Ready Player One
Steven Spielberg has been so good for so long, and so consistently, that it feels like general audiences undervalue just how good he really is. Of course, part of that might be because audience sensibilities have changed since Spielberg lit the world on fire with “Jaws,” “Close Encounters,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.,” but it’s also because Spielberg has changed, as well. Since he directed “Schindler’s List” in 1993, he’s gone further into more serious-minded, and cinematically-challenging material, so it’s not a surprise that, with an emphasis on franchises and superheroes, his box-office receipts have gone down, with only “War of the Worlds” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” hitting blockbuster status in the 2000s. I’m very curious to see how “Ready Player One” does.
I started Ernest Cline’s novel that is the basis of Spielberg’s film, but didn’t finish it before seeing the film in theatres. I’m still very curious to finish it, though, because I’ve heard very mixed things about the book and how it uses pop culture references. The story is set in 2046, and with an impoverished real world landscape, the majority of the people in the world go into The Oasis. The Oasis is a social media gaming network that is next-generation virtual reality, where the person puts on VR equipment, and they travel The Oasis as the avatar they’ve chosen. The Oasis is a video game, of sorts, and anyone who has played modern video games will be familiar with the way The Oasis works in terms of getting gear, outfits and items. The Oasis was created by Jim Halliday (Mark Rylance), and it’s an escape from the real world for many, but it’s also the only world, really, for people like Wade (Tye Sheridan), it’s the only world they really experience. In 2040, Halliday passed away, and his final message was not a will, but a challenge- inside The Oasis, he has hidden an Easter Egg, and whomever attains the clues available during three challenges Halliday has hidden within The Oasis will win the egg, which means not only an inheritance of half a trillion dollars, but control of The Oasis. In five years, no one has been able to get even one of the clues, but people like Wade, whose avatar’s name is Parzival, have continued trying, and Wade may have even figured out the secret to getting past that first challenge.
Halliday was obsessed with pop culture from the 1980s and ’90s, and that is all over The Oasis and its participants. Before you think Spielberg made this film as a love letter to himself, however, there’s not much from his own iconic part of that time period that can be found in the film of “Ready Player One,” even if it was in Cline’s book, although Parzival’s vehicle of choice is the Delorian from the Spielberg-produced “Back to the Future.” I would have to spend an extra 2-3 viewings looking for EVERY reference in the movie, but one of the curious things I was left with after watching the film was the way Spielberg and his screenwriters, Zak Penn and Cline, used a lot of those references less for window-dressing, and more for character development and nuance within the world. Not all of it works (the “Zemeckis Cube” was a little too much), but my God so much of it is so good I wanted to be in The Oasis myself. (He did miss an opportunity with one item that I lament, but still enjoyed.) This is especially true when it comes to the puzzle Halliday has left behind, and it’s important to the success of “Ready Player One” as a film that everything Halliday used to decide the fate of his legacy is something personal to him, and only true fans of his work, and people interested in his life, can figure out. Structurally, the story borrows from “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” and “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” but it’s the understanding of who Halliday was, and what his wishes for The Oasis were, that drives Wade and his friends as they find the clues they need to not just beat their fellow Oasis users, but Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) and his corporate drones and I0I, the tech rival that wants control of The Oasis for reasons that will likely be familiar to everyone who hates paywalls online. The personal nature of Halliday’s game is a big part of why “Ready Player One” sucks us in when it could have just been as boring as, say, watching people playing a video game.
