Excerpts of Reviews of “Ready Player One”
“The best TV of the last five years has been about ironic self-reference like no previous species of postmodern art could have dreamed of. The colors of MTV videos, blue-black and lambently flickered, are the colors of television … MTV’s television-trivia game show, the dry-titled Remote Control, got so popular it busted its own MTV-membrane and is in 1990 now syndicated band-wide. The hippest commercials, with stark computerized settings and blank beauties in mirrored shades and plastic slacks genuflecting before various forms of velocity, force, and adrenaline, seem like little more than TV’s vision of how TV offers rescue to those lonely Joe Briefcases passively trapped into watching too much TV.
What explains the pointlessness of most published TV criticism is that television has become immune to charges that it lacks any meaningful connection to the world outside it. It’s not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue. It’s that any such connection has become otiose. Television used to point beyond itself. Those of us born in like the sixties were trained to look where it pointed, usually at versions of ‘real life’ made prettier, sweeter, better by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today’s Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what’s not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.”
– David Foster Wallace, 1993
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Over the course of modern history, Marshall McLuhan’s warning that “the medium is the message” in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, has been given many illustrations, applications, and interpretations. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One may be one of the most ironic examples of this principle in the history of film.
Below is a selection of excerpts from reviews discussing the film:
From Evan Narcisse at io9, March 12, 2018:
“People applauded logos at the screening of Ready Player One I saw last night. Warner Bros. logo? Applause. Amblin logo? Huge applause. This movie is ready-made for people who want to clap at anything and everything they see. Based on Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel of the same name, the movie focuses on Wade Watts, a hapless orphan who spends most of his waking hours in a global VR simulation called the Oasis. It’s supposed to be a cosmic amalgam of every video game, genre movie, and geek artifact ever made, where players compete to earn money to keep playing to earn more money …
Ready Player One exists as the equivalent of a video game that uses microtransactions. Players have an insidious choice in games built on the controversial model: They can either spend hours playing to get the gear and rank they covet, or pay real-world money to acquire those things much faster. The institutional power of Warner Bros. essentially lets the studio able to use pay-to-win mechanics on the audience, unlocking laughter or emotional response by sheer volume of its resources. It’s the ne plus ultra of franchise mash-up-a-go-go mega-spectacle. And the overload makes missing bits of nerd iconography—no Marvel superheroes in here, kids!—all the more conspicuous. There’s a glimpse of a cult 1980s show, a snatch of old-school movie soundtrack, all speeding by in a way designed to make you want to buy the home video release and painstakingly annotate it frame by frame, but that’s about it.”
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From Travis Johnson at FilmInk, March 20, 2018:
“It becomes impossible to ignore what a cynical exercise Ready Player One is when you realise the characters’ only investment in all the pop culture ephemera the film is steeped in is economic. They don’t actually like this stuff, and if they do, it’s for the shallowest and most mercenary of reasons: possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of ’80s (and ’90s, and even ’70s – the film spreads a wide net) nerd culture might help them solve the puzzle left behind by reclusive genius game designer James Halliday (Mark Rylance) after his death and win All the Money in the World.
Not that there’s much of a world left. In Ready Player One’s dark near future of 2045, overpopulation and rolling energy crises have led to widespread poverty and everyone spends the overwhelmng bulk of their time plugged into the OASIS, the vast virtual reality universe that Halliday invented, where they can look however they want to look and do whatever they want to do. In practice, this results in countless folks wearing avatars that resemble pop culture icons (everyone from Batman to Robocop to Freddie Krueger to frickin’ Battletoads gets a cameo) and blowing the crap out of each other on endless first person shooter battle maps, because apparently that’s what you do when the world outside your window is all but on fire (it might sound satirical – it’s not. The film lacks the cojones to grapple with the implications of its base assumptions) …
Why is a populace suffering under deprivation and oppression so wrapped up in the cultural minutiae of the past? The obvious answer is because the world is screwed and living inside a Lotus-Eater Machine is a damn sight better than facing that particular grim reality, but the script, credited to Zak Penn and Ernest Cline, on whose novel the film is based, is careful to tiptoe around that conclusion, except with some lip service in the denouement. Tellingly, the quest in Ready Player One is not to save the world – by the time the credits roll, nothing has been done about the terrible shape the joint is in – but to seize the means by which the state of the world can be ignored. A more cynical take on the material might have spun satirical gold out of that; legendary director Steven Spielberg (The Terminal, 1941) refuses to take that route.”
