ARE YOU READY, PLAYER ONE?

NON SPOILER REVIEW

"If pop culture is your religion, then Ready Player One is your Sunday school teacher"

For a while now, Hollywood has churned out lots of cringe worthy young adult movies, but when Steven “The King’ Spielberg decides to delve into the genre for his first action adventure film since The Adventures of Tin Tin (2011), then you know it’s got to be worth the watch. Ready Player One is based on the novel of the same name written by Ernest Cline. Warner Bros won an auction for the rights to produce the film in 2010, before the book had even been published (in 2011) - a feat as impressive as it sounds, with that sort of precedent it’s little wonder why Ready Player One is such an intriguing and mind blowing experience.

Set in a near dystopian future (2045) where after series of wars and natural disasters mankind has gotten tired of ‘cleaning up’ we are introduced to Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan); a teenage boy living in 'The Stacks,' a slum in the metropolis of Columbus, Ohio where ship containers are stacked on top of one another to make rusty high rises. Things aren’t so dire for the residents of the Stacks though, cuz like everybody else they have a chance to escape their shitty reality by hooking up into the Oasis; A virtual world created by the now late eccentric trillionaire, James Halliday. Like many others Wade is a Gunter; an egg hunter who navigates the digital puzzles of the Oasis for Easter eggs left around by James Halliday in search of the ultimate prize - complete control of the Oasis and Halliday’s company Innovative Online Industries (IOI).

Enter the Oasis

Most alternate reality films, aim to suck viewers into their believable virtual worlds; usually akin with darkness and danger, but the Oasis, is one world you’d love to linger in for way more than you should, a world where with avatars you can literally be anyone and anything you want with only the risk of losing your life savings. Wade’s avatar in the Oasis; Parzival, gets by pretty well while scrounging for coins (that’s right coins, which can actually be used as credits in real life) that other players lose when they ‘die’, as the search for Halliday’s keys have become a futile exercise of death and mayhem, but after a chance meeting with legendary gunter and hottie Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Parzival’s interest in Halliday’s treasure is reinvigorated.

Parzival and Art3mis

But what would any treasure Hunt be without an antagonist with more resources and an army to find the same exact thing you’re looking for? Step In Ben Mendelsohn’s Nolan Sorrento, the CEO of Innovative Online Industries ( who remains relatively unchanged from  Orson Krennic in Rogue One, except he’s now a  corporate suit still bent on virtual world domination). As Wade/Parzival continues to progress within the Oasis, Sorrento (or rather his evil Clark Kent avatar) is bent on stopping him and his friends by any means necessary and acquires the services of i-ROK, an amusing bad ass bounty hunter in the Oasis and perhaps in real life (however we don’t get to see his human counterpart), and what ensues is a treasure hunt too big for reality as Wade and his friends; Art3mis, Aech, Daito and Shoto find themselves in IOI’s crosshairs.

T.J Miller's i-ROK was as amusing as Ben Mendhelson's evil Superman was mean

Ready Player One delicately balances its story between the Oasis and the real world and although majority of the movie happens in the Oasis it doesn’t feel like it’s done at the detriment of the real world scenes. Ready Player One rehashes various elements of online gaming from the popular dos of investing in level 100 power artifacts for the final battle to the don’ts of sharing your personal life online with people you don’t know or even that of the obnoxious player who’s leveled up more than most and just goes about pillaging others. It goes down the well-trodden path of action-adventures; as the unassuming young person rises above adversity to become the hero of the story, but it’s hard to even hold that against it, because no matter how many times you’ve seen the zero to hero arch being played out, you haven’t seen it quite like this.

Ready Player One is littered with Pop Culture references

If pop culture is your religion, then Ready Player One is your Sunday school teacher, as it offers a quick visual course on the subject, think of the most popular characters in pop culture for the last two decades and chances are that they were in this film - A nostalgic treat for geeks and non-geeks alike, although younger viewers may tend to miss out on the 80s and 90s references. Noticeably, Ready Player One glorifies fan boys and pop culture while utterly detesting it; a back handed compliment of sorts, which celebrates the escapism that we all desperately need from time to time when our true lives aren’t as contended or as exciting as we might want, but in which if we linger too long, might lose sight of what truly matters and what is real. It also shows the corporate world’s exploitation of consumers trapped in a never ending loop for the need to be entertained, a never ending supply of cows to be milked.

Needless to say, Ready Player One was a visual feast with amazing  CGI which kept your eyes stuffed for its 2 hour run time;  you really didn’t want to leave the Oasis and it was easy to understand why the citizens of Ernest Clines’s world were susceptible to linger. Seeing Ready Player One in anything other than IMAX or IMAX 3D would be a crime, as the only way to witness this huge adventure would be to see it big!

Ready Player One tells us what we know all too well (if we haven’t chosen to forget), and Oasis creator James Halliday sadly learns that quite late; as much as reality can suck (which can be quite often) it’s the only place where we really are and exist, the only place where everything actually matters and as we head into a future similar to that of Ernest Cline’s world with social media, virtual chat rooms and online gaming, it would be nice to remember that.

Reject Rating: 8/10