Three months after delivering “The Post” in time for Christmas, Steven Spielberg is back with another parcel, bearing the label “Ready Player One.” Nothing will ever match his uncanny—and, you might say, disturbing—transition from “Jurassic Park” to “Schindler’s List” within a single year, but it’s still quite a hop from “The Post,” a soaring liberal anthem in praise of print, to “Ready Player One,” a film in which nobody gives the faintest sign of needing or wishing to read. The screenplay, by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline, is based on Cline’s novel of the same name, but there ends any connection with the written word.
It is 2045, years after “the bandwidth riots,” and Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), an orphan in his late teens, lives with his aunt Alice (Susan Lynch). What is it with aunts? Peter Parker has one. James has two before he finds the Giant Peach. I guess nephews and nieces feel semidetached, without the tug of close ties, and thus more eligible for adventure. Wade and Alice dwell in the Stacks, a shantytown of piled-up trailer homes in Columbus, Ohio. What the wider society is like, what it labors at, and how it feeds itself are questions that never vex the film, although we do see pizzas being ferried by drone. All that most people, including Wade, want to do is strap on a headset, ditch their ponderous existence, and enter a virtual realm, known as the Oasis. It is wild, weightless, limitless, and devoid of genuine pain. (If somebody cuts you, money pours out of the wound.) Any resemblance to a heroin high, let alone an opioid epidemic, is entirely coincidental.
The Oasis was conjured up by a woolly-haired genius called Halliday (Mark Rylance), who died seven years ago, bequeathing an infuriating game. Anyone can take part in it, and, until now, everyone has failed to complete it, including Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the head of a malignant corporation. The aim is to earn three magic keys and, having collected the set, to win a glowing Easter egg and thereby to assume command of the Oasis. Is this the best that Cline and Spielberg could dream up? And, given that we hope from the start that Wade will be the victor, what has changed since Willy Wonka yielded control of his chocolate factory to Charlie Bucket?
Well, unlike the sprightly Mr. Wonka, Halliday is dead, but no matter, for he remains alive in the shape of his digital avatar, a gnomic graybeard by the name of—give me strength—Anorak. Within the Oasis, avatars are de rigueur. You’d never be so dumb as to reveal your actual name, and, besides, you get to adopt a new gender, a new body, and even, in cases of extreme timidity, a new species. Wade, who, for a Spielberg hero, strikes me as a little blockish and numb, has created an alter ego called Parzival, suggesting an implausible passion for medieval German romance literature. Or for Wagner, perhaps, except that Parzival doesn’t look like a knightly tenor. He looks like an extra in a Duran Duran video from the pit of the nineteen-eighties. Thus do we approach the movie’s holy grail.
James Joyce once confessed, with puckish pride, that “Finnegans Wake” would “keep the professors busy for centuries,” and a similar challenge is issued, to eminent scholars of pop culture, by “Ready Player One.” The task of freezing every frame and probing it for Reagan-era trivia may not consume them for a hundred years, but it should fill their leisure hours until, say, the release of “Avengers: Infinity War,” on April 27th. In the quest for the first key, for example, players must compete in a road race, hurtling along virtual streets in virtual cars of their own choosing. Parzival has a DeLorean, from Robert Zemeckis’s “Back to the Future”—a thumpingly obvious tribute that is compounded, later on, when he and a fellow-avatar, Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), evade trouble by deploying a special doodad that allows them to reverse time by sixty seconds. The name of that doodad? The Zemeckis Cube.
By far the boldest revisiting comes when a bunch of avatars, led through the Oasis by Wade, follow a clue from Halliday’s past—it’s a long story—and find themselves stranded inside “The Shining” (1980). Many of its infamous images are loaded straight into the new film: the identical twins, the axe-head splitting the door, the elevator that opens to unleash a blood-dimmed tide—in which, on this occasion, one of Spielberg’s more lumpen characters slithers and slips, purely for a laugh. I have no idea, first, how he was granted permission by the Stanley Kubrick estate to stage such a rude invasion, and, second, whether it should be greeted as homage or as outrage. Hard-core Kubrickians, I suspect, will view it with eyes wide shut.
