QR Film Reviews: Ready Player One
Ready Player One is Steven Spielberg’s ambitious VR blockbuster based on Ernest Cline’s 2011 science-fiction novel. While the film presents a truly incredible virtual landscape, it struggles with an often superfluous script and plot which drag down an otherwise exciting and imaginative film.
Ready Player One is the latest ambitious blockbuster from Steven Spielberg. Based on Ernest Cline’s novel of the same name, the story follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a young man living in Columbus, Ohio. Wade lives in the Stacks, a slum in Columbus made up of precarious towers of trailers. The world is not quite a dystopia but it is certainly on the brink.
To escape this reality people plug in to a futuristic virtual world known as the Oasis, created by James Halliday (Mark Rylance) & Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg). The story focuses on a competition launched by Halliday on his deathbed, to find his successor. Three keys hidden in the Oasis will reward the winner with Halliday’s fortune and control of his virtual world. The film picks up five years since the competition was announced as hundreds of Gunters continue to search for the prize. These include Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), CEO of IoI who employs armies of players to hunt for the keys in hopes of monetizing the Oasis for all it’s worth.
It’s a high risk contest for a very high concept film. As is to be expected the film relies very heavily on special effects. The effects are fantastic and never appear cheap or unbelievable. The film is a visual marvel which strikes the perfect balance between cartoonish and hi-tech. The effects are fanciful but grounded in a reality, which like the potential future, the film is set on give the film an air of realism. This balance provides a fun, adventurous tone evident in older Spielberg films like E.T and Indiana Jones. This is reflected in the story, a swashbuckling adventure which seamlessly jumps between the real and virtual worlds to tell an exciting and interesting story.
No movie can live on its special effects alone, this film is led by a largely unproven cast. Watts and his fellow Gunters Aech (Lena Waithe) and Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) carry the film well with solid performances. The film struggles with a relationship between Watts and Art3mis which falls relatively flat with flat dialogue that breaks your suspense of disbelief. There are a number of moments like this in the script which ruin your immersion in the story, something very ironic considering the VR subject of the film. Ben Mendelsohn’s Sorrento is a good, if unoriginal corporate villain, and his over the top performance plays well into the high octane set pieces which make up the film, especially the climactic battle. T J Miller’s I-R0k is also an entertaining comedic relief character who plays into the conceits of the virtual world and a character whose role has been well expanded on compared to the books.
The script as a whole is good, but when it falls it falls hard and these moments along with a few scenes of heavy expository dialogue and strange plot contrivances really drag the film down at some key moments. The performances overcome this as best they can but these moments are very problematic. The exposition dumps excellent special effects and good chemistry between the main cast and villain all work to pull you into the story and a lot of this is undone in an instant by moments of terrible dialogue or clunky storytelling.
One of the more publicised factors of Ready Player One has been the sheer amount of references packed into its run time. The film references modern games, older games, 80s cinema, anime and anything and everything in between. This is the great unifier for this film. Any viewer scanning the background or larger crowd shots will pick out their own references and cameos which are important to them, be they fans of classic gaming, anime, films or whatever else. While the references are plentiful and a lot of fun (especially an extended sequence in the middle of the film, which I won’t spoil here) this also plays into the film’s identity crisis.
The film strives for a nerdy nostalgic attitude that it never quite hits entirely. Scott Pilgrim vs the World is a similarly pop culture fuelled story which succeeds where this films struggles. Wright’s film brings the Scott Pilgrim comics to life with the aloof, 20-something attitude of the books brought to life on screen, while something has been lost in translation from page to screen with Ready Player One, although Spielberg does come frustratingly close. Ready Player One is a nostalgia bomb but one that isn’t sure who exactly it’s for. This is evidenced as the film routinely gets bogged down in exposition explaining concepts like an Easter egg. While this is a necessary evil to cater the film for any audience it could have been done much more gracefully.
As a whole, the hi-tech pop culture fairy tale Spielberg presents is an excellent story and a fun film which is let down by a script which is at times very awkward and clunky and slightly confused about exactly what film it wants to be. It’s a frustrating film. I would recommend it to anyone as a fun action film and an amazing visual spectacle, even more so if you have an even passing interest in the pop culture referenced, but you will walk away realising how close it came to hitting that sweet spot it was aiming for.
Verdict: 4/5
Run Time: 2 Hours 19 Minutes
By Sean Hughes