READY PLAYER ONE REVIEW
by David Curry
Apr 2, 2018
There is a temptation, when it comes to futuristic virtual worlds, to attempt the gargantuan and show the technical capabilities on offer today. While visually impressive, it often leads to a hollow story, seen most recently in the Altered Carbon series on Netflix.
Ready Player One seems to fall into the same problem, struggling to break out of its confines as a sci-fi action movie and look into some of the real issues of addiction and alienation.
As a brief introduction, the world is a polluted, overpopulated, corrupt mess and to escape it, people spend most of their lives inside a massive online simulation, called Oasis.
Wade Watts, our protagonist, spends almost all of his life in Oasis. A few months before our story begins, James Halliday, creator of Oasis, died. He programmed Anorak’s Quest into Oasis, which control of Oasis to the first person to find three keys hidden inside his world.
Halliday’s quest drives the story forward. Wade becomes ever-more obsessed with finding the three keys before IOI, an unpleasant corporation that has amassed an army of players, indebted to them, that are forced to compete for Halliday’s prize.
Wade meets Art3mis, a popular Twitch streamer, who is even more fanatically devoted to not letting IOI take control of Oasis. He is also helped by his best-friend in Oasis, Aech, who takes the form of an 8-foot orc.
IOI is controlled by Nolan Sorrento, played by Ben Mendelsohn in his typical slimy corporate fashion. The corporation wants to make some drastic changes to Oasis, aimed at improving their finances at the expense of player enjoyment.
Wade’s knowledge of Halliday is what makes him unique amongst the egg hunters, spending inordinate amounts of time at Halliday Archives researching everything about the
man. Despite being dead, Halliday is very much a main character, brought to life through flashbacks and conversations about him between Wade and his team.
And because Halliday is a Gen X nerd, brought up in the 80s, a lot of Ready Player One revolves around pop culture references to that time period. King Kong as the end boss in a race, the Grady twins from The Shining and Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears is just a sliver of Halliday’s childhood, projected into the film.
The constant call-backs to the 80s don’t feel as forced as I expected. The contribution of Ernest Cline, the writer Ready Player One, to the script appears to have helped keep the story from becoming a “Remember this!” quagmire.
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Tye Sheridan plays the role of Wade Watts competently enough, though Wade is not the most interesting of characters. The film benefits from the side characters, Aech and Art3mis, which add comic relief and a better sense of the stakes for the group, respectively.
Mark Rylance is perfectly cast as Halliday. He adds so much depth to the character with his nervous, Silicon Valley founder attitude. People have said he feels like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, apparently Cline used Howard Hughes as inspiration for the character. The flawed and fading vision of what Halliday wanted Oasis to be is easily connectable to many Silicon Valley founders, who have seen their companies or ideas fall into the wrong hands.
Visually, this film stands up with the best. There is a good amount of detail in every shot without it being too overbearing, though the last third hits the limit. There is only so much action you can have on a screen before the viewer starts to tune out, Spielberg almost makes the same mistake his friend George Lucas did with the Star Wars prequels.
The richness of the Oasis makes the scenes outside of it very bleak. The characters in their real-life form feel beige, which may be intentional because they spend most of their lives in an online world.
I do have problems with the ending, due to Wade’s lack of character development. I think in a dystopian future, which is partly Halliday’s fault for his lack of foresight and authority, there should be more grey areas. Instead, the final decisions of the film feel like black and white choices.
Overall, this is a competent film that will keep you entertained throughout, but it brushes the underlying issues of a world where the majority are addicted to a virtual world. Definitely, one to see at the cinema, if possible.