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From Constance Grady at Vox, March 26, 2018:
“Gamergate was a toxic cultural battle filled with harassment so vicious it would become a major influence on the alt-right — but fundamentally, it was about who gets to be a geek, which parts of geek identity are worth lauding, and which parts are destructive. Gamergate changed the way we talk about geek culture, and in the end, it would make it borderline impossible to think about books like Ready Player One as harmless, meaningless fun …
And of course you can read Ready Player One as a fun dumb fantasy. No one’s stopping you! But Cline’s world is not just one in which gamers get to be awesome, but also one in which gamers get to be awesome specifically because everyone else sucks. It’s a world in which women are trophies, the concerns of straight white men are all that matters, and the greatest possible calling of anyone’s life is the rote memorization of trivia at the expense of all else.
Cline does gesture at the idea that there is a world outside of video games. Wade is briefly humiliated and depressed by the life he’s built for himself — one of total isolation, in which he never leaves his crappy apartment with its blacked-out windows because he’s too busy searching for Halliday’s egg. And when he encounters Halliday’s avatar in the OASIS, Halliday passes on some words of wisdom to him: ‘As terrifying and painful as reality can be,’ he says, ‘it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.’
But the moment reads as lip service, because Ready Player One’s heart has no time for the world outside of video games, not really. It’s too busy nerding out over how freakin’ cool it is that Ultraman is fighting Mechagodzilla and a kid is saving the word by reciting every goddamn word of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
And in a pre-Gamergate world, the sheer glee and fun of moments like that were enough to make the dark underbelly of the fantasy disappear and carry Ready Player One to the heights of cultural phenomena. But post-Gamergate, the dark underbelly has become all too apparent.”
From Vince Mancini at Film Drunk; March 27, 2018:
“Its story celebrates the ability to retain pieces of pop culture ephemera, but even in lionizing characters who devote their entire lives to it can’t come up with any plausible explanation of why this might be good. Even when depicting ways that it might be bad it seems blind to its own implications. It’s a movie where the main character delivers a stirring speech about all the friends he’s found in the virtual reality video game world — It’s even helped him find love! — at which his audience stands rapt in the streets, Spielberg-faced in agreement — Yeah! We have lots of virtual friends now too! — seemingly unconscious of the fact that they already had 20 potential real-world friends standing two feet away from them, if they’d only taken off the VR headsets and said hello. The film makes a half-hearted attempt to address the analog world (‘The best thing about reality is… it’s real’ is an actual line), but it’s so transparently tacked on that it only serves to further expose the creators’ disinterest in the world outside games.
The most damning critique I can give Spielberg is that even while he’s enough of a virtuoso to get me invested in someone else’s video game, he can’t identify the crushing void at the center of this narrative. He comes off a brilliant craftsman and a mediocre thinker …
Ready Player One reveals its true id in a heated scene between Wade and Sorrento (a classic of the ‘We’re not so different, you and I’ variety), in which Sorrento tries to recruit Wade for his evil plans and Wade rejects his offer, growling ‘A fanboy knows a hater.’
To which you might wonder… what does ‘fanboy’ even mean in this context, floating free of a modifier, that might tell us… what thing the boy is even a fan of. A fanboy is not a fan of a specific thing, just an all-purpose fan … of things? Thus, your personal identity is ‘person who likes … things?’
This is the kind of uncritical thinking the advertising industry has been trying to inculcate in the public consciousness for last 60 or 70 years. Be happy, buy stuff! Yet I don’t think even the Don Drapers of the world initially expected people to believe it. It was just a shorthand. A little word association trick, like a pick-up artist’s ruse to create a false sense of familiarity. Short circuit your mark’s brain a little, hypnotize him by repeating his name, Dale Carnegie-style, for fun and profit. Happy guy, bottle of Coke. Isn’t it better to consume and smile than to criticize and frown? Fast-forward to the late ’70s or so and they’ve raised a significant portion of a generation who’ve internalized advertising’s messaging so fully and so uncritically that they honestly believe ‘fan of things = good; not fan of things = …bad?’ without even having to know what the things are. They’ve built an entire identity out of being an easy mark. Worse, they believe that to say so out loud, to write all-purpose love letters to … things, any thing — is somehow profound. This attitude of all-purpose positivity is not only artistically lame, it may end up killing us.”
