Ready Player One
Directed by Steven Spielberg
2018, Warner Bros. Pictures
2 hours, 20 minutes
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
It was apparent that the Ready Player One movie was a cash grab from the start. While I can commend Spielberg for wanting to adapt Ernest Cline’s book to film based on the concept alone, there’s no question in my mind that subtext was not something he was interested in when making this film. It’s a bombastic adventure stuffed with pop culture references and clichés. There’s no depth, and anything the book got right were lost in the process. In contrast, here is an edited excerpt from my 2016 review of the book from an old, now defunct Goodreads account:
As a long-standing geek and ex-MMO player, Ready Player One made me uncomfortable. A lot of what Wade went through, I experienced myself. Of course, I don’t live in a dystopia. But I did experience isolation and pined for a better life when I was younger, and still occasionally relapse into this mindset. The way Wade’s thought process seemed to mirror my own made me uneasy, and the book was sometimes painful to read as a result. At first, I was ready to give the book a two to three star rating because of how it made me feel. But if I’m honest with myself, Ready Player One kept me invested up until the last sentence, and I could not put it down once I hit the second half. It’s juvenile and straightforward with no surprises. There is no finesse in the writing. And maybe that’s why it’s a good book. It’s an honest, unabashedly geeky book for the 21st century that actually forces people within this world of geekery and nostalgia to reflect on what it means to be a geek. Too often I see works that try so hard to interpret this world for the masses, and fail miserably. This takes the best—and the worst—of geek culture and presents it to world, naked, and vulnerable.
It’s not a masterpiece by any account, but it is thought-provoking. If you haven’t read the book, it’s possible the movie can the same for you. It does tackle similar themes, such as online identity and the value of digital goods. However, the action always takes centre stage. The only truly powerful scene is the one midway through the film when Art3mis rejects Wade’s feelings for her. In this scene, we feel a hint of what the book tried to convey in regard to building human relationships in the digital world. However, I can’t remember anything about the events following this scene and the rest of the movie kind of falls apart afterwards.
Ready Player One was a thought-provoking book for me, but it was clear from the first trailers that the movie adaptation was not going to live up to the same expectations. It’s an action-adventure film with no clear audience, as the references seem to be aimed at older generations, but the story is incredibly juvenile—even by the standards set by the book. The IOI company is painted as a comical evil corporation instead of as an Orwellian totalitarian organization as it is in the books. None of the characters seem to understand stakes and keep cracking jokes at inappropriate times. Most of the characters also seem incompetent, so that when one of them does something intelligent—normally the female lead or villain—it feels out of place. It’s a mess of a film, and does disservice to its source material—even if the book wasn’t a game changer on itself. It’s a fun movie to watch if you have nothing else to do, but I doubt it will be remembered in five or ten years.