Movie Review: Ready Player One

Disclaimer: This review will contain spoilers. Don't read it unless you've already watched the movie or unless you don't care about being spoiled. I like to analyze movies, and I can't really do that unless I spoil the movie. You have been warned.

Ready Player One is a movie set in a dystopian future, though not very far in our future (set in Columbus, Ohio in 2045). The world's population centers have become slum-like cities, and in order to get away from the depression of the real world, a man named James Halliday has created a virtual world known as OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation). As I said, OASIS is a fully-immersive virtual world in which players can form friendships, play games, and basically escape the real world for as long as they want.

James Halliday has since died but users have discovered Anorak's Quest inside the OASIS. Anorak is Halliday's avatar in OASIS, so the quest was created by the creator of OASIS, himself. Inside the memory archives of OASIS lie clues to completing certain activities and locating keys. Once a player finds three keys, he will then discover the hidden "easter egg" in the game, and will then be given control of OASIS, among other prizes. Ready Player One follows five players on their quest to find these keys against other "gunters" (a portmanteu of "egg hunters") and IOI "sixers" (IOI is an acronym for Innovative Online Industries, and "sixers" are indentured slaves of IOI, known as "sixers" because of their six-digit identification numbers). In the process of hunting these keys for the easter egg, the five players uncover Halliday's life story and the true, nefarious nature of IOI.

Ready Player One was just really a fun movie. It was fast-paced from beginning to end, and it culminated in a major battle that was like Lord of the Rings with internet avatars. It's incredibly nostalgic. The soundtrack kicks off with Jump by Van Halen and runs a pretty good gamut of various styles from the 80s, also including Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears, I Hate Myself for Loving You by Joan Jett, and We're Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister. Considering how much 80s nostalgia was packed into the original book, securing copyrights was going to be a major hurdle to doing this film, and they didn't even get all the rights they wanted. This section of the article on Wikipedia is pretty interesting regarding the rights they wanted to secure.

The 80s nostalgia was largely due to Halliday's character being a huge fan of the 80s, not just with the music but with the movies referenced, as well as Atari games. James Halliday is actually a character I identify with quite a bit. He's probably the character I most identify with I've ever seen in a movie or television show (and there are some who have come close), from his extreme anxiety with women to his love of the 80s to how out of place he feels in the real world.

Themes

As with any movie or show dealing with a virtual reality, a major theme of this movie is real life vs. the fantasy world. One of the players we follow is a kid named Wade, who goes by Parzival in OASIS. His parents have died, so he lives with his aunt and his aunt's live-in boyfriend who is borderline abusive to Wade, his aunt siding with her boyfriend when he is rough with Wade. In the course of searching for the first key, he encounters Samantha, known as Art3mis in OASIS, who first tips Wade off that this is more than just a game and there is something evil going on at IOI. While this world provides a fantasy that allows people to escape the dredges of real life, in the end the victor of the easter egg game decides to shut down OASIS twice a week to coax people to spend more time in the real world. However, I think that particular message was neutered a bit by the fact that the protagonists' lives were all improved dramatically by finding the easter egg. It would have been much more impactful if their lives hadn't changed significantly for the better at the end of the film. It's all well and good to spend more time in the real world if your life has improved greatly, but what about all the people looking for an escape whose lives were still bad? I would agree living in the real world is better, but the film, itself, doesn't have any helpful advice for those people.

Grade: A-

Reason for grade: This was an incredibly fun movie, and the nostalgia was exciting. It was also gorgeous. Steven Spielberg has really outdone himself with this film (and has gone on record as stating this was one of his three most difficult films he's ever made). However, the movie has really very little else going for it. It doesn't really delve too deep into the theme of real reality vs. virtual reality, and the side characters are not developed very well, aside from playing into certain gamer and race-based stereotypes. This is a movie I would definitely re-watch, but not one to watch if you're looking for a movie that really makes you think.

Ready Player One
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by: Zak Penn and Ernest Cline, based on the novel Ready Player One, written by Ernest Cline
Starring:
Tye Sheridan as Wade Watts/Parzival
Olivia Cooke as Samantha Cook/Art3mis
Lena Waithe as Helen/Aech
Philip Zhao as Zhou/Sho
Win Morisaki as Toshiro/Daito
Ben Mendelsohn as Nolan Sorrento
T.J. Miller as i-R0k
Simon Pegg as Ogden Morrow/The Curator
Mark Rylance as James Halliday
Hannah John-Kamen as F'Nale Zandor