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From Britt Hayes at ScreenCrush, March 28, 2018:
“The parts of Ready Player One that feel truly dystopian probably aren’t the ones Spielberg and Penn intended; the real ugliness of this world is that it is a fanboy utopia where every inane piece of useless trivia has some divine purpose, and where all the time these loyal players spent indoors consuming pop culture could very well be their golden ticket to total control over the characters and fiction they love. Ready Player One tells fanboys that the very parts of this culture that have become so toxic — gatekeeping, in particular — are actually good.
Whatever message the film is trying to convey is utterly garbled by an exhaustive third act (the movie itself two and a half hours long); up until that point, the motives of Ready Player One are confusing at best. Fans are trying to protect their favorite franchises and brands and characters from corporate interests — you know, the same corporate interests that are responsible for bringing this film to the masses in the first place …
To certain viewers, Ready Player One is a terrifying story set in a world senselessly devoted to zealous fanboys, carelessly combining random bits of pop culture and shutting out anyone who’s a “hater” or a “noob.” (Someone in this movie actually says “noob.”) If you don’t love the right movies and games, and if you don’t appreciate the right parts of them in the correct fashion, then you’re a fake, unworthy fan. But if you’re the sort of person who just wants to see the Iron Giant in the same movie with Gundam, the Mach Five from Speed Racer, and the characters from Street Fighter II, then Ready Player One might be for you.”
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From Alissa Wilkinson at Vox, March 29, 2018:
“But about three-quarters of the way into the movie, I started to feel extremely uncomfortable, and that discomfort only increased as the movie skidded toward its conclusion. The movie was asking me to root for the heroes — but I wanted nothing more than for them to fail in their quest. And while that could work in a satirical film, Ready Player One is far from satirical. On the contrary, it seemed blithely unaware of how disturbing it was.
Ready Player One is set in a dystopian future. But it seems to have no idea how dystopian it really is.
The year is 2045, and the world has gone to shit. It’s gotten so bad that most people prefer to spend their time in a massive video game called the OASIS, where they engage as characters in various worlds and collect coin, the in-game currency.
We learn all this in voiceover from Wade (Tye Sheridan), a teenage orphan who lives with his aunt in a trailer park and plays in the OASIS as an avatar called Parzival. Wade loves the OASIS. It’s where he’s met his friends and where he spends his days. And no wonder — the real world is a wreck, and everyone in it spends all their time in the OASIS too …
An early shot in the movie pans across the trailer park where Wade lives, trailers stacked high. Inside each trailer is a person wearing VR goggles and looking kind of ridiculous, because they are in the OASIS, playing games or fighting or whatever.
It’s one of the more frightening things I’ve ever seen in a movie, largely because it’s only a few notches past the world we inhabit now. It’s like a scene from Black Mirror: a world of people so distracted by their shiny technology that they have entirely neglected the stuff of human life. They’d rather just escape into another world, created by a couple of programmers.
To me, that seems transparently dystopian — not that the world is bad, but that nobody cares anymore about fixing it …
There’s no sense in the film that anyone really should be paying attention to what’s brought their civilization to this place. (Which, for all its described evils, still has the wealth and technology available to deliver piping hot pizzas via drones.)
It sounds overly pedantic to say this, and it probably is, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what was going on in the world outside the OASIS. Were people starving? Or fearing for their lives? Can everyone afford to have headsets, or does this neglected world include people who have to live in the dystopic ruins without escape? What kind of unrest has driven them into this dystopic state? And why doesn’t anyone think it can be fixed? Isn’t it horrifying that they’ve just left it all behind altogether?
This would be some pretty salient Black Mirror-style warning about technology and bad social systems if it were just left there. The solution would be to see the OASIS destroyed so that people are plunged back into the real world and resolve to change it.
