READY PLAYER ONE (2018)

4/3/18 - Ready Player One (2018) - 4+/5-/10

Captures the joy and spirit of the book in broad strokes, though the emotional beats and personal story feel truncated, forced, and immature. The highs of the first half really sparkle, but everything fizzles during the last section. Full of highs and lows, and despite never reaching its maximum heights, always makes for a lively flight.

The main protagonist gets a bit lost in his supposed heroes journey, losing some of his agency and the emotional depth of his persona journey. The fact that Art3mis is a more empathetic, fleshed out, and has more agency is a problem, especially since she overall is shifted more into the “girlfriend of the hero” role. Her depiction is problematic in both formats, but it doesn’t derail the adventure, just salts it a bit. Similarly, as someone who recognizes 80%+ of the references and eggs, it is easy to caught up in the maelstrom and shift your focus from the story the particularities of the geekdom on display. It is a pleasurable digression that bordered on being an overwhelming distraction. Especially since the video game world moves at a mile-a-minute.

I also don’t know how you mention the theoretical “Princess Peach”, locked in the faulty tower of Halliday’s optimistic memories, without dealing with the eventualities of her actual person hood, her concrete romance & marriage, and her death. Assumedly cut for time, but you could easily beef up these crucial factoids and emotional stepping stones by sacrificing the TJ Miller one liners.

Setting much of this in the online game world really helped to solidify belief and appreciability in the CGI. It looks pretty fantastic. It swings for home runs where solid singles would do, but overall it excels. There is always a sense of weightlessness and lack of stakes with a lot of CGI/reality interactions in film, but in a video game setting, it was exceedingly easy to buy into it.

It does a better job of giving some vibrancy and putting referential material to work in the plot, rather than rote memorization and stale exposition. A little more 80’s would have been pleasing, as a fan of the nerdy entertainment of the book, but the changes they made are completely fun and, though a bit more cinematically simplistic, palatable.

As a spectacle, it does its job. This is popcorn film-making to the hilt. I think there was more drama, character nuance, and workable story that you could have packed into it though. Exciting and entertaining film-making does not have to be dumb or unengaged emotionally. An argument could be made that  maybe you might sacrifice some of the fun, but it feels light without the burden of Wade’s story truly playing out and coming into his own as a real character, and not a YA placeholder. As for the Ladyhawke banter and War Games minutiae, I would say there was much of that missing, but the fun wasn’t gone as they maneuvered its direction & specifics, and from this film, that is what it appears was the ultimate goal.

Could it have been a transformative property to truly instill an new ethos for time spent online and human interaction? Yes. But is it a complete failure for only nodding to instead of fulfilling its promise and bringing us on a journey to this crucial spirit? No. It works in the ways that it strives the hardest: being a light escapist fiction candy bar with the crunchy chunks of commentary sparsely spread out in the chocolate. It's an easy and tasty desert.