Ready Player One is primed for success. Every ingredient is there. A beloved pop culture novel, adapted by a directorial living legend - and not just a living legend, but the very one whose eighties touchstones of nostalgia punctuated countless pages of Ernest Cline's wonderful novel. Dream come true.
I suspect many viewers (especially ones who didn't read the book) are going to love Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. I certainly enjoyed large dollops of it. Both book and film are real works of imagination. Cline's novel of a bleak near-future where everyone's plugged into an immersive virtual reality game called the OASIS, was a magical Wonka-esque riff on nerd culture's shared iconography, but also a lightly masked cautionary tale of our escapes threatening to turn into collective dependency. When the creator (Mark Rylance) of the OASIS dies, he reveals that a special Easter Egg has been hidden somewhere in the vast gaming landscape - bestowing wealth and complete control of the OASIS to whoever finds it. It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World meets Tron.
No expense was spared, and it shows. And for this viewer, Ready Player One was an infinitely more enjoyable reading experience than a movie. One of the great appeals of the book is that each reader gets to conjure up their own imaginary mindscapes of the OASIS and the myriad characters. That really made for a fun read. Spielberg directs with great energy and vision, but there's something about seeing everything previously imagined made so literal that kind of deadens and overwhelms the result. There is just so much CGI on view, it's impossible to catch all the details, and it makes it a little hard to really get behind the characters. There are some substantial changes from the book. Hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and his gaming avatar Parzival only meet fellow gamers Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and Aech (Lena Waithe) at the end of Cline's book. Here, they all meet up "IRL" much earlier. Part of the fun of the premise is the uncertainty of who the actual person might really be behind their avatar. When Wade wants to meet Samantha, Art3mis's real self, she warns he might be disappointed in her, and when they do (gasp!), she has a birthmark on her face. Which is pretty ridiculous given Ms. Cooke's overall gorgeousness. She's not exactly the Elephant Man, or a leper.
As Wade's antagonist, oily corporate CEO Nolan Sorrento, Ben Mendelsohn does what's supposed to be a mid-Atlantic American accent of some kind, but it seems very odd - almost Southern at times, and it's pretty distracting. Sorrento's also given a Bond-girl femme-fatale called F'nale, who's unnecessary and a little R’diculous.
I wish Spielberg had taken more stabs at social commentary here. When a bad guy holding a gun is patiently told by a squad of police to "put down your weapon," it's pretty tone-deaf in this day and age. You're practically screaming for the cop to yell, "We're only not shooting you 'cause you're white!" You have to wonder what the Paul Verhoeven of the Robocop era would have done with this story. The cast is engaging, Sheridan in kind of an earnest, early Shia LaBeouf kind of way. But too often the tone feels more generic than piercing.
The book was a lot funnier, and there's not nearly as much humor here as there should be. The digital effects and design are all incredibly impressive (MechaGodzilla!), but they're also so inescapable that they become oppressive as well. I'll say this - the mid-section where the characters must journey into the movie of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is phenomenal - a real tour de force. That sequence is worth the price of admission - I only wish the rest of the film had been as clever and engaging. While your mileage may vary, if you’re on the fence, absolutely see the film in a theater, on the biggest screen possible - as the film’s visuals will be beyond diminished on any home video format.
I suspect many viewers (especially ones who didn't read the book) are going to love Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. I certainly enjoyed large dollops of it. Both book and film are real works of imagination. Cline's novel of a bleak near-future where everyone's plugged into an immersive virtual reality game called the OASIS, was a magical Wonka-esque riff on nerd culture's shared iconography, but also a lightly masked cautionary tale of our escapes threatening to turn into collective dependency. When the creator (Mark Rylance) of the OASIS dies, he reveals that a special Easter Egg has been hidden somewhere in the vast gaming landscape - bestowing wealth and complete control of the OASIS to whoever finds it. It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World meets Tron.
No expense was spared, and it shows. And for this viewer, Ready Player One was an infinitely more enjoyable reading experience than a movie. One of the great appeals of the book is that each reader gets to conjure up their own imaginary mindscapes of the OASIS and the myriad characters. That really made for a fun read. Spielberg directs with great energy and vision, but there's something about seeing everything previously imagined made so literal that kind of deadens and overwhelms the result. There is just so much CGI on view, it's impossible to catch all the details, and it makes it a little hard to really get behind the characters. There are some substantial changes from the book. Hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and his gaming avatar Parzival only meet fellow gamers Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and Aech (Lena Waithe) at the end of Cline's book. Here, they all meet up "IRL" much earlier. Part of the fun of the premise is the uncertainty of who the actual person might really be behind their avatar. When Wade wants to meet Samantha, Art3mis's real self, she warns he might be disappointed in her, and when they do (gasp!), she has a birthmark on her face. Which is pretty ridiculous given Ms. Cooke's overall gorgeousness. She's not exactly the Elephant Man, or a leper.
As Wade's antagonist, oily corporate CEO Nolan Sorrento, Ben Mendelsohn does what's supposed to be a mid-Atlantic American accent of some kind, but it seems very odd - almost Southern at times, and it's pretty distracting. Sorrento's also given a Bond-girl femme-fatale called F'nale, who's unnecessary and a little R’diculous.
I wish Spielberg had taken more stabs at social commentary here. When a bad guy holding a gun is patiently told by a squad of police to "put down your weapon," it's pretty tone-deaf in this day and age. You're practically screaming for the cop to yell, "We're only not shooting you 'cause you're white!" You have to wonder what the Paul Verhoeven of the Robocop era would have done with this story. The cast is engaging, Sheridan in kind of an earnest, early Shia LaBeouf kind of way. But too often the tone feels more generic than piercing.
The book was a lot funnier, and there's not nearly as much humor here as there should be. The digital effects and design are all incredibly impressive (MechaGodzilla!), but they're also so inescapable that they become oppressive as well. I'll say this - the mid-section where the characters must journey into the movie of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is phenomenal - a real tour de force. That sequence is worth the price of admission - I only wish the rest of the film had been as clever and engaging. While your mileage may vary, if you’re on the fence, absolutely see the film in a theater, on the biggest screen possible - as the film’s visuals will be beyond diminished on any home video format.
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