When you consider the pop culture nature of the film, it was natural to think that Spielberg (who also produced “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” for Zemeckis, and brought together a lot of different animation studio characters for that) would have been the ideal choice for “Ready Player One,” with Robert Zemeckis second, but when you compare this film to his other escapist adventures he’s directed like the Indiana Jones and “Jurassic Park” films, this was not an obvious choice for the director. That being said, that’s why it’s so fun to watch him making it- a quarter of a century after he pivoted as a filmmaker with “Schindler’s List,” he’s continuing to make bold choices, especially within the realm of genre. Thinking, in particular, about his science fiction films (which “Ready Player One” fits in with), Spielberg has used genre and technology as a way of making cautionary tales that relate to the here and now, or what may happen in the future. With “A.I.,” it was the responsibilities humanity has when it comes to making artificial intelligence that serves man’s purposes. With “Minority Report,” it was the dangers of thinking seeing the future, or assuming guilt, means preventing tragedy and removing due process. In “War of the Worlds,” he told a post-9/11 horror story of domestic terrorism that shatters lives. In “Ready Player One,” there’s plenty of conversation to be had, whether it’s about our addiction to online interaction, and how it gives the illusion of knowing people (especially important when it comes to the relationships Wade/Parzival has with his best friend online, Aech (Lena Waithe), and Art3mis/Samantha (Olivia Cooke), the fellow player he has fallen in love with); the exploitation of public consumption of a product for financial gain by corporations; or geek culture itself, and what different levels of pop culture says about people. That last one is a conversation I see online all the time, and with so much of culture tilted towards superheroes and genre, seeing how people react to things like the next Marvel or DC film or “The Last Jedi,” and how people come to such properties, can sometimes bring out the worst impulses of people who cannot abide by the idea that people interact with those things differently from they do. There are a few times when that conversation comes up in “Ready Player One,” but not enough to get much of a gauge on how Spielberg feels about it. That’s a shame, but that also would have shifted the focus of the movie, and Spielberg already puts a lot of different conversations into motion with the film. It interesting how “Ready Player One” feels like it should be part of one subset of Spielberg’s filmography (specifically, his purely escapist fare), but actually belongs with a different one (his intellectually-curious sci-fi films) more. I love knowing he can continue to surprise me, after all these years.
It isn’t just thematically where Spielberg continues to push himself, though. His further explorations into digital filmmaking- especially his use of motion-capture in “The Adventures of Tintin” and “The BFG”- are invaluable as Spielberg creates the virtual world of The Oasis, and tells a story that spans both that world and the real world. Because The Oasis is basically a video game, rules have to be set for it, and Spielberg, Cline and Penn have to make us feel like the events that take place in The Oasis have consequences- or, at least, importance- to what happens in the real world, and it’s exciting to see him figuring that out as he has Parzival and co. face a gauntlet of challenges where the worst that happens is they lose everything they’ve earned within The Oasis, and death only exists in the real world. That’s hard to subscribe weight to, but Spielberg and his collaborators (including his actors, which also include Simon Pegg as one of Halliday’s former associates and T.J. Miller as a henchman of Sorrento’s) manage to do it, because the film is not just about the end gold of finding Halliday’s Easter Egg, but understanding why Halliday has done what he’s done in creating this set of challenges. Each one digs deeper into who the man was, and what was important to him, and there’s a sequence midway into this film that is one of the most remarkable pieces of film craft and homage Spielberg, or any filmmaker, has done. It’s the equivalent of the desert chase in “Raiders,” the T-Rex attack in “Jurassic Park” or the single-take sequence in “Tintin,” and holy God is it a masterpiece of storytelling and cinematic imagination. (Anyone who spoils it for you should be drawn and quartered, full stop.) Janusz Kaminski’s sometimes-aggravating use of backlighting for Spielberg is ideal for many sequences in The Oasis here, as Spielberg has to create a credible digital world that matches today’s video games, and he and his effects team to just that. I was worried the 140-minute running time would be excessive, but Spielberg and editor Michael Khan (assisted by Sarah Broshar, this time out) keep the film movie at a wonderful pace throughout. And if you were worried about the soundtrack with the absence of John Williams (who was deep into “Last Jedi” and “The Post”), fear not, as Alan Silvestri does a wonderful job of evoking his ’80s style, and doing something fresh, alongside tracks from the pop culture eras Spielberg and Cline are mining for their pop culture funhouse.
I understand why there are mixed feelings about not just Spielberg’s film, but the book by Ernest Cline it was built from. Even I have some reservations about it (Wade is kind of a “blah” hero, although I enjoy his interactions with Aech and Art3mis, and Mendelsohn is kind of a standard villain), I found it an entertaining piece of genre filmmaking from a director who always seems to find interesting ways to tell the stories he’s hooked in by, and continues to assert one of the strongest voices in movie history, even when he feels like he should be winding down his career. “Ready Player One” shows he’s not set for that yet, and I’m excited by what that means for the rest of his career. Spielberg’s game isn’t over yet, and like Halliday, he’s still leaving his fans some personal clues to what matters to him until the end.
