Ready Play­er One

You can tell who the bad impres­sion­ists are straight away. Their act usu­al­ly begins with some­thing like this: ​“Hey there, I’m Keanu Reeves,” or, ​“Clint East­wood here…” or, ​“This is Eddie Mur­phy speak­ing”. The gam­ble of allow­ing the impres­sion to fly on its own – and in turn let­ting select mem­bers of an audi­ence guess the make-believe per­sona – is quashed in favour of quick­ly giv­ing the game away. It’s a form of des­per­ate self-jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. We com­plain that film crit­ics and those who write about art are too trig­ger hap­py when it comes to spoil­ing, but what about the artists who too freely hand out the keys to their own work?

There’s a fair amount of auto-spoi­ler­ing in Steven Spielberg’s rick­ety pop con­fec­tion, Ready Play­er One, as char­ac­ters strut around dig­i­tal land­scapes while point­ing out ref­er­ences and explain­ing things among them­selves. ​“Oh look it’s the Iron Giant!” or, ​“Hey, isn’t that Kaneda’s motor­bike from Aki­ra?” If an onlook­er didn’t man­age to recog­nise either of these icon­ic machines, then nam­ing them point blank kin­da kills it for those that did. But that’s per­haps part of this film’s unwieldy genet­ic make-up – it attempts to offer a care­ful­ly curat­ed gold­en greats pack­age of late 20^th cen­tu­ry nerd cul­ture while rid­ing on a script that pleads a con­stant case for its own wider relevance.

The year is 2045 and, as Van Halen’s ​‘Jump’ (shud­der) blasts over the sound­track, the cam­era glides us direct­ly towards The Stacks, a tee­ter­ing, high­rise town­ship in Colum­bus, Ohio which appears as an Amer­i­can­ised ver­sion of a favela. Lest it need stat­ing, soci­ety is in the process of being sucked down the U‑bend, and we arrive at the point where it’s swirling around aim­less­ly in the backwash.

Trash heaps line the streets and husks of old cars form mini moun­tains. Hous­ing, mean­while, is lit­tle more than a shel­ter from the ele­ments, a bolt­hole with enough heat, light and wifi capa­bil­i­ty to enable con­nec­tion to the Oasis, a vir­tu­al­ly-ren­dered alter­na­tive to the ardu­ous toil of real­i­ty where a plugged-in pop­u­lous fran­ti­cal­ly enter into con­tests of chance and skill in order to expand their cred­it lines. The losers find them­selves in a prison pod at the local loy­al­ty farm, pay­ing back debts to the odi­ous cor­po­rate leech­es at IOI. It rides on the cyn­i­cal belief that, in trou­bled times, humans would nat­u­ral­ly resort to escape rather than regeneration.

But it’s all change at the top: god­head coder James Hal­l­i­day (played by Mark Rylance, should’ve been played by Rick Mora­nis) has kicked the lunch­pail. He stacked up his tril­lions as a com­put­er pro­gram­mer, and because of this he is an awk­ward anti­so­cial intro­vert. He has decid­ed to cede his king­dom to the first play­er who can uncov­er an East­er egg nes­tled in a hid­den cor­ner of the Oasis.

Ben Mendehlson’s pan­tomime cor­po­rate nabob, Nolan Sor­ren­to, has divert­ed resources at IOI to make sure this dream chal­lenge becomes a hos­tile takeover, and he can mon­e­tise the Oasis for all its infi­nite worth. Tye Sheri­dan, an actor who looks like he has been bred to star in a Spiel­berg movie, is the cocky sol­dier of for­tune, Wade Watts (aka Parzi­val), who proves to be the dig­i­tal arrow in Sorrento’s jack-boot­ed heel.

Ernest Cline’s 2011 best­seller is the source of this lav­ish adap­ta­tion, and Spiel­berg has tak­en great pains to retain as much of the pop cul­tur­al arcana as his lawyers will allow. In con­cep­tu­al terms, imag­ine if The Beast­ie Boys had only sam­pled tune­ful, 1980s dri­ve­time hits while mak­ing ​‘Paul’s Bou­tique’. Yet the direc­tor has also been sad­dled with an absolute lemon of a sto­ry­line, a stan­dard issue saga of kids ris­ing up against adult oppres­sion that seems like a manda­to­ry ingre­di­ent of all Young Adult literature.

