Ready Player One
(2018)
(SPOILERS) Ready
Player One was a major test for the ‘berg. Did he still have what it took
to rank as one of the big guns of populist modern cinema, or would he be
confirmed as an out-of-touch grandpa, futilely attempting to reclaim a crown he’d
long since lost, and in the process adding insult to injury by attempting to
tap into a vein of nostalgia he himself had a hand in creating? The answer is
that this is very much cinema from a man with his finger on the pulse of current
tastes and trends, one who – if we’re take his comment at face value – thinks it’s
anything other than facetious to suggest the Indiana Jones series would benefit from a gender swap as “Indiana Joan”. Ready Player One moves along breezily, hitting the superficial
marks of event cinema, but it’s a mechanical exercise from a man who was once a
titan of the genre. Where once he was enthused by the possibilities of creating
sheer entertainment and that was enough, now he’s caught second-guessing
himself on getting down with the kids.
Zak Penn and Ernest Cline’s adaptation of the latter’s
geekfest 2011 novel (unsurprisingly, he’s scribbling a sequel), comes armed
with a couple of structural safeguards that ensure this is at least far from
the abject turkey of latter-day Spielberg popcorn flicks (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The BFG) if never reaching the heights
of his last great one (The Adventures of Tintin:
The Secret of the Unicorn). For starters, it has on its side a Willy
Wonka-esque goal of protagonists scoring the keys to the kingdom (lotto: the
American dream of the disenfranchised making good as one-percenters), complete
with guiding mad/eccentric creator figure (Mark Rylance in fully endearing
Brian Wilson mode as OASIS main man James Halliday/Anorak), via a
tried-and-tested treasure hunt structure that, while being enslaved to
nostalgia is actually (vaguely) astutely clued into the formative well pool of
nostalgia itself (the key notes of one’s own personal past – depicted by journeying through the recorded
history of Halliday – albeit more commonly identified by the pop culture paraphernalia
thereof, which is basically Ready Player
One’s selling point).
However, while the envisioning of an increasingly
detached-from-reality populace escaping to a nominally better virtual life is
an evergreen theme of science fiction, increasingly so because it seems to be
actively encouraged by the trends of science itself and (if you want to throw
conspiracy into the mix, and why not) as part of the controlling mechanism of a
state assigning the transhumanist objective as the ultimate stranglehold on
liberty, Ready Player One is a weak
sauce derivation, even given its placement as a brain-in-neutral crowd-pleaser.
The last time Spielberg went for a dystopian vision, the result, Minority Report, was his best picture in
twenty years (and it doesn’t look like anything will have equalled it in the
twenty following), right down to the deceptively downbeat ending. There,
however, the big idea and thematic content never escaped him. Here, he seems caught
between modes, of pleasing and moralising, of pandering to the ‘80s nostalgia
that infuses the concept and faintly disdaining this underpinning aspect of the
exercise.
If the picture is structurally sound – like Minority Report, it’s a chase, although
unlike Minority Report, its back end is
conceptually exhausted – it’s also well cast. Tye Sheridan shows more of that
early promise of Mud and Joe as lead Wade Watts/Parzival, while
Olivia Cooke is even better as Samantha er… Cook/Art3mis. Arguably, however,
the basis of a picture where uber-geeks seek solace in a realm of idealised
avatars is somewhat undermined by casting photogenic actors (my God, isn’t the
leading lady hideous with that aesthetically tasteful birthmark plastered
across her face?) Only scene-stealing Lena Waither as Helen and her male
alter-ego Aech, and eleven-year-old Akhihide (Philip Zhao) playing adult Daitro,
hint at the broader appeal of this environment as a great leveller (there’s are
coy VR fondling that lead to real world arousal and VR knees to balls that lead
to real world wincing; insightful stuff).
Ben Mendelsohn essays his umpteenth villain (next up, the
Sheriff of Nottingham) in Nolan Sorrento, and if he’s unable to imbue him with
much beyond inveterate corporate malignance that’s because he’s given nothing more
to work with (I like the touch of him post-iting his password to his super deluxe
VR chair, though). Simon Pegg, on the other hand, is so benignly pathetic as
Halliday’s partner Ogden, you can only assume he thinks he’s channelling Sir
Dickie (but failing to ensure we actually like him). TJ Miller walks off with
most of the laughs as bounty hunter i-R0k, his lack of real world presence
representing a luck-in for Warners who consequently don’t have to deal with his
recent spate of adverse publicity.
Spielberg gets to play in the sandpit of his traditionally
favourite haunts of families both dysfunctional (Wade’s aunt and abusive
gambler boyfriend, Susan Lynch and Ralph Ineson respectively) and surrogate (Wade’s
fellow “Gunters”, or egg hunters). But there’s little emotional permanence, not
when Wade loses his extended family in one of the picture’s few occasions of
grounded stakes yet is fully distracted by the real Samantha a few minutes
later, and not in the rote call to non-virtual interfacing (Wade pursues that
kiss where Halliday failed; I wouldn’t be surprised if Halliday’s fear of
intimacy inspired Spielberg’s lurking adolescent self to sign on).
