2018 Film Review: Ready Player One (2018)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Zak Penn, Ernest Cline
Starring: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn
IMDb Link

MechaGodzilla fights the Iron Giant and Gundam for the fate of the virtual world.

Ready Player One follows Wade Watts, also known as Parzival, as he and his friends traverse the wide virtual world of OASIS to find three keys that unlock an Easter Egg that allows a user to take control of OASIS (and I just realised that I watched a movie about a literal Easter Egg on Good Friday). It's a solid if cliche adventure story filled to the brim with weak character drama and fun but pointless pop culture references.

The concept of the OASIS is fantastically realised, and Spielberg takes great care to make the most of the extravaganza, emphasised by magnificent action sequences that take in everything with breathtaking sweeps, and an intriguing visual pastiche that's absorbed in the aesthetics of the culture it's born from and toes an appropriate line between real and fake. There's a smooth intensity to every second the film goes all out, and the best moments come from these scenes because the there's a chance to exercise some actual style. Regardless of anything else about the movie, it's a blast when it's virtual.

Unfortunately, not much else about the movie is as worthwhile as what can be looked at. The plot is silly, convoluted, inoffensive adventure yarn that keeps moving and is mostly sag-free, with little more to say than to consider the real and virtual worlds different and to not lose value in one by over-living in the other. The character drama is weak, with very little time spent actually developing the relationships between the characters and just short-handing everything for the sake of getting through everything as quickly as possible. Parzival, Art3mis, and Aech get a bit of personality and/or backstory, but Daito and Sho are just kind of there, and Mendelsohn's Sorrento is just a basic corporate stooge with no care for pop culture.

The movie really blew right through me; I was okay with everything that happened but found very little reason to care about any of it, and while a handful of the action scenes in OASIS were excellent I found no interest in the real world scenes as they were portrayed.

The Short Version: Ready Player One is an incredible visual spectacle; it's also a story that's little more than than a generic adventure covered by a wave of shallow, blink-and-you'll-miss-it pop culture references, and that's fine, because the film doesn't try to be more than that, but I feel like I'd get the same value out of going to Comic-Con, or spending a couple of hours in VRChat.

Rating: 6/10

Published March 30th, 2018