Have you ever been to a costume party where everyone’s dressed up as their favourite movie and TV characters? It’s a bit over stimulating but the familiarity is comforting. You grab a beer and lean against a wall, looking for a conversation to inject yourself into.
Then he corners you. You know who I’m talking about. The over-eager geek who means well, but doesn’t know when to shut up. He prattles on about shows, movies, and video games, spouting out an endless stream of pointless pop culture references and in-jokes. He talks about a lavish, ambitious story he’s concocted that sounds equally impressive and embarrassing. By the thirty minute mark, you’re wishing for the sweet embrace of death, or at least for the conversation to end. But you realize he’s only getting started. You resign yourself to your fate, letting yourself go numb.
That’s what it’s like to watch Ready Player One.
Three years ago, I thought we reached the nadir of shameless nostalgia pandering with Adam Sandler’s abysmal Pixels. It was a dreadful film that preyed on audiences’ childhood memories of video games. Its only aim was to exploit our nostalgia. But Ready Player One digs even further past the bottom of the barrel, using the entirety of 80s culture (with a splash of the 90s and 2000s) to garner audience investment. While RPO is a technically better-made film than Pixels, it shares the same crude approach to nostalgia as that forgotten dud.
Steven Spielberg, one of the greatest living directors, must have needed a new beach house. That has to be the only reason he signed on to direct this soulless mess. How the director of Indiana Jones, Munich, and Minority Report can create a movie this impersonal, junky, and irritating is the mystery of the year. Spielberg doesn’t elevate the source material; he sinks with it.
Based on Ernest Cline’s divisive (to put it mildly) smash novel, RPO drops us into the most depressing dystopia committed to film since Elysium. The world is falling into complete disrepair. Poverty, pollution, and overpopulation are rampant, but humanity’s too busy playing the Oasis (a VR-simulation) to do anything about it. The Oasis allows people to live out their virtual fantasies, which mostly means role-playing as their favourite 80s characters. The entire world is seemingly plugged in. It’s a dark portrayal of humanity’s overreliance on technology. Or, at least, it would be if RPO actually engaged with its premise instead of fangirling over how awesome VR headsets are.
We follow Wade Watts (a terminally bland Tye Sheridan) as he quests through the Oasis for a secret treasure hidden by the original creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance, who sounds and looks like Garth Algar). Everyone’s vying for this prize, which bestows complete ownership of the Oasis on the winner, including the slimy IOI, run by professional movie bad guy Ben Mendelsohn. Wade has to uncover the treasure before IOI or they’ll fill the Oasis with ads. Oh, the horror! (Or they’ll enslave humanity or something. It’s pretty unclear and who really cares?).
RPO doesn’t want to honestly tackle the issues its premise raises, nor does it offer a truly involving story. It unironically shows pop culture addiction as uniformly good, with no hints of balance. A few throwaway lines suggest that life outside of video games is healthy, but that idea’s drowned out by the endless scenes showing how awesome the Oasis is. RPO is too dumb to be thought-provoking and too annoying to be fun.
But even in an absolute mess, Spielberg’s talent shines through. While the CGI ranges from passable to ugly, he creates a uniform world that melds countless different colour schemes and tones into a somewhat solid whole. The action scenes carry his trademark smooth camerawork, even if the bombardment of CGI creatures makes the frame feel too chaotic. The quieter scenes also show his talent for making one-on-one conversations dynamic.
But RPO is easily Spielberg’s most anonymous movie of the decade. The film lacks all the wit, warmth, and humanity that define his best work. There are some technically good shots and scenes in RPO, but none of them grab the viewer. Nothing stands out. It feels passionless, and that’s one word that should never be applied to Spielberg.
RPO is a hodgepodge of nostalgic references and they’re all surface-level. It seizes the aesthetics of other properties without understanding their context. This is a movie where The Shining is repurposed as a zombie movie, where The Iron Giant (whose movie is specifically anti-war) massacres people on the battlefield. RPO is too shallow to give any of its references their proper respect.
RPO, on a technical level, is fine. It even achieves moments of beauty. But its pacing problems (it has at least three climaxes), sloppy script, and shameless pandering make it detestable. I’m certain people will point to individual scenes and moments of quality as proof of the film’s worth. But as a whole, Ready Player One is pixelated trash. Don’t waste your quarters.