There’s a more serious issue of trying to make coherent sense
of this future vision, though. At the outset, I assumed IOI (Innovative Online
Industries) was a kind of de facto corporate government, with its own paramilitary
wing and jurisdictional freehand. It appears, come the end, that this isn’t the
case, as the real police dependably show up precisely when they’re needed to haul
Sorrento off in cuffs. It rather runs antithetical to the broad course of dystopian
projection, of increasingly totalitarian and intrusive state surveillance and infringement
of liberties, corn syrup droughts and bandwidth riots damping their influence or
not. Thus, it’s difficult to envisage this version of near-three decades hence,
where an individual can effectively keep their real identity secret in a game
(they can’t do that in a world of clouds now, how much less will they be able
to in the future?) Even more bemusing is the appeal of a virtual reality system
that appears to replicate the quality of early ‘00s video games, complete with clunky
tech (oversized headgear, walkpads) that undermine the essence of escapism
(thank goodness 2049 is just three short years from this).
Spielberg’s much better at the real world cat-and-mouse
games at IOI, as Samantha escapes her cell then eludes Sorrento, than depicting
the immaterial OASIS. There’s one instance where the VR concept is used to its
Dickian potential as Sorrento is subjected to a Total Recall fake out in which, curiously, the crappy avatars are
dispensed with for the photoreal. If the OASIS can produce that level of quality
all along, why are the impoverished populace mostly putting up with this kind
of Final Fantasy crap? Perhaps they
should have got Michael Bay to design the system?
Not only are the graphics lacking, but with regular cinematographer
Janusz Kaminski on board, it’s also mystifying why the globe’s population think
the system’s any kind of escape at all. The dour real world is more
aesthetically pleasing than the frankly pug-ugly virtual environment (all drab blue-greys).
I’m pretty certain the ‘berg’s career over the past three decades would have
been much more rewarding if he’d mixed up his DPs occasionally, choosing them
on the basis of the project’s merits. As it is, Janusz is as miscast as he was
for Crystal Skull (in contrast, Zemeckis
regular Alan Silvestri provides the score, John Williams being quite old’n’all,
and it’s decent if overly fond of using Back
to the Future cues, presumably intentionally).
The OASIS also has a pervasively negative effect on the
director’s technical instincts. It’s replete the kind of weightless,
gravity-defying virtual camera moves and signatures that, since they couldn’t happen
in the real world, undermine investment in the already fake; this was once the
unenvied domain of only Stephen Sommers spectaculars, and only serves to
underline the divorce from the recognisable. The major battle scene is forgettably
busy, a whirlwind of errant pixels and signature icons, when it should have
been enthralling. It’s the old problem of wanting to adapt video games (Ready Player One is at least, if not
more, nostalgic for games as its movies and music) but it failing to work if
they look or feel like video games.
It’s also curious that the glut of nostalgia references swarm
by with a shrug of general irrelevance (and have you witnessed some of the truly, abjectly awful classic poster “tributes” the publicists came up with?)
Even The Shining (replacing Monty Python & the Holy Grail; I
guess even Spielberg knows quoting great tracts of Python wholesale is an insufferable geek-out too far – the last
time it happened was Sliding Doors,
and John Hannah’s career has never quite recovered), the one sequence the
director is clearly fully on board with given he’s retracting the footsteps of
his hero Kubrick, is afflicted by the sense of CGI inrush and overkill.
There’s a jab at Last
Action Hero (III) (which Penn
penned the original story for, and which was thrashed by Jurassic Park at the box office), but for all its flaws that
picture martialled its slew of in-references in its own virtual world with much
more style and affection (why are we supposed to care about an avatar dressed
as Beetlejuice any more than we would seeing someone in that outfit at
Halloween? Chucky did make me laugh,
however). It’s a strange, ungainly effect overall, as you might come away with
the impression Spielberg really wants to disincentivise this world, but if that’s
the case, how can he expect viewers to believe it weaves such a spell on future
us-es?
Perhaps, without realising it, he’s merely translating the
slight queasiness of the subject matter, from Cline’s ever-so-unconvincing
moral (two days of the week with OASIS switched off? I’m not sure CIA-funded Google,
Musk et al would like that, but it’s a sop; more insidious is the notion that
it would only be pesky monetisation keeping the OASIS from the status of a
golden utopia – Samantha is not fighting “a rebellion” to create a better
world, but to liberate a virtual one, which is some kind of deplorable collapse
of future priorities) to the awe of the embodiment of the transhuman Halliday, offering
as he does the promise of immortality through each of us cloud-ing ourselves. Is
Ready Player One Spielberg’s paean to
VR, or IA (“Intelligence Augmentation”) in the manner Close Encounters was to ETs?
Or maybe Ready Player
One is wholly innocent and benign, and such readings are merely a
consequence of how ill-conceived it is. I’ve read figures of $600m being
necessary for the movie to break even, and I suspect that merely illustrates it
cost too damn much in the first place. On one level it’s nice to have a major release
that isn’t franchise or sequel, even if it’s entirely formulated on the same culturally-dependent
notions. On another, it’s a shame this comes up so short. In the novel, Cline
celebrates WarGames, amongst others;
now there’s an example of a “kids” movie that manages to be reasonably smart
and sharp on its own terms while selling itself to essentially the same age
group Spielberg’s currently seeking. In part, Ready Player One’s failure is down to Cline being a geek and Penn not
being given enough rope to overhaul the project. In part, it’s simply because
Spielberg got old.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.