a whole section of town where people live in motor homes that are piled on each other until they reach into the sky.
"The Stacks" are sort of a vertical, dystopian Mumbai people who live in "The Stacks," but its sort of no wonder its residents are poor since all they do all day is sit in their motor homes and immerse themselves in virtual reality. If Ready Player One was intended in any way to make virtual reality look like a compelling or exciting technology, it fails -- in the film, VR seems a horrendous time-waster in which the only thing to do is play in a wall-to-wall video game.
Maybe the problem for me with Ready Player One -- which was also a problem I had with the novel -- is that I just have never found video games to be particularly interesting. Sure, a couple of hours in an arcade is an entertaining diversion, but spending hours upon hours in a fantasy world filled with endless competition has never held an appeal; there is never any time to just relax and enjoy yourself in a video game, it's perpetual stimulation.
And so it is for Wade, whose visual avatar in The Oasis is named Parzival. At the beginning of the movie, the inventor of this virtual universe, James Halliday (Mark Rylance) has died, and posthumously announced to the world that somewhere in the vast, endless digital expanse he has hidden an "Easter egg," a secret object that, when uncovered, will bestow a half-trillion dollars on the person who finds it.
After years and years of searching, it remains hidden, which is where Wade Watts/Parzival comes in. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory didn't follow Charlie Bucket around for nothing, and of course it will be the same for Wade/Parzival.
As he goes on his search, Wade/Parzival befriends fellow "Gunters" (that's a portmanteau for "egg hunters") like Aech, a giant hulk of a beast whose name is pronounced "H," and Artemis (actually, "Art3mis"), with whom Parzival falls in love.
The scenes set in the world of the Oasis are an elaborate animated film, and one of the great ironies of Ready Player One is that they aren't the most interesting scenes in the movie. They're all too obviously CG creations, more excusable because they are supposed to look digital, but nonetheless exhausting because like all CG creations of late, they over-rely on the ability to do anything. The dizzying, overstuffed scenery whizzes by, all looking like it was made in a computer -- again, that is sort of the point in a movie like Ready Player One, but that infinite possibility makes the film feel somehow smaller, a bit lacking in imagination. Director Steven Spielberg isn't limited in what he can do in this setting, so he does everything, leaving us helpless to know where to look or what to feel.
The best sequence in the film, by far, is one that wasn't in the book and that takes the heroes into an unexpected cinematic setting whose surprise I won't ruin here but that turns out to be a delight. The worst is the climactic battle, with tens of thousands of CG soldiers fighting an overwhelming army of CG villains. Technically, it's impressive, but dramatically it lacks urgency.
Ready Player One is most comfortable, though, when it is telling its story with good, old-fashioned flesh-and-blood actors in real (or mostly real) settings. I wanted more, not less, of Sheridan, Olivia Cooke and Mark Rylance -- even Ben Mendelsohn's rather bland villain is more interesting as a human than as an animated avatar.
There's little doubt of the outcome of the story, and because of that the plot loses some steam before it's finished -- there are multiple efforts by screenwriters Zak Penn and Ernest Cline (on whose novel this is based) to throw one more climax on top of one more climax. Thirty-four years ago, critics complained that Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was too fast-paced and frenetic, and the director hasn't mellowed much since.
It is interesting, though, that in an industry whose strategy of blockbusters and "tentpole franchises" was essentially created by Spielberg, the director's style has started to seem endearingly backward. Cinematically, Ready Player One is -- despite its all-CG sections -- about as traditional as they come, replete with a rousing orchestral score composed by Alan Silvestri, who seems to be doing his best to imitate John Williams.
Ready Player One is solidly made and will no doubt delight fans of the book and anyone who grew up on video games and pop culture. The big surprise, though, is that it creates a digital world that seems so eminently less intriguing than the real world, which turns out to be both the lesson of the movie as well as its most substantial limitation.