There is an attempt to offset these online antics with a threat from the physical world, involving Sorrento, but the balance between high technology and low sublunary guile, so finely achieved by Spielberg in “Minority Report” (2002), is all but absent here. His attention is riveted, instead, on the poetry of brands and icons (did I not catch a glimpse, in the shadows, of the police box from “Doctor Who”?). Nothing is stranger, in this very strange film, than the mystical power with which pop culture is endowed; one vital riddle can be solved only by somebody versed in the works of John Hughes. If Spielberg is being nostalgic, it’s less for his own childhood (he grew up in the fifties) than for the childhoods that he helped transform—for the epoch that was so effectively colonized by his films, and by those of his contemporaries. An old clip in the archives of the Oasis finds Halliday in a wistful mood. “Why can’t we go backward for once?” he asks, adding, “Bill and Ted did.”
And yet, truth be told, I would trade the whole of “Ready Player One” for the scene in “E.T.” in which Elliott shows his “Star Wars” action figures to his friend from outer space: “This is Greedo, and then this is Hammerhead, see, this is Walrus Man, this is Snaggletooth, and this is Lando Calrissian, see, and this is Boba Fett.” In essence, he is doing what Wade does, parsing the minutiae of fictional places and plots, except that Wade does so in a dangerously thin dramatic atmosphere, whereas Elliott has an enraptured audience of one; what we focus on is the expression on E.T.’s face, as he ponders the habits of the human. This intimate calm is alien to the new film, which Spielberg whips along at so rampant a pace, and whose every crevice he stuffs with such fevered detail, that it’s as though his mission, at the age of seventy-one, were not merely to recapture but to redouble the zest of youth. I saw the film in IMAX, and a week later I’m still waiting for the safe return of my optic nerves, but it was the meagre emotional charge that shocked me most. Toward the end, as in many Spielberg movies, there are tears, but, for once, they feel unearned. From what, apart from sheer sensory exhaustion, do they spring? In a closing homily, we are told that “reality is the only thing that’s real.” I wouldn’t even go as far as that.
A meeting between Wade Watts and Charley Thompson (Charlie Plummer), the hero of “Lean on Pete,” would be fraught with interest. Both are in their teens. Both are motherless, and bowed down by burdensome lives. And both seek a way out, though nothing could be less virtual, or more beggared of thrills, than the path that Charley chooses. Often, it doesn’t seem like a choice at all.
At the start, he shares a house in Portland, Oregon, with his father, Ray (Travis Fimmel), a cocky loser who swiftly fades from the picture, leaving his son alone. Charley, who already has a casual job with Del (Steve Buscemi), a local horse trainer, now becomes his full-time dogsbody, or nagsbody—cleaning the stables, driving the truck, or walking Lean on Pete. Pete, as he is commonly known, is a five-year-old horse of gentle disposition, bred to run short courses at a sprint. When Charley watches him race, on a scruffy dirt track, with a few spectators idling behind ropes, it’s the first time that we see the kid crack a smile. For Del, however, Pete has reached the end of his usefulness and should, as it were, be sold for scrap: a prospect so horrifying to Charley that one night, with the horse in tow, he flees.
Not everything in “Lean on Pete,” which was made by the British director Andrew Haigh, rings true. Buscemi is the least grass-fed of actors, meant for the rat-run of city streets, and, if I didn’t quite believe in him as a country guy, I believed even less in Chloë Sevigny as a cynical jockey with a set of broken bones. But Plummer, who recently played the kidnapped John Paul Getty III, in “All the Money in the World,” grounds and tethers the movie, as an unclaimed soul with barely a dollar to his name. When he speaks, he tends to glance down or aside, lacking the confidence to hold somebody’s gaze. The story drifts with Charley, in and out of peril, and becomes a doleful picaresque; as his face grows hollow and besmirched, we desperately want him to survive. And where is he headed? Across country, to try to find—you guessed it—his aunt. ♦
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