In his defence, Spiel­berg doesn’t appear at all inter­est­ed in exploit­ing the story’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary under­tow, instead plac­ing a wide-eyed focus on where his hum­ming bird-like cam­era will dart next. This sug­ar-rush sen­si­bil­i­ty only gets him so far.

Spiel­berg has said of Ready Play­er One that audi­ences should accept it as a ​“movie” rather than a ​“film”. The sub­text to that state­ment is that he doesn’t want his fan­base to look too close­ly at what he’s made, and instead they should bask in the super­fi­cial daz­zle of each bom­bas­tic set piece. And even though there’s some­thing a lit­tle trag­ic in hav­ing to advise peo­ple on how to con­sume the piece of art you’ve lov­ing­ly cre­at­ed, his state­ment does work as a damn­ing assess­ment of a work which prizes flip­pant, in-the-moment spec­ta­cle over a deep­er inves­ti­ga­tion into the social ram­i­fi­ca­tions of this unique duel existence.

It offers a grudg­ing cri­tique of gam­ing cul­ture, par­rot­ing the banal les­son that, yes, the real world can offer sen­sa­tion and expe­ri­ence that no machine can repli­cate, even with the aid of a full-body impact suit with ful­ly cal­i­brat­ed crotch pads. And yet its ultra pre­scrip­tive, lev­el up-like plot machi­na­tions cleave to the lin­ear ​“col­lect all the keys to win” com­pe­ti­tion ele­ment of most com­put­er games, with none of the sense of achieve­ment or discovery.

A weak cen­tral con­flict and an inabil­i­ty to make the stakes feel con­se­quen­tial means that the film doesn’t evolve. Mendehlson’s vil­lain is too sil­ly to be scary. It drifts towards inevitabil­i­ty. There seems so much poten­tial in the notion of liv­ing a spec­tral dou­ble life, being giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to build a ​“per­fect” copy of your­self and ques­tions of how a digi­tised self-image chips away at the human soul and the nature of roman­tic con­nec­tiv­i­ty. Yet unlike Spielberg’s 2001 mas­ter­piece, AI: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, the sto­ry pays mere lip ser­vice to these rich sub themes.

James Halliday’s trio of tri­als each amount to a search for human com­pas­sion, though Spiel­berg doesn’t do enough to present his char­ac­ters as any­thing more than ath­let­ic cyphers whose quest is to join togeth­er dots. Genre cinema’s least com­pelling trait is being made to watch peo­ple solv­ing puz­zles, and here it’s the back­bone of the entire enterprise.

Wade him­self is per­haps one of Spielberg’s least excit­ing and most func­tion­al pro­tag­o­nists – even his dig­i­tal avatar looks like one of the blue Avatar crea­tures cross-processed with some­one who lis­tens to punk records on Spo­ti­fy. Olivia Cooke steps in as his spiky femme cohort Saman­tha (aka Art3mis), and even though she has all the agency and wits of Wade, there’s still a sense that she’s his ulti­mate prize rather than the oth­er way around.

Spielberg’s great­ness as an artist lies in an abil­i­ty to forge unique images – to tap into a sense of awe that nat­u­ral­ly comes from see­ing some­thing for the first time. There is one sequence in Ready Play­er One where he comes close to this ecsta­t­ic trade­mark, but it’s an ear­ly high the film is unable to repli­cate. One lat­er sequence, involv­ing an extend­ed homage to Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing, will either delight or repulse depend­ing on whether you can accept the man­gling of a canon­i­cal clas­sic at the ser­vice of tepid iron­ic larks.

Along­side The Post, his recent polit­i­cal pot­boil­er about the Pen­ta­gon Papers, Ready Play­er One feels like Spiel­berg pan­der­ing direct­ly to audi­ence expec­ta­tion – giv­ing peo­ple what he thinks they want as opposed to main­lin­ing his own, fecund imag­i­na­tion. This is not a movie, but his impres­sion of a movie.