Big, forgettable fun

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This article was published 29/03/2018 (2723 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s a bit sad to consider that, in the year 2045, where Ready Player One is set, the cultural touchstones will mostly come from the previous century: King Kong, Gundam, Saturday Night Fever, Mecha-Godzilla, Chucky, Back to the Future, the Iron Giant, Gandalf…

And, very importantly, The Shining.

It’s doubtless more of a comfort to director Steven Spielberg — no small influence when it comes to helping define 20th-century culture. With Ready Player One, he seems to be assuring himself his work and the work of his contemporaries will endure.

Spielberg is at the helm of this adaptation of Ernest Cline’s sci-fi novel (scripted by Cline and Zak Penn), which postulates a world where most people are resigned to spend their time playing in a complex, ’80s-centric online game called OASIS.

You can’t blame them. Work is drudgery. Living conditions are bleak, with cheap mobile homes stacked atop one another in a flimsy approximation of high-rises. Much of the population has been diminished as a result of past conflicts most people are striving to forget.

In this world, orphaned Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is a veteran gamer, escaping the reality of life with his aunt and her various abusive boyfriends. Wade, employing the cool elfin avatar “Parzival,” becomes a star in the OASIS when he is the first to make headway in an ongoing challenge to find an “Easter egg” hidden in the game, placed by deceased game designer James Halliday (Mark Rylance), who has promised the winner will inherit the trillion-dollar OASIS empire.

Watts has an edge in that he has studied Halliday’s past extensively in an online repository of the designer’s collected experiences. Though he goes it alone in his quest, he has accumulated a few friends in his mission, including a giant, tech-savvy cyborg Aech (Lena Waite) and a samurai named Daito (Win Morisaki). Joining the club is Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), whose avatar is a sexy sprite.

The loose band’s success captures the jealous attention of tech industrialist Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) who has poured a fortune into funding an army of gamers intent on finding a set of three keys that will unlock the location of the Easter egg. A murderous rivalry ensues on both planes of existence.

The film is painstakingly produced, with huge CG vistas, animated characters in the real world and real actors at play in digital landscapes. A pivotal sequence in the middle of the film, in which the friends seek a realm in a world designed to look like the cavernous sets of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Steven King’s The Shining, is self-consciously referential cinema at its most sublime.

Yet the film ultimately feels little more than an amusing lark for Spielberg, who only half-heartedly sells the theme that it is good to put down the video games on occasion because “reality is real.”

For all his mastery of technique, the stakes feel diminished when the bulk of his movie too closely resembles a video game. That dynamic afflicts the actors as well; they share so much screen time with their digital avatars, it is difficult to connect to them.

Ready Player One is big fun, to be sure. But its chances of enduring into 22nd-century pop consciousness seems improbable.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing