Ready Player One Lacks Game

By Katherine Monk

Why does Steven Spielberg always make the same mistake? Every time he tries to make technology and artificial reality the guts of the story, instead of the means of telling a story, he makes a great big-budget mess.

Ready Player One isn’t as bad as some Spielberg flops. But it feels like watching AI all over again: A boy gets lost in an alternate realm and makes friends with a robot, more or less.

Based on Ernest Cline’s 2011 book, Ready Player One takes place in the year 2045, after civilization collapsed and left Columbus, Ohio the fastest-growing city in the U.S. The business buzz is thanks to IOI (Innovative Online Industries), a corporation that designed the Oasis, a virtual world where people can don a pair of goggles and become someone else.

Because reality sucks, just about everyone in the world plugs into Oasis over the course of the day to escape the post-apocalyptic landscape and the workaday grind. For people like Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), it’s become the only reason to live. Wade is an orphan living with his aunt in a vertical trailer park — which looks exactly like it sounds; stacks upon stacks of RVs piled atop the other. He is a no one in the real world, but in Oasis, Wade is Parzival — a gifted player looking to win the game of all games.

For the Oasis isn’t just a place to waste time in a second skin, it’s a whole environment created by the late co-founder of IOI, James Halliday (Mark Rylance). Like Willy Wonka before him, Halliday’s main succession plan involves recruiting a pure-hearted player and handing him several tests. If he passes the moral and intellectual challenges, he’ll be in control of the virtual world.

Like Willy Wonka before him, Halliday’s main succession plan involves recruiting a pure-hearted player and handing him several tests. If he passes the moral and intellectual challenges, he’ll be in control of the virtual world.

For the current head of IOI (Ben Mendelsohn), Halliday’s Easter Egg hunt is a huge risk to his hold on power. He has plans to turn the Oasis into a consumer mall and cashing in on all your personal data, as well as enslaving humans who lose virtual money. Wade and his four friends stand in the way — and that means they must be removed, forcibly, from the board.

The plot is latter-day young adult head cheese — scraps of everything from Spielberg’s own repertoire to Maze Runner, Divergent and Hunger Games suspended in translucent, computer-generated frames. The result isn’t all that attractive, even when we’re in the magical VR mainframe where anything is supposedly possible.

James Cameron offered us a whole new reality in Avatar, but Ready Player One feels deja-vu from start to finish — from the familiar game play of racing a car, to the idea of a battle royale between different beasts. Character cliché compounds the problem. Wade is a your standard YA hero — reluctant but engaged. His romantic interest, Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), is an outsider as a result of a facial birthmark, and his best friend and sidekick is a wise-cracking cyborg.

The attempts at humour are probably the most painful part of the whole exercise. The jokes fall flatter than Fergie’s national anthem, mostly because we can hear them approaching five minutes before the punchline. Also, there’re no sense of rhythm between the actors, or even within the scenes themselves.

Spielberg can’t find the flow. Everything seems to eddy in a feeble swirl because he gets clogged up with characters and action without exploring the deeper emptiness within the human soul.

Like The Matrix, the whole point of Ready Player One was to question our need for escape. The fake world may be more fun than the real world, but ultimately, it’s not real — and therefore unable to nurture the deep spirit.

Spielberg can’t find the flow. Everything seems to eddy in a feeble swirl because he gets clogged up with characters and action without exploring the deeper emptiness within the human soul.

Spielberg waits until the last five minutes to articulate the actual message, and go figure, it’s not at all convincing. Metaphysics are not the Hollywood boy-king’s strength. He fumbles with the underlying philosophical underpinnings and leaves them loosely arranged somewhere beneath his pretty frames.

Metaphysics are not the Hollywood boy-king’s strength. He fumbles with the underlying philosophical underpinnings and leaves them loosely arranged somewhere beneath his pretty frames.

He tells us reality is better than artifice, but you never get the feeling Spielberg believes it himself. The man who made dinosaurs walk the earth and Harrison Ford raid ancient temples has delivered some of the most memorable moments of movie artifice in history. Dealing in the humble truths of the human condition is anathema to his entire oeuvre.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, March 29, 2018

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