Ready Player One Review: Spielberg back at his best straddling the gap between nostalgia and outright entertainment
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It’s 2045 and the world has been brought to its knees after riots and war. There’s famine and poverty wherever you look - apart from inside The Oasis.
The real world is a mess, but the Oasis offers you everything. You can look how you want, be how you want. People enter on the promise of what they can do, but stay for what they can be.
Then there’s the added promise - and premise of the movie - the creator of The Oasis, James Halliday, has set a competition. When he died he left a message. Inside The Oasis are three hidden ‘keys’. Whoever finds the keys will win the virtual Easter Egg and control over The Oasis and his trillion dollar business.
RP1 sees Tye Sheridan play Wade Watts, an orphaned teen that lives with his aunt and her abusive boyfriend in the Stacks, a slum he escapes by plugging into the VR world known as the Oasis.
He has no friends, bar those he makes in online.
The movie flips between the expansive CGI environments within The Oasis and the dull and dank reality Wade inhabits.
We find Wade mid-search. Years have past since Halliday’s death and no one is close to solving his clue. Dedicated gamers have trawled through Halliday’s memories in a bid to find answers.
Now the number searching has diminished, but among those that remain is the corrupt Innovative Online Industries aka IOI headed by Bolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) who has hired an army of people to ‘game’ for him.
There’s also Art3mis, a beautiful avatar, who catches Wade’s attention as she also battles to find the keys, but with the intention of keeping them out of the hands of IOI.
Just as this review has been mainly laying out the set up, the movie spends the first part laying the foundation and rules to The Oasis and explaining Wade’s life. If you can keep up and follow his narration (and our’s) you’re in for a treat.
Based on Ernest Cline’s novel of the same name, Ready Player One, is for the die-hard Steven Spielberg fans.
Crammed full of easter eggs and pop culture references it could easily have given way under all that weight, but RP1 manages to somehow embrace them and weave them into the story.
Wade jumps into his delorean, dons Duran Duran’s wardrobe of choice (as well as Michael Jackson’s Thriller outfit) and throws out gaming and movie knowledge like he’s a walking encyclopedia. There's even the Iron Giant.
This is Spielberg’s love letter to the 80s packaged for the 90s child. The hope clearly being that the movie straddles the holy grail, the coveted middle ground between grown-up nostalgia and kids entertainment.
The quests are different to the book, and that’s where the main changes come in. No spoilers here, but the main plot points are largely changed from the book, though the spirit remains the same. After all, isn’t that how the best games work? The journey changes and the destination may be obvious, but it’s the experience that counts.
While structurally RP1 is not that sophisticated, or unpredictable (and has a glaring need to flesh out some of the sidekick characters) it is packed full of humour and heart.
At its core RP1 is about entertainment. The issues and messages aren’t anything new, they’re just packaged differently, but ultimately it doesn’t matter.
Tye Sheridan puts in a great show as Wade, convincing both as his avatar and the real life teen struggling to do the right thing. He’s come a long way since X-Men: Apocalypse.
He jumps between the cool (but still geeky) Parsival in The Oasis, to the lonely and sweet teen Wade in real life.
Olivia Cooke as Art3mis is also a stroke of genius and Lena Waithe is an even better ‘surprise’ as Wade’s online best friend. The other sidekicks don’t get as favourable showing and could have done with being fleshed out a bit more, but that’s seems to be, in part, down to time.
If you’re looking for an uplifting film with a story centering on love and friendship, with Spielberg’s humour and geekery throughout, then RP1 is for you.
While a little on the long side (it comes in at 2hrs 20mins) and even more obvious in where it’s taking you, it still manages to engage you thanks largely to the actors’ performances, visuals and truck loads of references.
RP1 may not be perfect, but it places Spielberg back at his best.
Ready Player One is out March 29.
Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Zak Penn, Ernest Cline
Starring: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Lena Waithe, Win Morisaki, Philip Zhao, Mark Rylance, Simon Pegg
Cert: 12 A
Running time: 140minutes