Toward the end of Ernest Cline’s 2011 science-fiction novel Ready Player One, our hero faces a challenge. He must recite the dialogue of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All of it – from the species of swallows to the bringing-out of your dead to the Were-Rabbit. This litmus test, a cliché of straight-guy, dormitory one-upmanship, stands between (the perfectly named) Wade Watts and a Wonka-sized reward. As a reader, this is where Cline lost me. It’s when the Comic Book Guy’s joyless fandom hijacked what’d been an entertaining adventure.
As I submitted myself to the assaults of Steven Spielberg’s nerd-tastic adaptation of Ready Player One, the brilliant Who Framed Roger Rabbit, directed by none other than Spielberg protégé Robert Zemeckis, came to mind. Both Roger Rabbit and Ready Player One traffic in nostalgia and countless a-ha, crossover moments, but in vitally different ways and to diverging ends. Roger Rabbit is a smart noir send-up in which beloved ‘toons are “real,” and their fates hang in the balance. Ready Player One is like a bad night of pub trivia: loads of obscurity, very little fun and mounting frustration.
And yet, during my screening, the theater erupted when the Iron Giant lurched into battle, the T-Rex from Jurassic Park snapped at a DeLorean, and Chucky sliced-and-diced some baddies. This isn’t a movie that deserves cheers, even though it features a fight between an army of Master Chiefs and Mecha-godzilla. Cool? OK. Sure. I, too, felt the pull of these retro references at first. But the film operates as if recognition – “Oh yeah!” – were an end in itself. Cue the requisite fist pump.
Ready Player One is set in a dystopian future (is there any other kind, nowadays?). People live in vertical trailer parks, exist hand-to-mouth and spend most of their days in a virtual ecosphere called the OASIS. That second world, accessed via visors and haptic gloves, is the brainchild of James Halliday (Mark Rylance), a recently deceased, septuagenarian geek. His love of ‘80s pop minutiae is seemingly infinite, and has spread into the wider culture thanks to a gamer challenge he constructed as a last will and testament. Billions of dollars, and total control of the OASIS, is up for grabs for the gamer who can acquire three hidden keys by plumbing the depths of Halliday’s taste and matching his skill with a joystick. No easy task.
Enter our ragtag teenage heroes and their nefarious corporate adversary IOI, a fascistic organization hoping to control the OASIS and destroy its open-sourced spirit. The global stakes may be high, but the everyday, self-conscious baggage of Cline’s protagonists are conspicuously deleted. Wade (Tye Sheridan) isn’t an overweight fugitive, alone and constantly on the run. Instead, he’s a bland Mary Sue. Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) isn’t a “Rubenesque” introvert. She’s ported into a mighty (and slender) femme fatale. The big reveal of Wade’s closest digital friend Aech (Lena Waithe), is tossed aside with little dramatic impact.
Spielberg has shown himself to be a master of adaptation. Peter Benchley’s pulpy Jaws became the template for the summer blockbuster and a masterpiece of the man-versus-beast format. Likewise, Michael Crichton’s bestseller, Jurassic Park, in Spielberg’s capable hands, endures as a white-knuckled, popcorn classic. His War of the Worlds transformed H.G. Wells’ novel into a thrilling, melancholy parable about 9/11.
Had you blindfolded me during this film’s credits, I’d never have guessed the empty, big-screen disarray of Ready Player One came from the same genius. This movie would be a bad showing (and a better fit) for a lesser director such as Zack Snyder or Brett Ratner. For Spielberg, a wizard of the form, it increasingly veers from disappointing to embarrassing. Dark and ugly CGI landscapes abound. Large-scale action sequences unfold with choreography befitting a middle-school dance recital. Awkward motion-capture recalls a disastrous Zemeckis picture. The novel’s ingenuity, and thumping heart, is reduced to lines of ones and zeroes.
Ready Player One’s rare joys are mere footnotes, reminders of superior distractions. Kubrick’s The Shining, Atari’s Adventure and Van Halen’s 1984 (just to name a few), exist apart from this hollow encyclopedia. PROTIP: Protect your time and money. Run from an unwieldy simulation and investigate its source code instead.
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