**Here are some thoughts I had about the film after my second viewing**
“Ready Player One” has a LOT more going on than just a nostalgic visual encyclopedia of pop culture references. That’s what gets you into the theatre, to be sure (as if Steven Spielberg’s name wouldn’t be enough), but Spielberg has bigger interests than just a fun adventure film (although it IS very fun), and that became even clearer the second time around. If you’re a fan of Ernest Cline’s book, it’s best to look past whatever changes were made, and look to something deeper that Spielberg might have in mind. **Spoilers** await after this moment.
The past 25 years has seen Spielberg use the science fiction genre to comment on the dangers humanity risks in overconfidence in technological advances. I go back a quarter of a century because it did start with “Jurassic Park,” which tempers the awe that would go into being able to bringing dinosaurs to life with a cautionary tale of how messing with nature can backfire spectacularly; that said, while the same idea exists in the background of “The Lost World,” that film is more a traditional monster adventure film than it is interested in the science of it all, although looking back at it reveals some intriguing notions about game hunting and the encroachment of man on natural habitats that got lost with the disappointment I felt in it as a sequel to “Jurassic Park” back in 1997. In 2001, he made “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” and while he did bring a lot of his own sensibilities to the project, he also followed through with the ideas his buddy Stanley Kubrick was looking to explore in the film about the responsibility of man towards the artificial intelligence it creates to make its life easier, whether it’s a robot nanny to make a parent’s life less hectic, a robot lover like Gigolo Joe to give humans sensual pleasures, or a boy like David that can fill a parental void for either a mother who has lost her own child, or could never have one in the first place. The next year, there was his brilliant “Minority Report,” which looks at what civil liberties may be lost, along with the nature of choice, if the government can use technology to try and “predict” future crime so that premeditated murder is a thing of the past. In 2005, he made “War of the Worlds,” which breaks the pattern of his sci-fi interests for a more traditional telling of H.G. Welles’s classic tale, but in a post-9/11 world, its darker look at alien attack resonates strongly, and is a potent counterpoint to the optimism of his earlier, more personal looks at aliens coming to Earth in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.”
All this brings us to “Ready Player One.” I’ve seen criticisms of the film’s depiction of online video game culture, especially in light of the Gamergate attacks against women in the video game industry, and how it doesn’t deal with the toxic masculinity online gaming can engender, and those are valid, but I think Spielberg is looking less at video game culture and more at our relationship with online social media, and how it stunts our ability to live in the real world. (You may point out the irony of this post being made on Facebook, if you wish.) Wade Watts, the main character of the film, lives his entire life in the Oasis, and he’s absorbed the world created by James Halliday into his DNA; he worships Halliday, like others, and sees him as the pinnacle for what he created. Listen to the things he tells Art3mis he would do if he won the contest Halliday set in motion with his death- it sounds a lot like what people, when they’re young, would do with millions of dollars from winning the lottery. Compare that to the end of the film when he does win (I told you spoilers were coming), and is confronted by reward of half a trillion dollars, and control of the Oasis. His priorities have changed, not just because of the real-world implications he’s seen in a ruthless corporation like IOI winning, but because the contest is as much about understanding who Halliday was, and what he came to regret in his life, than it is races to the finish or working out puzzles. The clues found at the Halliday Journals are not clever “easter eggs” but painful emotional realizations Halliday came to understand at the end about what truly mattered in life. Money and power getting in the way of friendship. The “leap not taken” of telling the love of your life how you feel about them. And finally, the simple joys of life beyond a reward at the end. Wade Watts thinks he loves Art3mis based on the image she presents him in the Oasis, but by the end, he knows he loves Samantha (her real name) because of what he’s learned about her in the real world, and who she is beyond an avatar she has made online. The Oasis is a great place to go and catch up with people you meet, or may not be able to see in real life, but you have to unplug to truly feel like you’re living.
We’re at a crossroads of society when it comes to interacting with one another, and online interaction has made it easier to not just meet people, but easier to push people away. A lot of people use social media to present their best selves, their best life, but also find a way to let their worst selves come out because, let’s face it, it’s easier to attack someone from the comfort of behind a keyboard than it would be face-to-face. I know I’m guilty of that, and I’m trying to get better at it. I think Spielberg’s film, despite the things it doesn’t really address in online culture, has some important things to say about our responsibilities to one another when it comes to how we interact online, and how we can make easy assumptions about people, but it also reinforces the idea that living exclusively online is not living at all. The Oasis provides value, but not as much as the real world has to offer when it comes to surviving as a species. After all, the real world is the only place you can get a good meal at.
