Ready Player One (2018)

In a dystopian future, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is a simple-minded, selfish, undeveloped, pop-culture fanatic who we are supposed to like. He, like most people, spends all his time inside the OASIS, a virtual universe where people can be anything, sorta, but tend to go for things that were popular in the 1980s. The OASIS is the most important economic entity in the world, and how it is run can determine the fate of the planet. So when the trillionaire inventor of the OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylace), died, he didn’t will it into the hands of a carefully chosen committee, but instead set up a contest that seems to be about pop trivia, but is really about obsessively digging in to Halliday’s personal life. He is giving control of the world to any jackass who worshiped him. Wade, known as Parzival within the OASIS, isn’t worthy to run a hotdog stand, but he’s decided to go for the big prize. Working with him is Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), who is a resistance leader in the real world. She is more competent than Wade in every way, but she’s a girl, so she slips into a sidekick role. His friends are Aech (Lena Waithe), Sho (Philip Zhao), and Daito (Win Morisaki), who are all members of minority groups, so they stick to their sidekick roles as well, even though they too seem infinitely better than Wade. Opposing Wade is Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) the head of an evil corporation. Sure, his corporation runs debtor’s prisons (allowed by Halliday), but he’s really evil because he doesn’t know ‘80s pop culture, likes Nancy Drew (and you know what that means…), and wants to put ads in the OASIS, and ads are bad. (Good thing Ready Player One has no product placement). Wade must use all of his stalking skills and pure luck to win the contest and the girl.

Ready Player One is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with computer games instead of candy. That’s not my statement, but that of the author. But it is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory if Mike Teavee was the hero and Willy Wonka was a selfish sociopath who cared nothing about innocence or morality. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was also a kid’s book, made into a kid’s movie (at least the first version), where a certain amount of simplification of the universe and ethics and human behavior is reasonable for the intended audience. Ready Player One is filled with references to a time before any current kids were alive. It is a book, and film, specifically for adults who still think like children. The theme of this mess would be toxic if it wasn’t so poorly delivered that most people have no idea what it is.

So what is the theme? It is that pop culture has become a religion. While spelled out in the book, director Steven Spielberg prefers to simply grab every religious symbol he can and toss it in helter skelter. There’s cathedrals and heavenly clouds and shafts of light and kneeling before the representation of god. It’s not subtle. The main character is Parzival and he’s on a Grail quest.

And making pop culture your religion is bad. That’s the stated point. We shouldn’t elevate all this stuff above real life. Yeah… Except that is diluted down to “Hey, take a day off from obsessing over pop culture every once in a while.” That’s not much of a message, but it is a message—except it isn’t. Stating a message in a film doesn’t make it the message. Spielberg made this slip before in a much, much, much better film. In Jurassic Park, the theme is stated by Jeff Goldblum and boils down to, “Don’t do things just because you can, but carefully consider the consequences,” And while the plot does back that, the visuals say, “Dinosaurs are AWESOME!” Who left that film not wanting to make a dinosaur? In the end, the theme of Jurassic Park is that dinosaurs are so cool that nothing else should be considered in our mad dash to make them.

Ready Player One takes it further by not backing the theme with the story. How do you win the day? By obsessing about pop trivia and the makers of pop trivia. How to you get the girl? By obsessing about pop trivia and the makers of pop trivia. Obsessing about pop trivia is the only thing that matters (that and buying some of those sweet, sweet, Warner Bros licensed materials—really, this movie is a nonstop ad), and you need to worship that trivia and destroy anyone who isn’t part of your church. Sorrento doesn’t know the right trivia, so he must be stopped—sort of like how sending death threats to people who disliked Batman vs Superman is a perfectly reasonable thing as they aren’t part of the right sect. Now Sorrento does like some pop culture things, but he likes girls’ things, so… Go ahead, work out why liking Nancy Drew makes you open to ridicule, but praying to Mechagodzilla makes you cool. I’ll wait.

This pop culture religion that we’re told not to embrace, and then shown that embracing is the only thing worth doing, is the worst kind of religion. It is all words with no meaning. None of the references have any depth. You don’t need to know the meaning of The Shining, or the metaphor of the Iron Giant (hint: he doesn’t want to kill). Actually understanding pop culture, thinking about it, is of no use—you just have to be able to rattle off facts and feel it is cool. It’s how Warner Bros would like you to watch this movie: Don’t think about it, just feel it is cool.

It needed to be a lot cooler to pull that off. The visuals are…fine. There’s no great moments. Nothing like the first sight of the sauropods in Jurassic Park. It doesn’t even approach the level of the giant robots fighting giant monsters in Pacific Rim. Apparently in the future everyone will love graphics that look like cut scenes from the 2010s. They can have photo-realistic graphics as is pointed out in the “hacking” scene, but no one goes for that. Ah, but that’s thinking about this world, and no one involved in making this movie wants anyone to do that. The OASIS has been around for years but people haven’t dealt with the fact that what you look like inside the OASIS may be different than what you look like outside it—they deal with it the way someone in 2018 would. Ah, but there I go thinking about world-building, and Ready Player One doesn’t world-build; it just pours some pop culture icons in and stirs.

Ready Player One is a mildly sexist and racist film (women are trophies! Wohoo!) but its true foulness lies in its support of the nostalgia-fanboy mania that has fueled much of the problems in current “fandom”: gamergate, comicsgate, sad puppies, driving people off social media, etc, etc. Thank god it is so bad at it. None of these hate groups are using it as a rallying cry because all they see is a bunch of cool references. Instead of being a garbage fire, it’s empty. Did you see that Terminator 2 thumbs up? Yeah, that was cool. And a time reversal device is named after Robert Zemekis. That’s cool. And that’s all Warner Bros wants you to see. Don’t forget to buy your Buckaroo Banzai T-shirt and Iron Giant figurine when you pick up your blu-ray.