Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros.
Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernest Cline’s polarizing novel could be so much better if it aimed a little higher.
Is it possible to enjoy a movie that also fills you with a kind of vague, existential despair? I’ve been thinking a lot about something Steven Spielberg said at the world premiere of Ready Player One. “This is not a film we made,” he told the audience just before the screening began. “This is, I promise you, a movie.”
This is Spielberg’s twinkly-eyed way of promising that Ready Player One is the kind of endlessly entertaining spectacle that has defined roughly half of his career: A Jaws, or a Raiders of the Lost Ark, or a Jurassic Park. The type of blockbuster that might make a lazy critic reach for one of the old cliches: “Get a large popcorn,” or “Check your brain at the door.”
But there’s a qualitative judgment that’s worth parsing here, too. Spielberg’s recent Best Picture nominee, The Post—a Serious and Important movie, full of Serious and Important Actors, is probably a “film” by Spielberg’s standards—but it’s a slapdash and lazy one. And Spielberg established himself as one of Hollywood’s most beloved directors by crafting “movies,” like the ones listed above, with uncommon depth and skill.
Or, to put it another way: Your film can take itself seriously, but that doesn’t make it intelligent—and being a spectacle-laden blockbuster doesn’t need to mean you have nothing to say.
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That brings us to Ready Player One, which arrives in the midst of a mini-cultural battle about Ready Player One. Spielberg’s new blockbuster is adapted from Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel of the same name, which imagines a near-future in which overpopulation and climate change have turned America into a bleak dystopia. Fortunately, technology offers an escape: the OASIS, an immersive virtual-reality world with endless possibilities for anyone who jacks in.
You might think that the ability to look like anyone and do anything would be plenty of adventure. But Ready Player One adds an extra meta-game: Halliday—the deceased, Willy Wonka-ish creator of The OASIS—has buried a secret series of quests in the game, which require an obsessive knowledge of ’80s pop-culture to crack. The first person to solve all the puzzles will be granted sole ownership of The OASIS. Our protagonist is a young, dedicated nerd named Wade “Parzival” Watts (Tye Sheridan), who is determined to inherit Halliday’s legacy. Over the course of the story, he teams up with a few other similarly devoted gamers and squares off against a shady businessman who wants to win the game so he can pack The OASIS with pop-up ads and make a fortune.
Cline’s novel was reasonably well-received when it was published, but has since drawn a considerable backlash for what detractors describe as a myopic, self-indulgent, and infantile reverence for ’80s pop-culture, and also for being sexist and poorly-written. Its defenders are delighted by Ready Player One‘s validation and veneration of all that ’80s stuff, which they know and love as much as Cline—particularly the heavy emphasis on video game lore, which rarely shows up in fiction.
You might fall into one of those camps, or you might land somewhere in the middle. (For the record: I tried the book and hated it almost instantly, putting it down for good after about 30 pages. But I’m also starting to find Ready Player One’s many, many vocal detractors as exhausting as I found the book.)
In retrospect, Ready Player One should have been a movie all along. It’s weird that this elaborate tribute to the movies, TV shows, music, and video games of the ’80s began life as a book. The story’s bottomless references and pop-cultural easter eggs work much better in the visual language of film, which lets you decide whether you want play Where’s Waldo? instead of forcing you to read something like this before you can get to the plot. And Ready Player One certainly improves with the care of one of cinema’s all-time greatest craftsmen. I don’t think anyone—including Ernest Cline—would argue that Ernest Cline is a better storyteller than Steven Spielberg.
The end result is a movie that I don’t particularly like, but is also very, very hard to hate. Ready Player One is a boisterous puppy of a movie, so revved-up and eager to please that it practically jumps onto your lap until you crack a smile. If you have even the tiniest bit of pop-cultural nostalgia, there’s a reference in here for you somewhere. (When I spotted a Battletoad walking around in a crowd shot, my eyes bugged out like… well, like a Battletoad.)
Ready Player One has an explicitly anti-hater ethos, and trust me: It was not fun to be sitting in that movie theater feeling like a hater. But for every genuinely transporting moment, there was something that nagged at me. Why is Ready Player One so half-assed about the details of its dystopian future? Why does it spend so much time on the boring and predictable motivations of Wade, while failing to dig into the full story behind his vastly more interesting best friend, who travels the OASIS as a kind of musclebound cyber-orc? Why, despite a recent and very disturbing sexual assault allegation, does Ready Player One carve out a prominent role for T.J. Miller—particularly in a voice-only role that could easily have been recast without a single reshoot?
The movie doesn’t want you to dwell on any of that. It doesn’t want you to dwell on much of anything. It just wants you to nod and smile in recognition at the parade of references on display. Ready Player One is the logical culmination of a culture increasingly pitched toward reboots and re-imaginings and remixes. You can literally watch Ready Player One’s generational tiers of creators paying homage to their favorites. Steven Spielberg, a lifelong Stanley Kubrick stan, stages a lengthy, shiver-inducing sequence in the second act as an elaborate Stanley Kubrick tribute. Ernest Cline, more than 25 years Spielberg’s junior, relies almost entirely on references to Spielberg and a few of his buddies, whom he idolized when he was growing up. In 20 years, some screenwriter who grew up loving Ready Player One will probably write a movie full of winky homages to Parzival and Art3mis.
In fits and starts, I was happy to laugh and cheer right along with Ready Player One. Nobody stages a thrilling action sequence like Steven Spielberg. But by the time it got to the third act—a massive, Super Smash Bros.-style pop-culture battle royale, set to Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It”—the whole thing was starting to feel exhausting, and even a little embarrassing. As I watched the Iron Giant square off against Mechagodzilla, it was hard not to think about how much more rewarding it would be to just watch The Iron Giant. Borrowing an icon from a movie with such a richer, deeper emotional palette just made Ready Player One look cheap, and doubled as a reminder that none of this movie’s original characters can stack up against the best of the pop-cultural icons the movie is borrowing.
And maybe that’s fine with you! Ready Player One absolutely clears the relatively low bar it sets for itself. If you engage with it as much as Steven Spielberg wants you to engage with it—as pure, nostalgia-baiting spectacle—you’ll probably have a blast with it. Remember: It’s a movie, not a film.
But while Ready Player One might not intend to have a moral, that’s ultimately out of Steven Spielberg’s hands. Art is always saying something. A better movie might recognize that there’s something both topical and depressing about a world that has made escapism the lynchpin of day-to-day life, and turned the very specific fixations of a nerdy teenaged boy into society’s predominant organizing principle and sole cultural currency.
Ready Player One ultimately pays a half-assed kind of lip service to the idea that reality is ultimately more important than fantasy—but those tossed-off platitudes are overwhelmed by the rest of the movie, which aims to thrill audiences by asserting the opposite. In Ready Player One, the OASIS really is the avenue to wealth and happiness. Mastery of nerdy trivia is the surest route to power. Haters can’t ever be trusted. And fixating exclusively on the retro shit you loved as a child might actually be the key to unlocking the life of your dreams.
And why not? It worked for Ernest Cline.
Should you see it?
Come on, you already know if this movie is for you or not.
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