'Ready Player One' - Review

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

In Ready Player One - Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernest Cline’s bestselling novel - the Halo assault rifle makes the wrong sound effect. Now, I get it: that seems a ridiculously pedantic nitpick to lose sleep over, but I did. For a film built and marketed almost solely on an ability to draw characters, vehicles, weapons and more from every facet of popular culture, it’s an important and revealing lapse in detail. In one tiny error, it betrays this cavalcade of intellectual properties vaguely arranged into a narrative as the shallow, slogan t-shirt-level text it really is.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. Cline’s book (which first went to print in 2011) is - to put it lightly - a problematic text that’s quite happy to wallow in its own nerdbro ‘nice guy’ shtick while a plot loosely forms around it like mould on a discarded pizza box. The plot is nominally the same: in Ohio, 2045, young dweeb Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) spends most of his days escaping the grimy boredom of the real world into a virtual reality landscape known as The Oasis. Taking the pseudonym Parzival and hiding his schlubby form behind a Final Fantasy-style avatar, Wade engages in races, battles and more in a world where users can adopt the form of any character, pilot any vehicle or wield any weapon from the entire history of popular culture. The Oasis’ creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), has left three keys scattered across the vast imagined universe that will unlock enormous fortune, and Wade’s chance encounter with longtime rival Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) leads him on a quest for the first key. The Slugworth to Rylance’s Wonka-like Halliday, and armed with his own plans for the reward, is industrial megalomaniac Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, proving that even the most engaging faces in Hollywood can’t escape looking like idiots once the VR goggles go on).

It’s not as if Spielberg is new to wrangling difficult source material (no-one takes on The War of the Worlds lightly), but the original product is so inherently vacuous that even with the guiding hand of a master, the adaptation falls into all the same shortcomings. Besides the mistrust of corporate oversight and Sheridan’s wide-eyed optimist in a flannel shirt (calling to mind Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind), there’s very little in the overall composition to reveal Spielberg behind the curtain. Or perhaps that’s because (like the scatterbrained narrative and boring, unmemorable characters), he’s obscured - nay, suffocated - by digital recreations of the characters, locales and general paraphernalia of the 70s and 80s.  

I’m not going to pretend I’m totally impervious to Cline’s party tricks: having been raised on the films my Dad loved as a teenager (and as a loud-and-proud member of the ‘The Iron Giant is a masterpiece’ club), I couldn't conceal a small smile seeing the DeLorean from Back to the Future sweep across a snowy plateau in pursuit of Mechagodzilla. I even found myself doubled over laughing during a lengthy sequence set in a particularly divisive Stanley Kubrick film, but more at the sheer audacity than any of the quip-centric dialogue. 

But it’s in those small moments of true homage that the sentimental streak that has never bothered me in Spielberg’s work finally drew blood. The glorification of Gen-X escapism here goes beyond self-aware cynicism and into blind, lovesick devotion, which somehow makes the cost even more painful. While Cline is enjoying himself reliving a childhood spent in awe of his director, what of the actual children and teenagers in the audience? Ready Player One is not interested in entertaining them beyond meaningless CGI reference vomit, nor teaching them anything new, just revelling in their parents’ nostalgia and relaying the “It’s not about winning” diatribe they’ve already suffered a thousand times in their real life Easter egg hunts. 

I digress: expecting a commentary on the true potential of virtual worlds, or the ways men and women present and interact in digital spaces might be too much to ask from what is essentially a wall of Funko Pop figures masquerading as a movie. For some, the sight of The Iron Giant stomping on robotic spider tanks or the bike from Akira racing a Tyrannosaurus Rex through New York City will be a high worth seeking. If that’s all you need to have fun at the movies, Ready Player One will provide. The ambition to be a universe-spanning adventure with plot taking a backseat would be no problem at all, but only if the film had any imagination on behalf of its own world (there’s a notable lack of any culture, popular or not, from the nearly 50 years separating the turn of the millennium from the film’s 2045 setting). For all the slick visual effects and sheer volume of entities vying for screen time, it feels like well-trod ground. The enormous battle scenes are already the stuff of a million children’s bedrooms, collector’s exhibits and internet fan art.

It’s the polar opposite of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi; a monastery of pop culture’s biggest parish - notable only by its almost utter absence here - that preaches a different kind of reverence, one that takes something powered by nostalgic affection and launches it in subversive new directions. To see the largest franchise in film history shake up the formula while a movie with one thousands times the fanboy firepower can muster little more than “Hey, recognise that?”, it cuts to the real philosophy at the heart of Ready Player One: when you can bring back anything from the past, why make anything new at all?