‘Ready Player One’ is a massively multifarious mess
Over more than 40 years as a filmmaker, Steven Spielberg really helped create what we now think of as popular entertainment — sometimes mining it from the past (the Indiana Jones films, Schindler’s List) or as a futurist (he was an early master of VFX, from Close Encounters to Jurassic Park). At age 71, though, he may have finally stumbled onto the apotheosis of his status as an iconographer with one of his youngest-centered films ever, the massively multiplayer online role-playing fantasy Ready Player One. It practically summarized Spielberg’s legacy with countless in-jokes, self-referential cameos (especially to Back to the Future, a movie he helped produce) and tropes that wouldn’t be tropes without Spielberg himself. It’s a cinematic Mobius strip.
Which is not to say it’s very good, because it isn’t.
The plot concerns teenager Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) living in the near dystopian future, a time when the huge online VR universe called Oasis, created by the late, legendary programmer Halliday (Mark Rylance), dominates all human interaction. People all but live inside the game, the only place to make money and be someone important, as evidenced by your avatar. Wade (online name: Parzival) is one of many denizens hoping to find the greatest Easter egg of all time: Three keys hidden by Halliday inside Oasis that will make its finder fabulously rich. Of course, another evil industrialist (Ben Mendelsohn) wants to get the keys first, or crush Wade before he finds them.
The plot calls to mind Tron, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, E.T., Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Lego Movie and more off-shoots than I can recall, which is, sadly, the film’s problem. Ready Player One is epic in its scope and dazzling in its use of CGI (too much so — it gave me a headache), but it’s equally unwieldy. This is the kind of movie nerds will freeze-frame for year, looking for its own Easter eggs, hints, references and gags. That might prove fun, but it leaves out what has always made Spielberg’s bubblegum movies delightful: The heart, the personality, and sense of wonder. There’s very little of that here, just a catalogue of allusions (some quite excellent, like The Shining riff) but mostly just overwhelming and noisy, while missing many of the more salient moral issues posed by this online world. Someone needs to hit reset.
— Arnold Wayne Jones
