SPOILER ALERT!!!:
Plot details for Ready Player One follow.Ready Player One is probably the most relevant work in pop culture today. It well describes the retromania of the 1980's that has overrun much of film, television, and video games. It is the tableau of our obsession with reference, reverence, and remix. Even if you don't care for
Ready Player One, it's worth paying attention to as the premiere epitome of our geek-heavy, nostalgia-driven art.
Ernest Cline's science-fiction "novel", if it can even be called such, is perhaps one of the worst works of literature I have ever tried to read. The prose is the equivalent of hearing of the geekiest friends you know prattle on about every episode of
Star Trek that they've ever seen, while failing to translate to you what makes
Star Trek so appealing. We've all been on both sides of that. Much of the novel's substance is wholly dependent on reference to other works of media, and it does little interesting with them. Unlike other quality works of crossover fiction,
Kingdom Hearts,
Super Smash Brothers,
Who Framed Roger Rabbit,
The Avengers, and
The Lego Movie, there's no common theme or coherence to the references aside from the fluid emotion of nostalgia. So the referential composition of
Ready Player One can come out looking like a mess. Also, unlike the homage heavy works of
Star Wars,
Kill Bill,
Stranger Things,
Pulp Fiction,
Super 8,
Cowboy Bebop,
Dragon Ball, and
Indiana Jones, it doesn't properly utilize past reference to create an original mythos. So the whole product can also come off as derivative to the point of near plagiarism. Most of the problems in reading
Ready Player One are present in the fact that it is a work of literature that refers more to visual works than to literary ones. It also doesn't help that Cline is hardly an expert at the old rule of "show, don't tell." It's always preferable to
see a Quidditch match than to read about it, so it should be of no surprise that
Ready Player One translates better into film.
Steven Spielberg, like Wes Anderson, is a director who is able to bring his skills from live-action into animation. Spielberg's adaptation of Herge's
Tintin, perhaps the best film ever produced by
Nickelodeon, had both engaging adventure and immersive use of cinematography. Spielberg similarly crafts impressive visual set-pieces in
Ready Player One. The first is a race through New York City imperiled by
Jurassic Park's T-Rex and
King Kong's mighty ape. The second is an exploration through The Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's
The Shining. The third is an epic battle where the Iron Giant and
Mobile Suit Gundam's RX-78 do battle with Mechagodzilla. The end result makes for some harmless, but shallow fun. Through film, Spielberg is able to express the geeky passion that I imagine drew many to Cline's book. To a degree, every geek can relate to this version
Ready Player One. Some not as passionately as others, but still. You also start to wonder what all the damn fuss is about. Fans hail this story as though it is some clever exploration of nostalgia or virtual reality, and not another Millennial-pandering
BuzzFeed listicle with a plot written around it. While critics decry it as an alt-right Gamergate fantasy that celebrates the "toxic geek culture" of entitled white males, or whatever. This isn't to say that
Ready Player One doesn't have some dumb messages, with its infamous rant on masturbation and such, but this seems more to be Cline's sloppy way of expressing the sexual frustration of awkward introverts, than the crafting of a
Breitbart manifesto. He hardly strikes me as the type to make four-hour long rants about why Anita Sarkeesian's videos will bring an end to the video games industry. By the end of the day,
Ready Player One is all frosting and no cake, a sugar rush, and a forgettable one.
Black Panther and
A Quiet Place will probably be the first words on people's lips when they think back on 2018 in film.
Indeed,
Ready Player One is forgettable because it is conservative. Its use of reference is minimal, since, aside from the three major set pieces, a great deal of the licenses are blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameos. This restraint is preferable to Cline's scene-for-scene reenactments of
WarGames and
Monty Python in the book, but the end product is rather deflated. The Oasis in
Ready Player One is supposed to feel playing with your toybox, except that it feels like your father is trying to play along with you. The problem is twofold. Spielberg is a fan of 80's culture, but not a fanboy who grew up with it. Cline admires the creativity of these properties, but fails to be very creative himself. In the race, the Batmobile and the Mach 5 both appear, but neither utilize the gadgetry that made them famous. It certainly would've made for a more exciting race. Freddy Kruger and Jason Vorhees only show up to get killed. They would've made interesting additions to
The Shining sequence. Gandalf, The Joker, Marvin The Martian, Sonic The Hedgehog, Batman, and Chun-Li all appear in the film, but none of them do anything interesting or noteworthy. It's wasted potential. Any geek worth their salt with these many properties on hand would certainly have done more with them, in fact, we already have examples. The highest aspirations of
Ready Player One were already accomplished in Monty Oum's short films:
Dead Fantasy and
Haloid. Or we can go further back to Gainax's
Daicon films, which were a more colorful and vibrant celebration of geek culture than the rather grimy levels of the Oasis. Perhaps I'd be more impressed by the film if it followed more in line with
The Shining scene, an exploration of popular 80's films with unexpected variations. We all acted out movies when we were kids, but changed certain things up to make them more exciting. It would've been fun to see
Ready Player One explore this creative area of nostalgia, but oh well.
One can't help but suspect that the Oasis is in our future, and to an extent, we already live in it. The world is becoming more and more digital, while nostalgia fills up so much of our entertainment. It is a world where people rarely ever go outside to interact, while we are all too interested navel-gazing at our youth to create anything new. That's worrisome, but given the film's lukewarm reception, it's probably a long way off.
Ready Player One's flimsy attempt to compromise between the Oasis and the real world can come off as a cop-out, but it's much closer to everyday life than it appears. While going outside and meeting real people is important, so too is fantasy and escapism. Each of these realms provides us with different levels of experience and emotion. It is true that fantasy doesn't provide everything the real world does, but neither is the real world always a satisfying experience. These two realms should not oppose each other, nor overtake each other, but reinforce each other in symbiosis. This interplay is touched upon in
Ready Player One, but never explored in any memorable way. While some fantasies are either deathly or divine in their draw, this one is neither. It's marshmallow cereal without the grains, though it'll probably give you less cavities.
