When “Ready Player One” begins, the theater is pitch black with only the setting written across the screen (Columbus, Ohio 2045). Almost immediately, Jump by Van Halen blares in all its nostalgic glory, and, if you’re anything like me, you instantly began to expect the worst.
The next few hours were pretty balanced with good and bad things. What is absolutely certain, though, is that this is a true modern-day blockbuster: action-packed, slightly humorous, pop-culture laden, but disappointedly superficial. An average blockbuster!
In its defense, “Ready Player One” is pretty fun to watch. The special effects are marvelous considering the fact that more than half of the movie takes place literally inside a virtual reality. It was very funny at times and goosebumpy-epic in others. Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, and Ben Mendelsohn all give very solid performances in their titular roles, but none even remotely measure up to the mastery of Mark Rylance.
Much to the disappointment of fans of the source material, the film is only the skeleton of Ernest Cline’s novel filled in with the flesh of a Spielberg action flick. It was never going to be a faithful adaptation of the book, book fans, let’s face it. Most opening-weekend crowds were probably like myself and my friends, at least one person who had read the book and convinced his friends to see it when they otherwise could not have cared less about such a dorky concept that took a whopping 2 hours and 20 minutes to develop. For that one book fan in the group, the movie was likely a devastating blow to a 7-year-old fandom, but I believe that can be reconciled once they accept the fact Cline’s 2011 masterpiece was simply impossible to faithfully adapt to the screen for general audiences in 2018. The movie is (thankfully) aware of the vast difference in the attention span between the average movie-goer, and that of the average Ernest Cline reader.
As is much easier to point out, this does have its share of major flaws including some awkward pacing, shallow characters, and a sense that it’s “cramming” everything in at various points. For me, the most tragic of flaws is the shallow characters. One of the reasons the book is so good is that Wade Watts is not a typical hero (nor is he the pseudo-rebellious,“I’m not your average hero”, melodramatic type). Wade is a full-blown nerd in the novel, real and believable and, sometimes, very gross; in the film, he just seemed to morph into whatever the plot needs him to be at the moment ranging from a depressed outsider to a Bruce Lee-caliber action hero doing backflips in the back of a truck. In the end, there is no deep sense of fulfillment and joy in Wade getting what he had been searching for for most of his life (I just wanted it to finish so I didn’t have to watch Sheridan and Cooke make out in their loft).
“Ready Player One”, with all the subsequent conversation about it, is really about pop culture. Not everyone is a hard-core fanboy like Ernest Cline or Wade Watts, but what is fascinating about this is that almost every person in the theater will get at least one of its numerous pop-culture references. From TMNT to Chucky to “Back to the Future” to “The Iron Giant” to “The Shining” to even “Citizen Kane”, Spielberg very obviously tried his best to tickle everyone’s nostalgia-bone. Now, nostalgia can either be taken as good or bad when heavily applied to a movie, but when a movie like this is, at its core, a cornucopia of pop culture, viewers inevitably gush over it; I guess this is why the audience rating on both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes is higher than the critics’ score.
We simply love classic pop culture because it reminds us of when life seemed to be better, even if that was not actually the case. Wade’s world sucks and it is clear why people want to spend all their time inside the OASIS. Some of us can genuinely relate to that even in 2018 as we go back to old shows on Netflix or spend hours playing Fortnite to escape from our present circumstances. A movie that commented on such phenomena would have been an enlightening experience, one which Cline’s novel definitely set up. But, with its rushed ending and simple characters, viewers are bound to end up wanting to see “The Shining” rather than discussing how frightfully similar our own culture is to Cline’s vision of 2045. “Ready Player One” is more about what occurs within its 140 minutes of runtime when it could have been more about its audience and the world we live in today.
