Ready Player One takes place in 2045. Life is miserable for most people. To escape their wretched existences, they log into a virtual world called the OASIS. Created by socially awkward genius James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the OASIS allows anyone to become whoever or whatever they want to be. Just before Halliday dies, he channels Willy Wonka and sets up a contest to find 3 keys that lead to an Easter Egg. The first person to find the egg inherits Halliday’s fortune and gains control of the OASIS. Parzival (Tye Sheridan) and Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), avatars of real-world Wade and Samantha, are determined to find the egg and keep the OASIS out of the clutches of evil business executive Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who wants to take control and put up advertisements. Yeah, that’s the existential evil the inhabitants of the OASIS are facing. Annoying adds.
If you unplug your brain and don’t think about it, Ready Player One is another soulless CGI-heavy spectacle. We’ve seen a lot of them these past few years. The characters are poorly developed, the story is thin, and the whole thing is just an excuse to cram as many pop culture references as possible into the 140-minute runtime. This film exists to give middle-aged nerds an opportunity to squeal with delight at their ability to spot call-outs to their lost youth. It very quickly crosses the line and becomes downright patronizing. Plenty of movies are all style and no substance, but I had hoped for more from a film directed by Steven Spielberg.
The other target audience is basement-dwelling gamers who mistake achievement points for real accomplishment. I’ve compared plenty of films to watching someone else play a video game, but that’s literally what you’re doing with Ready Player One. The action is frenetically paced, but the tension is nonexistent. The worst that happens if you “die” is you lose your stuff. The ultrahigh contrast CGI makes everything look fake. There’s never any sense of anyone really dying, and there are almost no stakes. When nothing is real and nothing important is on the line, there’s no reason to care what happens to anyone in the film. Yes, some of the action takes place in the real world, but even then, there’s precious little to care about.
Random T Rex attack. IMDb.com
The sins of screenwriters Zak Penn and Ernest Cline are numerous, but a small sample of plot-critical elements should give a good sense of their lazy storytelling. The OASIS spans the globe, and the protagonists meet online, but they all happen to live in the same city. The main bad guy keeps his password on a post-it note. Samantha/Art3mis is a gorgeous woman but is crushingly self-conscious about a birthmark that isn’t all that unattractive to begin with and could easily be covered with some concealer. Credit the writers for one huge accomplishment, though. The OASIS has few rules, and just about anything can happen, but they still manage to brazenly shatter what little internal consistency there is and pull off a shameless deus ex machina.
What a disfiguring birthmark. Olivia Cook in Ready Player One. IMDb.com
That’s all bad enough, but if you fail to unplug your brain, and if you think about things even a little, Ready Player One becomes truly horrendous. As bad as the real world in this film is, the OASIS and its implications are FAR more dystopian. As the movie opens, Wade is traveling through his slum, and everyone is wearing virtual reality goggles and interacting with the game in some way. This is considered normal. An entire civilization has voluntarily chosen to plug itself into the Matrix rather than face their problems and maybe do something about them. Some negative consequences of game addiction are mentioned in passing, but, for the most part, logging in and checking out is presented as a good thing.
The zombified masses of Ready Player One. IMDb.com
The contest itself is even worse. As it turns out, the key to solving the puzzles doesn’t involve mastering gameplay in the OASIS itself. To succeed, you must worship Halliday and immerse yourself in the minutest trivia of his life. Early on, Parzival and Art3mis engage in a dominance ritual of reciting random Halliday-related facts, because apparently only those sufficiently steeped in the details of all things Halliday are worthy enough to be one of the cool kids. Keep in mind that these people are devoting their lives to the pop culture of an era that ended almost half a century before they were even born. In the world of Ready Player One, the insufferable fanboy is king.
No nuance of James Halliday’s life is too trivial. IMDb.com
Halliday deliberately feeds into this. He is so self-absorbed and egotistical that he constructs an entire in-game database devoted to himself and requires players to commit to an in-depth study of him in order to crack the clues and find the keys. Willy Wonka at least attempted to test for positive personality traits. The only thing James Halliday tested for was fawning hero worship.
Spoiler alert
In the end, the world is still an awful place. The now bazillionaire kid sits in a posh office with a hot babe on his lap smugly talking about the importance of spending time in reality. That’s great for him. HIS reality is now amazing. What about all the other sad sacks still living in the slums? Their lives still suck, and he and his friends haven’t done squat to make the real world one speck better. All the so-called heroes have done is make sure the virtual crack keeps flowing.
End spoiler
Most of the people still live here. IMDb.com
At best, Ready Player One is an empty sugar rush of a film. At worst, it’s a sick glorification of video game addiction and supreme narcissism.
Overall rating: 3/10