Spielberg’s Game By Kyle Smith
His new movie reflects on the flight from reality.
Ready Player One presents a sci-fi vision of the near future so eerie and provocative that the first half of the movie constitutes Steven Spielberg’s most captivating work since A.I. (2001), the only film he’s ever done that merged his fairy-tale awe with Stanley Kubrick’s cold fatalism. By the climax of the new film, though, it has morphed into a serviceable if trite blockbuster about a plucky multicultural gang of cute kids outsmarting the cruel chief of the greedy corporation.
It’s a serviceable if trite blockbuster about a plucky multicultural gang of cute kids outsmarting the cruel chief of the greedy corporation.
On the surface, the screen version of Ernest Cline’s novel is a quest narrative set in a dystopic 2045, when Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a resourceful orphan, undertakes a search for three magical keys stashed inside a massive multiplayer virtual-reality game by the game’s late creator, Halliday (Mark Rylance). Wonka-like, Halliday (who continues to exist in virtual form online, as a wizard avatar) has promised to give away the kingdom to whoever proves worthy enough to solve his riddles. That prize is also sought by a nasty corporation whose domineering boss (Ben Mendelsohn) is using a brute-force strategy of sending out an army of players to find the keys by trying every possible option.
That’s the core of the film, and also the most routine aspect. But it’s interspersed with a delightful Gen X pop-culture scavenger hunt that gives the film considerable bounce: In retrospect, The Lord of the Rings could have used the leavening touch of a couple of Hall & Oates tunes. References to Back to the Future, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Atari video games, Twisted Sister, and especially The Shining (which gets a lengthy homage) blanket everything as relentlessly as the popcorn explosion in Real Genius. Ready Player One may feature more direct references to other movies than any blockbuster ever, even The Lego Movie, though Spielberg is notably coy about referring back to his own movies or to those of his sometime partner George Lucas. That’s probably just as well; Spielberg ruled the early 1980s and it would be unbecoming of him to brag about it. (No need to inform me he had an executive-producer credit on Back to the Future, by the way.) For extra nerd points, there’s a special guest appearance by the Holy Hand Grenade, that super-weapon from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Fun as all this is, though, it amounts to a cop-out from the low-level dystopia in the background. The film could have built from this to be as dramatically engaging and unsettling as Black Mirror, the ongoing Netflix sci-fi inquiry into how technology is reshaping us. In Ready Player One, the attraction to OASIS — the online game everyone plays — is both effect and cause of the emptiness of its players’ real lives. Wade lives in a vast vertical trailer park held together by bare catwalks and metal scaffolding. The ugliness of this human landfill is shocking to us but it has an ironic twist — the residents don’t much care what their world looks like. The virtual reality of OASIS is exciting and vivid, a parallel universe in which players spend most of their waking hours racing or slaying King Kong or climbing Mount Everest with Batman, casting themselves as avatars that are much cleverer and better-looking than they are.
In part, Ready Player One is an antidote to Avatar, which framed escapism to Pandora’s eco-paradise as a solution to physical or spiritual defects. The contrast between the glitz of the OASIS cyberspace (accessed via virtual-reality goggles) and the squalor of its players’ living space — meatspace — immediately brought to mind Las Vegas, where darkened trailer parks fenced in by chain-link can be found just off the bedizened, sensory-overloading Strip. Let your imagination wander a bit farther, and Ready Player One serves as an oblique reference to how the crazed highs of opioids provide an outlet from desolate and empty lives, which people neglect further in order to obtain more drugs. Wade lives with an aunt and her crude boyfriend, who spends the real money they’ve saved for an actual house to buy more goodies to be used in virtual reality. Like drugs and like gambling, the game is an addiction that burns down everything around it.
Such thoughts are far too bleak to preoccupy Spielberg for long. Even in his maturity he is guided by optimism, or maybe just the sense that only happy endings work at the multiplex. Moreover, having spent most of his life selling escapism, he may be inclined to defend it. He doesn’t really do so in this film, though; instead he suggests a daft compromise: How about if everyone stayed off OASIS on Tuesdays and Thursdays?
Would you give that kind of advice to chronic gamblers or drug addicts? Spielberg has a frighteningly plausible vision of our near future, but he lacks the courage to follow through on its implications.
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