Viewed March 28, 2018 -- DGA Theater
1900
The hero of the movie is a boy named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), who lives with his aunt in a near-future Columbus, Ohio, which according to his narration is the fastest-growing city on the planet and has a whole section of town where people live in motor homes that are piled on each other until they reach into the sky.
"The Stacks" are sort of a vertical, dystopian Mumbai people who live in "The Stacks," but its sort of no wonder its residents are poor since all they do all day is sit in their motor homes and immerse themselves in virtual reality. If Ready Player One was intended in any way to make virtual reality look like a compelling or exciting technology, it fails -- in the film, VR seems a horrendous time-waster in which the only thing to do is play in a wall-to-wall video game.
Maybe the problem for me with Ready Player One -- which was also a problem I had with the novel -- is that I just have never found video games to be particularly interesting. Sure, a couple of hours in an arcade is an entertaining diversion, but spending hours upon hours in a fantasy world filled with endless competition has never held an appeal; there is never any time to just relax and enjoy yourself in a video game, it's perpetual stimulation.
And so it is for Wade, whose visual avatar in The Oasis is named Parzival. At the beginning of the movie, the inventor of this virtual universe, James Halliday (Mark Rylance) has died, and posthumously announced to the world that somewhere in the vast, endless digital expanse he has hidden an "Easter egg," a secret object that, when uncovered, will bestow a half-trillion dollars on the person who finds it.
After years and years of searching, it remains hidden, which is where Wade Watts/Parzival comes in. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory didn't follow Charlie Bucket around for nothing, and of course it will be the same for Wade/Parzival.
As he goes on his search, Wade/Parzival befriends fellow "Gunters" (that's a portmanteau for "egg hunters") like Aech, a giant hulk of a beast whose name is pronounced "H," and Artemis (actually, "Art3mis"), with whom Parzival falls in love.
The scenes set in the world of the Oasis are an elaborate animated film, and one of the great ironies of Ready Player One is that they aren't the most interesting scenes in the movie. They're all too obviously CG creations, more excusable because they are supposed to look digital, but nonetheless exhausting because like all CG creations of late, they over-rely on the ability to do anything. The dizzying, overstuffed scenery whizzes by, all looking like it was made in a computer -- again, that is sort of the point in a movie like Ready Player One, but that infinite possibility makes the film feel somehow smaller, a bit lacking in imagination. Director Steven Spielberg isn't limited in what he can do in this setting, so he does everything, leaving us helpless to know where to look or what to feel.
The best sequence in the film, by far, is one that wasn't in the book and that takes the heroes into an unexpected cinematic setting whose surprise I won't ruin here but that turns out to be a delight. The worst is the climactic battle, with tens of thousands of CG soldiers fighting an overwhelming army of CG villains. Technically, it's impressive, but dramatically it lacks urgency.
Ready Player One is most comfortable, though, when it is telling its story with good, old-fashioned flesh-and-blood actors in real (or mostly real) settings. I wanted more, not less, of Sheridan, Olivia Cooke and Mark Rylance -- even Ben Mendelsohn's rather bland villain is more interesting as a human than as an animated avatar.
There's little doubt of the outcome of the story, and because of that the plot loses some steam before it's finished -- there are multiple efforts by screenwriters Zak Penn and Ernest Cline (on whose novel this is based) to throw one more climax on top of one more climax. Thirty-four years ago, critics complained that Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was too fast-paced and frenetic, and the director hasn't mellowed much since.
It is interesting, though, that in an industry whose strategy of blockbusters and "tentpole franchises" was essentially created by Spielberg, the director's style has started to seem endearingly backward. Cinematically, Ready Player One is -- despite its all-CG sections -- about as traditional as they come, replete with a rousing orchestral score composed by Alan Silvestri, who seems to be doing his best to imitate John Williams.
Ready Player One is solidly made and will no doubt delight fans of the book and anyone who grew up on video games and pop culture. The big surprise, though, is that it creates a digital world that seems so eminently less intriguing than the real world, which turns out to be both the lesson of the movie as well as its most substantial limitation.
Viewed March 28, 2018 -- DGA Theater
1900
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