Wildly successful book yields a wildly successful movie.
Adaptations of young adult fiction have proven to be solid winners in Hollywood, but with Ready Player One, the techno-dystopic undergirding and nostalgia mining throughout make this film a broadly appealing tale, one squarely in director Steven Spielberg’s wheelhouse.
Set mainly in the virtual world of OASIS, Ready Player One follows a rag-tag group of underdogs on a quest, with the requisite legion of bad guys there at every turn. The real world is an ugly one, filled with sordid living conditions and debtors’ prisons. The only refuge available is an escape to OASIS.
The central conceit of the story revolves around the quest, a gauntlet set up by OASIS’s creator Halliday (Mark Rylance), a tech visionary more Woz than Jobs. After his death, he set up a challenge, the winner of which would inherit this second world in its entirety. His near-crippling obsessions become the key to unlocking riddle after riddle.
Born in 1972, Halliday is a child of the ‘80s, and Reagan-era movies, music, and video games are the source material for all that follows. This means a solid, synth-heavy soundtrack and some very cool cinematic tie-ins. As a plot device this could easily turn into ridiculous fan service, but Spielberg keeps it from going there, using a great adaptation of the novel written by the author Ernest Cline and screenwriter Zak Penn.
The band of outsiders seeking the prize is fronted by Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), known online as Parzival. He lost his parents in the great tragedy that struck the world and has transformed into a Halliday scholar in order to win the game. He has a small group of friends, and even meets a female counterpart in Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) who keeps him sharp and allows young love to flourish, a very ‘80s movie thing to have happen.
The baddies come in the form of IOI, a corporation bent on winning the game itself and bastardizing OASIS. The head of this venture is Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), a fairly typical Spielbergian bad guy but with a slight lack of confidence and competence. It keeps his malevolence in check. T.J. Miller is brought in for laughs as an online mercenary, a move that works, but also feels a tad out of place.
As with any big-budget aspiring blockbuster, there are going to be action sequences, and in Ready Player One they are not only accomplished with technical acumen but always serve to further the story in important ways. Fights, car chases, battle scenes. Every one works.
Much in the same way the characters pour over every aspect of Halliday’s life, fans will pour over the purchasable version of Ready Player One as well one day. There’s just too much going on in any of the busier scenes to catch it all. One could literally make frame-by-frame breakdowns to eke out every reference and nod. This isn’t necessarily a good thing. That way madness lies.
Ready Player One is going to appeal to the broad swath of humanity. Young folks will dig the action and the toys come to life, even with language that gets a little salty at times. Nerds of all stripes will find something to pin their hat on, but even run-of-the-mill audiences will be captivated and drawn into this world of excitement, friendship, and nerdery. Summer movie season starts early this year.