But Ready Player One presents itself as a story about a gang of brave, scrappy heroes who are motivated to save the world — but only the virtual world, the one that keeps them from engaging with what’s really going on in the physical world.
And the movie applauds this. It very obviously wants us to cheer for our heroes as they try to save the OASIS from destruction. I sat watching this all unfold, disturbed by the implication here: that we out in the audience are supposed to be on the side of escape. In fact, we are on its side, engaging in a movie that functions as an escapist fantasy itself.”
From Alex Doenau at Trespass Magazine, March 29, 2018:
“Ready Player One is not a film. It is an object lesson. This is a film that purports to oppose capitalism even as it is entirely propped up by it, more so than normal. This is something that must be meditated upon, but to expend any thought on Ready Player One is to do more than anyone involved in its production managed. Ready Player One represents the death of the imagination, a society governed entirely by gatekeepers, where the only difference between the corporates and the rebels is that the suits wear suits …
In Ready Player One’s faint defence, it has one sequence that impresses, but as it drags on it becomes obvious that Cline and his cowriter Zak Penn (Alphas) have missed the point as much here as the rest of the movie. As High Fidelity tried to teach a generation of people who didn’t understand it, it’s not what you like but what you are like. Beyond Ready Player One being about characters who pride themselves on their taste and looking down on people who don’t have identical cultural experience, what niggles most is that none of them came by their pop culture loves “honestly”: everything that they like is because they were essentially told to by Oasis founder, Halliday (Mark Rylance, Dunkirk), who is worshipped as a God. They have read his holy texts, but have they learned anything from them? They have not.
Somewhere in Ready Player One there is a message about the value of human connection, and the need to switch off and go outside from time to time, but Ready Player One forgets the world-building of its source material: in the bleak dystopia of the 2040s, the Oasis is legitimately the basis of the world’s economy, and all education takes place within it. In the film, the Oasis is a distraction from the nightmare of modern existence, which really has nothing to recommend it. If the Oasis is a cultural wasteland and the real world is a literal wasteland, no one would want to live in either of them.”
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From David Sims at The Atlantic, March 29, 2018:
“Ready Player One is a beautifully, expensively realized vision of hell. The year is 2045, and the world is an overpopulated wasteland; in Columbus, Ohio, the fastest-growing city on Earth, people live in shipping containers stacked on top of each other. The American dream is a rotting corpse, and instead of hoping for a better life, people while away their days in the OASIS: a virtual-reality realm filled with cartoon avatars of logged-on gamers, where you can do whatever you want as long as you have enough coins (a currency, it seems, that’s largely earned by blowing up other gamers).
Steven Spielberg’s new film is set in two different dystopias, but it’s only intermittently interested in acknowledging that. The first is our real world, which has become far more polluted and overcrowded—both a typical and believable near-future prediction. The second is the OASIS, a dazzling land bound only by the limits of one’s imagination that has somehow ossified around late 20th-century pop-culture artifacts as if they’re religious icons. This is a film that treats an Atari 2600 like it’s the Ark of the Covenant, that turns The Shining’s Overlook Hotel into an inviolate temple, and where lines like “a fanboy can always tell a hater” are barked with sincere zeal.”
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From Sean Burns at The ARTery, March 29, 2018:
“Wade and his small gang of ethnically diverse, underdeveloped sidekicks need to save the OASIS from the evil corporation IOI, which has recruited a large army of players running around on treadmills in their shiny offices to try and win the contest. The extent of IOI’s dastardly, nefarious plan for spoiling this virtual utopia appears to be some sort of tired-membership program and advertising space within the OASIS. (The latter is quite hilariously considered a grave sacrilege by a film that features prominent product placement for Pizza Hut during its opening scene.)
It’s easy to see why Cline’s book became a bestseller. Ready Player One subserviently seeks to flatter its target audience with a spectacular array of semi-clever references to cool stuff from their childhoods. Meanwhile the entire premise of the story is that an otherwise unremarkable, antisocial, adolescent white boy’s skill at video games and deep knowledge of trivial ephemera will someday save the world. It’s fanboy fellatio — an unquestioning nerd fantasy in its purest form. I found it all almost unbearably depressing …
I hate to indulge the old critics’ cliché of saying a movie feels like watching someone else play a video game, except in this one you literally are watching someone else play a video game. Hell, the whole climax involves the world looking on in suspense while Wade fiddles with an old Atari 2600. Not even a director as kinetically gifted as Steven Spielberg can make that exciting.
