Special thanks to Michael Heaton of The Plain Dealer for inviting me to a press
screening of this movie. Please check out his reviews and
his Minister of Culture column.
When they announced that Ready
Player One, the bestselling sci-fi novel by Ernest Cline, was getting a
movie, I was a bit skeptical. On one hand, it was inevitable. It’s a New York
Times bestseller, and it’s heavily centered on nostalgia, escapism and how the
Internet plays a big part in coping with our reality, which, unless you’ve been
living under a rock for the past two years, is pretty freaking relevant right
now. On the other hand, the source material is rather dubious. It reads like it
was written by the Member Berries from South
Park, with the prose consisting mostly of the main character listing off
his pop culture nerd credentials, his relation between him and his love
interest is incredibly uncomfortable, and, whether intentionally or not,
highlight a lot of the entitlement issues of geek culture that have been
plaguing it pretty much since the beginning. The only way this could’ve worked
is if they cut out all the problematic parts, or just gut it completely and
start over from scratch. Thankfully they got Steven Spielberg to spearhead this
project. He’s not as infallible as most people think, but he knows how to make
this kind of stuff work, and he’s made stellar movies out of
not-so-stellar books before. So how does he fare?
Our story takes place in a future where many of our
resources have been depleted and society has gone to the pits, so people cope
by escaping to a virtual world called the OASIS, where you can do whatever you
want, go wherever you want, and be whatever you want to be. The only limits are
your imagination. When James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the eccentric creator of this
virtual paradise dies, he sends a message telling everyone that he’s hidden
three keys in the OASIS, and whoever finds all three will inherit his vast fortune
and become its ruler. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a Halliday fanboy whose best
memories are in the OASIS, is just one of many hunting for the keys, along with
his best friend Aech (Lena Waithe) and fellow key hunter Art3mis (Olivia
Cooke). But they also have to fight against another major tech company who are
looking to take control by winning the game, and will do whatever it takes to
get what they want.
First thing’s first, the movie is much better than the book.
I know that’s not saying much, but what the movie has that the book lacks is
soul. That’s not to say it dials back on the excessive pop culture references. Most
of the OASIS’s inhabitants create avatars based on their favorite movie, TV and
video game characters, so you could pause this movie at any moment and any
frame you land on could be a Where’s
Waldo? page packed to the gills with intellectual properties. They become
even harder to spot during the movie’s highly kinetic action sequences, where
the camera snakes and twists its way through madcap races, haunted house,
zero-gravity dance clubs and Lord of the
Rings sized skirmishes. It’s a stark contrast to the real world, where cities
have been reduced to trailers stacked on top of each other held together with
flimsy scaffolding. If there’s any horror in the framing of this dystopia, it’s
buried in coats upon coats of Spielberg whimsy. In fact, the main reason this
movie works as well as it does is because Spielberg’s specialty is finding the
soulful center of even the most cynical of cash grabs.
Pop culture overload aside, it’s all reflective of our
current time. A technologically advanced but environmentally devastated world ruled
by an uncaring oligarchy where the citizens prefer to escape to a nostalgic virtual
playground where everyone is obsessed with the pop culture of the past? All one
needs to see the parallels is look at the front pages of CNN and Buzzfeed. In a
world of throwbacks, social media, VR gaming and crypto-currency, it’s something
you can easily see becoming reality. Nostalgia is very in right now, and Spielberg had a big hand in making the
current cultural landscape that way. It rarely challenges or interrogates the fan
culture it pays tribute to. Halliday is a brilliant but socially maladjusted
introvert who built a world out of the menagerie of his favorite things from
his childhood as a way to share them with the world in the only way he knows
how, and in turn passed his obsessions and neurosis on to the generation he
helped shape. Wade, on the other hand, is maladjusted in the sense that his
devotion in his study of his hero helped him stay one step ahead in the game,
but absolutely kneecapped him his social interactions. He’s still a bit of a
clueless moron, but it’s a huge step-up from the book, where he puts on a “nice
guy” attitude with Art3mis after his failed attempts at romance (at least they
cut out the part with the sex doll), and his reaction to meeting Aech in real
life his much more tastefully handled here.
The dramatic irony is that this movie wants to have its cake
and eat it too. The inherent irony of the ultimate showdown being between an
evil corporation that wants to monopolize the greatest digital goldmine in the
world and a group of uber nerds whose identities are centered around their
affection for corporate ephemera seems lost on the makers of this movie.
Perhaps the villain (Ben Mendelsohn), a corporate bigwig whose ultimate
downfall is being a noob who doesn’t understand the game as well as our heroes,
is symbolic of the film itself, a festive meatloaf of all the things we enjoyed
as kids. Is it equally hypocritical that the ultimate message of the movie is to
live your life and not to get so sucked into the bubble of our selected
passions, while also catering to an audience who spent their youth doing
exactly that? Or does this disguise make their point more poignant? I like to
think so. To quote one of the characters quoting Groucho Marx, “I’m not crazy
about reality, but it’s the only place to get a decent meal.”
Bottom line, Ready
Player One is a good time that shines despite its source material. In fact,
the fact that he was able to wring something decent out it is a true testament
to Spielberg’s mastery of film. Even if you still have gripes with it, he still
manages to make it a fun ride. Considering what he had to work with, this is
possibly the best version this story one could reasonably ask for.
7/10, Matinee
No comments:
Post a Comment