- Ready Player One should really present itself as more of a cautionary tale. After all, the relatively near future of 2045 that it depicts is littered with towering stacks of trashy mobile homes and dominated by greedy slave-powered corporations. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more dystopian extrapolation of the modern era outside of H. G. Wells or WALL-E, but the film and its characters are content to distract themselves from the extreme horribleness of everyday life by escaping into a virtual reality known as OASIS. There, you can transform yourself into an orc or a samurai and ski down Egyptian pyramids or blast monsters on Planet Doom for kicks. Imagine Second Life, except fun and popular.
- Part of OASIS' allure has to do with the fact that its late founder, the eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance), established a treasure hunt to determine who would inherit his virtual Earth. The idea is that only the most dedicated nerds well-versed in the minutiae of both retro pop culture and Halliday's life would be able to solve his complicated riddles. Known as "Gunters" (don't ask), these young treasure seekers with online handles like Parzival (Tye Sheridan), Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Aech (Lena Waithe), Daito (Win Morisaki), and Sho (Philip Zhao) all spend their days poring through Halliday's video journals and competing in seemingly impossible races. The corporate competition, known as "Sixers" and led by the merciless Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), takes the brute force approach by throwing lots of players into the game in the hopes that even one will stumble onto something useful.
- About the treasure hunt: The first stage is a wacky car race constantly interrupted by the T-Rex from Jurassic Park and an unbeatable King Kong. The second stage features a remarkably thorough reconstruction of the Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining. The third involves playing the Atari cartridge Adventure as a game-within-a-game. Oddly enough, the visit to the Overlook Hotel is by far the most entertaining and humorous part of the entire film, with Lena Waithe's hapless avatar having to execute a speedrun past the creepy twins, the blood elevator, the labyrinth, and even Room 237. (It's as though director Steven Spielberg were way more interested in movie homages than video game trivia for some reason.) At any rate, the heroes complete the stages, collect the keys, and win the game, but not before facing considerable life challenges, both virtual and otherwise.
- As far as adaptations go, Ready Player One is quite effective in that it perfectly captures both the tone and the shortcomings of Ernest Cline's source novel. Cline was also willing to let a fanatic obsession with nostalgia overshadow any real social criticism, with the main difference being that he preferred Zork to Adventure. Still, Spielberg is a master entertainer, and the fast pace and seamless employment of CGI in this film helps to smooth over a lot of its thematic issues. If your goal is to visit an all-you-can-eat retro buffet that serves Battletoads, Madballs, The Iron Giant, Back to the Future, and Monty Python, then you have certainly come to the right place. It's not an especially nourishing meal and drags on far too long, but at least it's unlikely to give you indigestion.
- Also featuring Simon Pegg, T.J. Miller, Hannah John-Kamen, Susan Lynch, and Ralph Ineson.