It’s also impossible not to feel like these folks would be better off trying to repair their disastrously broken society instead of spending all their time and energy fighting to keep commercials out of their precious video game. If the movie made any sense it would end with Wade unplugging the OASIS for good, but the most Spielberg and company are willing to muster without alienating their audience is a mild admonishment to shut off the console every once in a while and go try getting yourself a girlfriend.”
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From Katherine Monk at the Ex-Press, March 29, 2018:
“Why does Steven Spielberg always make the same mistake? Every time he tries to make technology and artificial reality the guts of the story, instead of the means of telling a story, he makes a great big-budget mess …
Spielberg can’t find the flow. Everything seems to eddy in a feeble swirl because he gets clogged up with characters and action without exploring the deeper emptiness within the human soul.
Like The Matrix, the whole point of Ready Player One was to question our need for escape. The fake world may be more fun than the real world, but ultimately, it’s not real — and therefore unable to nurture the deep spirit.
Spielberg waits until the last five minutes to articulate the actual message, and go figure, it’s not at all convincing. Metaphysics are not the Hollywood boy-king’s strength. He fumbles with the underlying philosophical underpinnings and leaves them loosely arranged somewhere beneath his pretty frames.
He tells us reality is better than artifice, but you never get the feeling Spielberg believes it himself. The man who made dinosaurs walk the earth and Harrison Ford raid ancient temples has delivered some of the most memorable moments of movie artifice in history. Dealing in the humble truths of the human condition is anathema to his entire oeuvre.”
From Jonathan Romney at Film Comment, March 30, 2018:
“Based on the science-fiction best-seller by Ernest Cline—who has scripted the film together with Zak Penn—the movie is set in Columbus, Ohio in 2045, in an America transformed by both droughts and ‘bandwidth riots’ (you can only imagine what they are, but we should probably prepare ourselves). The action begins in a slum area, the ‘Stacks,’ where containers are piled up in towers as living quarters; in a vertiginous opening sequence, we’re wheeled though a world in which almost everyone we see is strapped into virtual reality headsets. ‘These days, reality’s a bummer,’ explains young hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) in voiceover, ‘that’s why everyone’s trying to escape.’ As we soon see, the universal flight from bleak, subsistence-level reality and into the escapist pleasures of VR is itself a bummer: gaming has become a universal addiction destroying people’s minds and draining their economic resources. Profiting handsomely, meanwhile, is a company named IOI (Innovative Online Industries), which employs its own militia and places overdrawn subscribers in ‘Loyalty Centers’: basically, private debtors’ prisons with a touch of Guantanamo, where they’re forced to work off their debt by playing games in cell-like pods …
There’s a certain nerd pedantry, however, to the film’s omnivorousness. At one point, Sorrento tries to catch Wade out with trick references to John Hughes movies: Wade passes with flying colors whereas Sorrento, who has no true love of pop culture, has to be prompted through an earpiece by his minions. This is a truly strange moment for several many reasons. One, it reminds us that the Hughes cycle, and similar teen movies of the era, have become cherished as an embodiment of Edenic purity before the cynical CGI-fuelled rot set in; we’re also meant to believe that knowledge of such films embodies some sort of spiritual authenticity (Wade sees through Sorrento with the clear vision of a believer because ‘a fanboy knows a hater’). But this sequence itself recycles a staple of teen movie tropes since time immemorial: Sorrento’s the corporate square, the breadhead, trying to capitalize on the idealism of the young: he’s the Man plotting to synthesize acid commercially, or a record company executive out to milk the kids’ music … It’s a curiously ’60s moment in this futuristic movie …
For all its ferocious energy, Ready Player One strikes me as the product of a cinema of exhaustion—it’s a film about having come too far and being at the end of something, where extraordinary things no longer mean much, or have become toxic. It does have serious questions to ask about where the cinema of spectacle—and its more cynical cousin, the gaming industry—have taken us today. The film is so insanely overloaded—with event, image, action, detail—that it becomes an essay on the difficulty of finding meaning in an age of overkill.
