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Ready Player One

Monday morning. Kids at school. $10 tickets at the Galleria. All looking good. And then....Ready Player Wonka. This is Steven Spielberg's latest. It's about a boy, ~~Charlie Bucket~~ Wade Watts, played by Tye Sheridan, who lives in an impoverished ~~rural~~ urban setting and dreams of being elsewhere. Enter a mysterious, man-child savant with poor social skills and a hugely popular business enterprise. Said fella wants to give away 'the keys to the kingdom' for one reason or another. Loads of people scramble to find the ~~golden ticket~~ keys. Shit, there's even a scene of the protagonists floating in a cylindrical chamber that's very reminiscent of the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Like most Spielberg films, this is put together with the skills of a professional technician who knows what he's doing and can call upon the cream of the industry to help him. He has some pull, this guy. But also like most Spielberg films, it doesn't do anything creatively or dramatically innovative. I read someone once refer to him as a 'one-trick pony' and I'm inclined to agree. Sure, there's a market and a place for these kind of films and, if I'm honest, his films are generally not terrible. But there's no bite, no edge, no other angle aside from a child-like wish for a happy resolution. In Ready Player One, he manages to cram in loads of speccy stuff and 'easter eggs' but it still doesn't provoke anything more than a cursory head nod.

There's lots of exposition too - 'Oh, you're Parzival, the knight who found the holy grail. Oh, and you're Artemis, the Greek goddess of some bullshit....' I'd say this is another fault, treating the audience like children, but as most of them probably ARE children, perhaps I'm being overly harsh. Ultimately, we don't NEED to know who the avatars are named after if we don't know already. Another irritation is the overwhelming abundance of pop culture references, hidden and glaringly obvious. I'd usually rail against this obscene nodding and winking but that's kind of the point of the film, for what it's worth. The creator of the Oasis, James Halliday, is (was) a massive nerd genius and the story is really about him and his child-like innocence. The video games, music, films, etc, are all part of the virtual world he created and therefore, part of the film. Many of the usual 'Spielbergian' themes are here - friendship and belonging (clanning up, in the film's vernacular) and the struggle of the weak and oppressed against the powerful (not much hypocrisy there). No surprises who wins in this sugar-coated world. I quite liked the mirror work of the kids in the Oasis rectifying the past relationship between Halliday and Simon Pegg's Ogden Morrow (a bit of a Zuckerberg / Saverin reference?)

There are some nice things about Ready Player One. The visuals are well done in a video game sort of way, the performances run the gamut from heartfelt (Mark Rylance) to suitable (Olivia Cooke) to roast ham (Mendelsohn) and the juxtaposition of the Oasis and the real world is nicely designed. But the pongs outweigh the pings. It starts with Van Halen's 'Jump' and fuck off. The soundtrack is trite and uninventive all the way through. There's a troubling question at the end as to what/who Halliday is (a god, an angel, a spirit residing in his 'oasis'). Whatever the answer, it was unnecessary. And the moment when Parzival summoned the Saturday Night Fever dance floor, I knew it wasn't going to end well for me.

See also:

Obviously, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) with Gene Wilder as Wonka and also David Cronenberg's Existenz (1999) for a more dystopic taste of virtual reality.

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