I don’t think I ever anticipated seeing the day when the release of a Steven Spielberg-directed sci-fi adventure would be greeted with such widespread disdain as we’ve seen for Ready Player One. Sure, as the king of the blockbuster, more or less responsible for inventing the format as we know it along with George Lucas, Spielberg is always going to be the target of some derision from those of a more high brow and/or anti-mainstream inclination, which may well include a good portion of cult film enthusiasts; but as the director of Jaws, ET, the Indiana Jones movies, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and more besides, the man is responsible for more than his fair share of all-time greats, significantly changing the face of film more than once in the past 43 years. And in some instances, he’s done this with films based on source material which wasn’t exactly earth-shattering; anyone who’s ever read Peter Benchley’s original novel Jaws can tell you it’s nowhere near as well-executed and significant to literature as Spielberg’s adaptation was to cinema, and I daresay the same is true of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park.
And yet, Spielberg’s decision to bring Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel Ready Player One to the screen has, for a vocal portion of online fandom, proved something of a tipping point. The book has long been divisive; while acclaimed by some as one of the most enjoyable and forward-thinking science fiction novels of recent times, others have blasted it as dim-witted, derivative and sloppily written, with a painfully excessive over-reliance on pop cultural references. There’s a lot to be said for both sides of the argument, but to my mind the key strength of Cline’s Ready Player One is its portrait of a world in which social media and gaming are indistinguishable, and the vast majority of the world’s population seeks to spend as much of its waking hours within the virtual world as possible, because the real world has completely gone to shit. All of this strikes me as an entirely logical, quite feasible progression of online culture as we know it in 2018. The question then becomes, does Ready Player One present its digital alternate universe as a cautionary tale, or every immature man-child’s dream come true?
The year is 2044; the place is Colombus, Ohio. Though home to some of the biggest tech companies in the world, the vast majority of the city’s population lives in poverty. Space is so limited and housing so expensive that most can only afford to live in the Stacks, trailer parks in which the domiciles are piled on top of one another. One such anonymous Stacks resident is Wade Owen Watts (Tye Sheridan), an orphaned teenager living with his largely apathetic aunt and her sleazebag boyfriend (Ralph Ineson cameo ahoy, The Witch fans). It’s a pretty grim existence – at least, in the short amount of time Wade spends without a VR visor and haptic gloves on. See, though Wade may be a nobody in the real world, in the OASIS he’s Parzival, a funky anime-looking digital avatar with blue-ish skin, an old-school jeans vest, and his own personalised DeLorean. The OASIS is kind of like the bastard love child of Facebook and World of Warcraft multiplied by a billion, and filled up largely with obsessive fans like Wade who seek to emulate all their pop culture heroes.
But the biggest hero to them all is James Halliday (Spielberg’s recent go-to guy Mark Rylance), the video game designer who created the OASIS, initially in collaboration with his friend Ogden Morrow (Hollywood’s go-to fanboy Simon Pegg). It’s been several years since Halliday died, leaving behind a video message informing OASIS users that, somewhere within the near-boundless digital universe he brought into being, the designer left behind a carefully hidden Easter Egg which will grant the person who discovers it both the entirety of his immense personal fortune, and even more importantly the controlling share of the OASIS. Wade is but one of innumerable Gunters (egg-hunters) who have pretty much dedicated their lives to cracking the riddles that lead the way to the prize. But of course, it’s not just common gamer geeks like himself on the case; there’s also the unscrupulous corporation IOI, anxious to take over the OASIS in order to monetize it, and their executive Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) doesn’t care how many lives he has to destroy in order to win.
The main reason Spielberg’s decision to direct Ready Player One raised so many eyebrows is that Cline’s original novel is absolutely bursting at the seams with 1980s movie references, with Spielberg’s work naturally being a big part of that. Not only that, but 1980s TV shows, music and of course video games are also heavily referenced. The way the novel (and subsequently the film) justifies this over-indulgent geekery is that Halliday, having been a child of the 1980s, was obsessed with its pop culture; and, as such, the Gunters are too. Search Ready Player One on social media and you’ll find no shortage of snarky piss-takes of Cline’s prose, widely derided for reading like it was written by a socially-backward, virginal adolescent with no life outside of his fanboy fixations (of course, the book is written in the first person with a central protagonist who fits that exact description, so I’m not sure how else it could ever have read). The film cuts back on this just a bit, in no small part thanks to significantly changing the challenges Wade and co face to get the keys; let’s face it, re-enacting the entirety of WarGames and playing a perfect game of Pac-Man was never going to make for especially compelling viewing.
The film also makes significant changes as regards Wade’s relationship with the other ‘High Five’ Gunters, most significantly Olivia Cooke’s Samantha, AKA Art3mis. Their awkward love story has been one of the most heavily criticised elements of the novel, and not without some justification; although accusations of flagrant sexism and/or misogyny are, I think, heavily overstating the case. Even so, it’s probably for the best that the film plays things very differently, bringing the characters together outside of the OASIS far earlier, and giving Samantha more vital a role to play in the final act. I expect there will be complaints that Cooke is clearly far too beautiful for a character who’s meant to be something of an ugly duckling; but then, much the same can be said of Sheridan as Wade. The most important thing is they’re both endearing actors, easy to root for. As for the remainder of the High Five: I’m loathe to say much regarding Wade’s best buddy Aech for fear of spoilers (not that the film’s marketing seems too worried about that), but I will say that Daito (Win Morasaki) and Sho (Philip Zhao – not sure why his character’s name has been shortened) remain pretty under-developed, though they do get their moments to shine.
Still, the question of whether Ready Player One: The Movie can win over the critics of Ready Player One: The Novel rather pales in significance next to the question of whether or not it’s going to win over the wider audience. The jury may be out there. For me, it’s one of those that I think I’ll need to see once or twice more before I can fully make up my mind; having read and enjoyed the novel, I spent much of my time noting where it did or did not adhere to the existing story, and the rest trying to keep up with the pop cultural references that made it in, again some of which differ from the novel (Ultraman’s a notable absentee, though he has some laudable stand-ins). Given this site’s genre proclivities, it bears mentioning that there’s a little more horror stuff here than you’d necessarily expect, with one old favourite playing a major role midway, and more than a few horror icons making brief appearances – although for me, the biggest Easter Egg was spotting none other than Hellraiser’s Clare Higgins in a small role.
In this age when new megabudget blockbusters arrive in cinemas week-in week-out, I’m not sure if Ready Player One packs enough of a punch to really stand apart from the crowd. Nonetheless it’s an enjoyable ride, and in many respects an accurate reflection of the current obsessive-compulsive state of fan culture – even if, like the novel before it, it may be a little too content to merely indulge, rather than critique as deeply as it occasionally promises to.
Ready Player One is in cinemas now, from Warner Bros.