The film’s spectacular effects no longer figure as revelations of the new, but simply trigger recognitions of the already-seen: even a climactic battle of armies seems more a generic nod than a significant event in itself, an allusion to the clash of multitudes that’s been a mandatory blockbuster trope since The Lord of the Rings and the development of Massive crowd-simulation software. Most distressingly from a cinephile point of view, Ready Player One seems to say that popular cinema no longer means much in itself but has primarily become a generator of iconography to be recycled more lucratively in games …
In the end, the film’s warning about escapism is rather neatly resolved with the sign-off, ‘People need to spend more time in the real world.’ Spielberg manages to have his virtual cake and eat it, but then we all love a contradictory text. The thing that most worries me, however, is that while the film pays testimony to the God-like brilliance of Halliday as a paragon of boundless imagination, the world depicted here leaves no room for the imagination. Aech does a bit of tinkering on his own robots, while Wade gets to decide whether he’ll dress his avatar as Prince, Michael Jackson or (wait for it) Buckaroo Banzai. But no-one really gets to use their imagination in the Oasis, a world laid on with all its possibilities pre-programmed. And in the hyper-programmed, visually intense, pixel-saturated world of Ready Player One itself, there doesn’t seem to be much room for viewers to use their imaginations either.”
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From Richard Brody at The New Yorker, April 2, 2018:
“Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is not a video-game-centered dystopian teen adventure but a horror film, a movie of spiritual zombies whose souls have been consumed by the makers of generations of official cultural product and regurgitated in the form of pop nostalgia. The movie, framed as a story of resistance to corporate tyranny, is actually a tale of tyranny perpetuated by a cheerfully totalitarian predator who indoctrinates his victims by amusing them to death—and the movie’s stifled horror is doubled by Spielberg’s obliviousness to it …
In short, Ready Player One depicts a retrofitted universe that filters out any artist or subject cooler, bolder, more aware than Spielberg and his films—and, chillingly, that monolith of virtual reality and the nostalgia that fuels it isn’t depicted as a tyrannical or terrifying aspect of the movie’s dystopian premise. Halliday, as if desperate to recapture the fetish objects of his youth, creates a world of young mental clones whose minds are emptied of their current concerns and filled with his own obsessions.
Instead, to those who consume nothing but multiplex movies, commercial video games, and mass-market music to fuel their imagination, Ready Player One offers a heartening encouragement: fear not, for these things offer you all the tools you need to be Master of the Universe. But what lies just underneath that reassurance is a deadly, deadening complacency—to stick with the most immediately accessible products on offer, not to look further than what’s delivered by advertising or algorithm, and to look no further for heroes than the purveyors and recyclers of their self-consuming, vastly profitable trivia contest. Spielberg’s very career pivots on the notion of popular art as a source of virtue. In Ready Player One, Parzival insults the villainous Sorrento with the ultimate Spielbergian credo: ‘A fanboy knows a hater.’ The movie turns Spielberg, in the persona of Halliday, into the ultimate cool dad, converting Wade’s heroism into a conjoined set of virtues centered on filial piety (piety toward a substitute father) and pop devotion. Yet that coolness is an unintended mask for an underlying horror: Ready Player One is a story of generations of kindly and avuncular creators, venerators of their own childhoods and the childhoods of children to come, perpetuating their own senescent, obsolete, and decaying reign by consuming the brains of the young. A fanboy doesn’t know a cult because he’s in it.”
