Quick Review: Ready Player One

Throwing out a quick review, admittedly a bit late, but better late than never. Will try to get up a belated Wondercon post-mortem in the next day or so; been really busy. But I caught a new flick last week.

Saw Ready Player One. Really liked it. It was very good, possibly the best I’ve seen this year so far (the 2018 year of movies, not counting last year’s pictures). I didn’t really know too much about the story but was pleasantly surprised by it. I’ve learned to never bet against Spielberg; he doesn’t always knock it out of the park, but you can always count on his movies to be well made and more than just competent, as opposed to other directors who throw out crap and have one gem. The difference, I think, is that he actually knows how to make movies and what makes them work; it’s very hard for some directors to grasp, as anyone who tells you making it work is a roll of the dice or catching lightning in a bottle clearly isn’t equipped to guarantee a basic level of quality. Spielberg knows how to do every aspect and takes the reigns, so he can guarantee quality filmmaking, even if not everything fires on all cylinders. It’s amazing how some filmmakers don’t even get problems with the basic plot or how to work those out, and just plunge straight ahead and hope it’ll work out like a game of craps.

But everything works here. In the near future of 2045, the world exists in a wasteland where everyone ‘escapes’ through a unified VR experience, called the Oasis. Young Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is our protagonist, just because he is, dammit, and tries to find three digital keys hidden in the world that help the finder solve three puzzles and win the game; and will give said winner complete ownership of the Oasis and the assets of its creator, the late James Halliday (Mark Rylance), in true Willy Wonka fashion. Hijinks ensure as Wade teams up with his digital friends H. and Artemis to try to find Halliday’s golden tickets, before the evil rival company, that wants the majority share of the Oasis to subsume control of it, uses its team of operatives to beat them to the punch. Headed by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the evil corporate head will stop at nothing to win the game for himself- including venturing into the REAL world to destroy Wade before he gets too far into the puzzles. Think The Surrogates done right. Actually, nobody saw The Surrogates. Probably not even Bruce Willis saw The Surrogates.

The first half is great, Spielberg in top form, and while it sags a bit from the middle to the end, it’s overall very impressive. Do I have to pretend that I wasn’t thrilled it did NOT have a score from John Williams? Lest he trot out his “magical whimsy of being a child” motif that makes an appearance in every movie he scores with a youngish person, or even after the ‘kids’ in whichever movie are obviously aged out of it. Alan Silvestri takes the charge and does a good job. I liked The Shining scene and the whole hotel sequence with the music and the footage, and you can tell Spielberg did too. I liked the Batman and Harley Quinn cameos. I liked the performances, for the most part- Ben Mendelsohn was probably best, although I pictured Sorrento being more of a Hispanic actor than a Mendelsohn. I liked the effects a lot, I liked most of the nostalgia porn (with a couple exceptions), and I most of all liked how the world was so utterly believable and only a couple steps away from where we are now.

Let’s face it, all the Playstation VR needs to become the Oasis is more advanced graphics/interplay, and the ability to move without the little wand controls, a la the gloves and the little treadmill things they were all on. That would be so cool- to be able to exercise anywhere you like on your VR, like take a jog on the surface of Mars. No one would ever be fat again! It’s so doable that I really hope that interplay will come within our lifetime, and then this movie would be pretty much a documentary. But I also liked the underlying message that since they HAD the perfect VR system, nobody wanted to participate in life or the real world, juxtaposed with the idea that maybe they retreated into VR becuase there was nothing out there for them in the real world. Are we bringing about our ruin thru technology, or are we already there? How prescient.

What didn’t I like? The constant 80’s genre vomit (as opposed to other decades) that infests the whole thing, but this was apparently even WORSE in the book, so we can look past that. It was a bit lame how Artie’s human counterpart indeed did look exactly like her avatar, minus the red scales, instead of being a dude in a basement- like, what a lucky coincidence for Wade! And she even has a non-offensive birthmark that totally shames her, to explain her insecurities and why a healthy, attractive girl retreated to (gasp) video games! What else? I wish they would stop trying to make The Iron Giant a thing- honestly, does anyone under the age of 40 even care about that movie? I have never met any youth, then or now, that had even the slightest bit of attachment to it, besides middle aged neckbeard Brad Bird enthusiasts. Think C.B. and Tom Brevoort, who, according to Marvel lore, paid for tickets to see it again immediately after their first viewing on opening day. Conversely, I want Spielberg to stop trying to make Mark Rylance a thing- enough already! He has a bad tendency to latch on to random British actors and re-use them over and over in consecutive films, then drop them as soon as someone else catches his attention. In either event, he’s not bad nor exceptional, nor is the obligatory nerd film cameo from Simon Pegg. I’m not trying to hate on Rylance too much, but the dude stole Sly Stallone’s Oscar, and he certainly ain’t the BFG, when that tall fucker from Guinness World Records was the spitting image of him already!

(Hint: he’s the one wearing purple)

Last thought: I found it interesting to wonder how much of every modern action movie, where we give the director credit for the effects-heavy scenes working, is actually done by the VFX department. Spielberg said in an interview he consulted with his CGI team 3 hours a day 3 times a week, and he STILL felt like he didn’t have full control, since he basically had to hand entire sections off to them to “direct” rather than doing it all himself. If even Spielberg doesn’t have 100% control, and he cares enough to consult that much, there’s no way in hell any of these green directors on some comic book movies have ANYTHING to do with the effects. So while we all like the Captain America movies and give the Russos so much credit, how hands-on were they in the CGI portions? It begs the question of how involved most directors really are with the directing of the VFX scenes, and how much is just the studio taking over. Hence why the action sequences in all the Spider-Man movies, dating back to the Raimi era, are kind of similar, regardless of who’s behind the helm: because these scenes are being directed by Sony Imageworks, not Mark Webb. Maybe that’s why Disney keeps hiring unproven indie film directors who don’t know a line of code from a line of coke, because it truly is out of their hands and never in their purvue. A sobering thought that could in some way be related to the theme of this film, with technology getting out of our hands taking away the human element. But overall, a really cool spring movie. I recommend it. Go see it.