Ready Player One

Geek culture has reached a mass breaking point. With superheroes taking over the screen, new video games often out-grossing films on opening weekend, the unfunny losers of The Big Bang Theory being one of TV's biggest "comedy" sensations and the ubiquity of nerdy ephemera in stores everywhere is proof of this. What was once considered niche and nerdy is now mainstream and bankable. And with more methods than ever of taking in all this mass media, the blurring of lines between formats has truly begun. Riding on this wave was Ernest Cline's best-selling 2012 novel Ready Player One. I have only discovered in recent weeks though that Ready Player One is possibly one of the most divisive best-selling novels of recent years. Some have declared it as the Holy Grail of Geekdom. Others have decried it for its racism, sexism, homophobia, unlikable main character, poorly defined world-building, terrible prose and fundamentally not getting why people obsess, engage with and love popular culture. And from what I've read ... it's hard to see past all that. I mean I thought the early trailers for the film adaptation looked bad anyway but reading the book has made me slightly dread this one. Steven Spielberg clearly has his work cut out ...

Wade Watts is our lead "character" in Ready Player One

The year is 2045 and the world is on the brink of societal collapse. However, the denizens of the future have found solace in an online world named the OASIS, a boundless universe where, via VR headsets, people can become video game avatars to live out their greatest fantasies against the backdrop of every piece of pop culture imaginable. The world was created by eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance), who has recently passed away. Halliday left behind a vast fortune to those who can find an 'Easter Egg' hidden in the game, which is locked behind three keys scattered around for players to find. Enter ... Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), aka Parzival (his in-game avatar name) who has become something of a Halliday expert, seeing the OASIS creator's obsession with 80s popular culture, and his own personal history, as the key to finding the Easter Egg...However an evil corporation named IOI, headed up Nolan Sorrento (Rogue One survivor Ben Mendelsohn) seeks to obtain the Egg for themselves in order to gain complete domain over the OASIS...

While Spielberg tries his best (he is, even at his worst, a consummate professional), many of the book's biggest problems I outlined in the opening paragraph are still here. The main character, played by Tye Sheridan, is about as bland as he is in the novel and, ultimately, has little driving his motivation outside of winning the contest. We know and understand little of what makes Wade tick. His motivation is just shallow and he faces no real consequences for his actions throughout the story. I mean the film tries, I suppose. His life seems pretty crappy, living in a huge stack of trailers with his rubbish aunt and abusive boyfriend, his only solace being the digital world and decades of geeky media, with an emphasis on the 1980s (the decade Halliday grew up in and idolised). Yet Wade never really engages with the world or pop culture as a fan - these are merely objects and clues to unlocking the fortune hidden in the OASIS. He is just a walking talking Hallidaypedia with no real love of the material, along no sense of personality or charisma. I can think of several classic 80s genre films that got the "down-on-his-luck-protagonist" right ... maybe Ready Player One should have taken some more notes on that... Ultimately, his drive is a bit of mystery with no real stakes involved and the film doesn't spend adequate time establishing what is at risk of being lost. Well, they do a couple of things. Spoilers - his horrible aunt dies but this is swiftly forgotten. The evil corporation tries to extert itself over our hero, yet they are so comically inept as to render any threat meaningless. Wade becomes the hero, gets the girl, and wins control over the OASIS. And that, coupled with the lack of threat, doesn't make for a satisfying character arc.

The film has some nifty visuals and good sequences but the whole is just a giant mis-judged mess

Wade is synonymous with a wider problem with the film - how tensionless the whole thing is. Problem with me is that I don't tend to like stories set in virtual reality - my biggest issue being that there is often little consequence to actions taken in the virtual world having little to no fallout in the real world. Only The Matrix, in my opinion, got this right. I mean sure, as mentioned, the evil corporation moves against Wade and his friends but the ease at which they avoid their would be captors makes them almost feel almost invincible - which harms the film's narrative as a whole. And the worst thing that can happen to our heroes in the OASIS is that they lose all their loot ... big deal. Ready Player One is the ultimate consequenceless free geek power fantasy which invariably taps into some fairly toxic parts of the internet (i.e. the Gamergate community) with little to no repercussions in the real world. So all the action scenes are rendered in breath-taking detail, with more recognisable characters than you can shake a stick at it but the central core is so tensionless and shallow it's hard to get invested.

The rest of the characters are served a little better, such as Olivia Cook's Artemis who gets something resembling a character arc, even if they are essentially cardboard cutouts. I did enjoy Rylance's suitably awakard performance as Halliday and the film reaches something of a satisfying coda to this character. There are several nifty scenes. The adaptation, wisely to some degree, makes the challenges a bit more cinematic than they are in the book (they basically bare no resemblance to the challenges as written). The opening car chase scene is phenomenally executed and one sequence, in which a classic Stanley Kubrick film is recreated wholesale, is a treat on a technical level even if it is borderline sacrilegious. The problem is when you get past the whole "hey, look a reference to something you know" the film offers very little as a substitute. So you get loads of wonderful 80s pop songs, plenty of appearances from video game characters and a plot twist based around an obscure Atari 2600 game...and that's about it. The final battle scene descends into a blurry CGI mess of iconic childhood heroes, yet I just felt ... nothing. I am a firm believer in the positive effects of consuming media yet Ready Player One doesn't seem interested in engaging with this at all. It just reminded me of better films, songs and games

Look, I'm a geek. Self proclaimed and no shame. And while it masks itself as being a celebration of the liberating effects of the internet on individuals and a love letter to "geek" culture, I'm not convinced that Ready Player One really gets any of this. It's flashy and hits several audience pleasing moments, largely in part due to Spielberg's own personal touch of magic, but the core is as fake as the OASIS itself. There's little at stake and no sense of why the OASIS is worth defending. At the end of the day, I can't get behind a film like this especially with the cold, almost cynical edge to the material. I know a lot of people are enjoying this film on a visceral level, and that's fine, but for me I was just left bitter and wishing I'd loaded up my character in the MMO Final Fantasy XIV instead. And no amount of Buckaroo Banzai references is going to make me change my mind about that ...

It almost seems like a film primed for them terrible click bait videos on YouTube - "31 Easter Eggs You Missed In Ready Player One: #17 Will Shock You"

And don't even get me started on how they used The Iron Giant. Just ... don't ...