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From Sarah Ward at ArtsHub, April 9, 2018:
“Escaping the troubles of today, longing for a seemingly simpler time, viewing history with rose-coloured glasses, holding onto childhood favourites in a mass case of arrested development: call it whatever you like, but it’s fast becoming the cultural status quo. No shortage of films and television shows have helped twist society’s Rubik’s Cube to its current ‘80s-heavy configuration, though Ready Player One is the trend’s latest move. It’s a movie not only overflowing with more references to communally beloved properties than a comic book convention, but a Willy Wonka-like quest for glory through a Matrix-esque scenario, where ‘80s-dominated pop culture has become the chosen reality. More than that, the feature posits that proving that your recollection of, obsession with and affection for the decade’s entertainment commodities exceeds everyone else’s is all that anyone could and should possibly dream of …
What results is the cinematic equivalent of ‘retweet doesn’t equal endorsement’, where representation doesn’t equal interrogation. Directed by Steven Spielberg, the film is based on the 2011 novel by Ernest Cline – and adapted for the screen by Cline (Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return) with Zak Penn (The Avengers) – but it’s content to list favourite movies, games, bands and shows as a substitute for displaying personality. And while fandom takes many guises, a topic Cline also explored in his only other feature script, for 2009’s Fanboys, Ready Player One simply includes beloved icons rather than contemplating what draws audiences to them, or how they shape fans in turn. Even its most thoughtfully constructed scene, which recreates The Shining as one of Halliday’s games, just offers a depiction. It reminds viewers that they love Stanley Kubrick’s film, but it does little else. While there’s no such thing as a perfect journey through nostalgia, missing is Stranger Things’ evocation of mood, Red Oaks’ immersion in the everyday minutiae, or Brigsby Bear’s smart, sweet grappling with pop culture’s influence over identity.
Instead, Ready Player One serves up spectacle without substance, though its largely-CGI-animated action hardly dazzles. It’s fast, frenetic and functional; rendered in the right colour scheme; set to an expected array of ‘80s hits; and not only well-choreographed thanks to Spielberg’s ample experience, but places some of the director’s own greatest hits on display; however it possesses all of the allure of the Netflix menu. In fact, with its recognisable references lined up for quick, easy, shiny consumption, that’s what the viewing process resembles. With much of the movie’s content feeling as if it has been calculated by an algorithm, the parallels with the streaming platform extend further, but audiences may as well be scrolling through a catalogue, experiencing twinges of appreciation when they happen across something they know and like, but never delving any deeper.”
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From J. Olson at Cinemixtape, April 16, 2018:
“Overkill, on the other hand, doesn’t suit Spielberg. Each of his four or five epoch-making summer movies left something to the imagination, be it the involuntary but ultimately successful absence of the shark throughout most of Jaws or the surprisingly low number of effects shots in Jurassic Park. Here, everything is on screen, resulting in a half-baked casserole of middling CGI (Parzival and company evoke the sorely artificial characters from 2001 bomb Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within) and heaps of tired pandering to middle-aged nerds.
The movie’s man-child streak, where references function as nothing more than pacifiers, is even more bewildering in relation to Sorrento, its main villain. Where 2015’s decidedly corporate, Spielberg-produced Jurassic World managed to paint a picture of the push-pull between artistry and stock points, Ready Player One is so dense as to depict an army of intellectual property literally fighting a corporate overlord. It makes as little sense as a denouement that hastily attempts to rebrand the movie as pro-reality – as in, this virtual reality porn we clobbered you with the past two hours is only good in moderation!
The silver lining is that the movie is so inadvertently incisive as to the emptiness of nerdom that someday it might be viewed as an worthy document of the feedback loop of memes and YouTube reaction videos that’s become American culture. The presence of fallen comedian T.J. Miller’s voice as an OASIS bounty hunter is the movie’s essence – both white male toxicity incarnate and a regrettable reminder of things once enjoyed.”
From Palmer Rampell at The Los Angeles Review of Books, May 3, 2018:
“The New Yorker critic Pauline Kael wondered rhetorically while being interviewed in 1985. ‘One hates to say it comes down to the success of Steven Spielberg, but…’ She left a pregnant pause. For critics like Kael, Spielberg, along with George Lucas and others, shifted the production model in Hollywood away from introspective low-budget pictures helmed by auteurs — like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider (the so-called Hollywood Renaissance) — to blockbuster productions with ever-proliferating sequels and extensive advertising campaigns. Spielberg’s critics insist that his blockbusters are ‘infantilizing’ or even ‘totalitarian’ in their unreflectiveness and focus on spectacle. At the same time, the popularity of the blockbuster has enabled Spielberg to become the highest grossing director of all time, personally worth $3.6 billion. And while Spielberg began as a countercultural auteur, or so the legend goes, there is also good evidence to suggest that he was sanguine about corporate production from early in his career. Like Halliday and, one day, Wade, his obvious doubles, Spielberg is a multibillion-dollar creator of artworks for the masses, and the battle in the film between Wade and Sorrento is a battle over the legacy of the cultural meaning of the 1980s, the nature of corporate productions, and by extension Spielberg’s oeuvre. Was the culture of the ’80s all just for profit and in bad taste, with Sorrento as its true heir, or, following Wade, can we find something redemptive underneath the shoulder pads, hoop earrings, and acid-washed jeans? …
Once we see that Spielberg is pointing to the intertwined visions of director and corporation, Ready Player One looks like a celebration of one corporation in particular — Warners — and of the corporate vision — the vertically integrated multimedia conglomerate — that has underpinned it for the past 50 years. The media conglomerates of the 1970s and ’80s could underwrite the Hollywood blockbuster’s high risk and high reward because they had diversified their holdings by investing in a number of different industries: film, television, video games, et cetera … What would it mean to read the film as celebrating not just Spielberg but also Warners’ culture, to think of the film not only as Spielberg’s creation but also as Warners’ advancement of a particular agenda at this moment in time? One obvious answer is that Ready Player One promotes virtual reality as a medium for the masses, a potential boon to both Time Warner and Spielberg, who have invested in virtual reality technologies as the next multimedia frontier …
But ironically, in its frequent allusions to Warners’ productions, Ready Player One cannot help but reveal the gap between its celebration of the free and open distribution of content and the studios’ actual practice of covetously guarding their intellectual property. To paraphrase Henry Ford a bit, users of the OASIS can explore any IP that they want — so long as it belongs to Warners. Users can generate their own content, but perhaps the most notable example of user-generated content is Wade’s friend Aech’s massive recreation of the Iron Giant. Her creative imagination has been thoroughly colonized by Warners’ IP, which AT&T plans to release to its consumers in similarly customizable experiences. The OASIS is thus exactly what many reasonably fear AT&T envisions as the future of the internet: a putatively free internet that is dominated by Time Warner’s content.
While, to Spielberg, the Golden Egg may refer to the quality of the art produced under corporate supervision, to Time Warner and AT&T, a golden egg refers to the monetary value of the associated goose. In fact, AT&T has described its premium satellite and cable subscribers as precisely that: ‘a golden goose,’ by which they mean a reliable source of revenue.”
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From Meg Downey at CBR, May 18, 2018:
“The end result is a confusing and muddled message about the ‘purity’ of fandom. Wade is different from the Sixers because he won’t literally sell out, but he exists in a world where worth is proven by figuratively doing exactly that. Wade is endlessly juxtaposed against cuts to IOI’s team of suit-wearing corporate fanboys and girls, but they only ever do the exact same thing: rattle off trivia in ‘um, actually’ cadences, solve puzzles by diving deep into their own obsessions, and prove their worth by winning nitpicking arguments.
If Ready Player One has anything to say at all, it’s that the corporatization of pop culture is cutting out its heart. It’s a noble enough flag to plant in the ground, but one that makes little to no sense considering that the movie itself exists as a multimillion dollar corporate blockbuster where — no joke — the audience uproariously cheered for the Warner Bros. and Amblin logos that play at the head of the film …
There are real-world slave labor camps called Loyalty Centers which help provide the motivation for Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), but why does a mega corporation with the reach and resource of IOI need slave labor in digital world where seemingly anything can be created at will? Who knows. ‘Welcome to the resistance,’ Art3mis tells Wade when they meet in the real world — but the resistance to what exactly? IOI? Corporate greed?
Of course, the elephant in the room when dealing with Ready Player One is its naked derivativeness — it’s a story that takes an awful lot of pride in reusing and repurposing parts of other, more famous stories — but honestly, the referential humor in and of itself is hardly a sin here. You know from beat one exactly what you’re in for, even if you’re not typically a fan of endless wink-nudge ‘did you catch that reference?’ moments. The problems start when you realize that those wink-nudge moments feel less like fun pop culture shout-outs and more like off-brand, off-model passing glances to avoid too many copyright issues.”
