In the vast cinematic desert of predicable over-advertised movies with requisite sequels, something fresh and new.
Too many movies--maybe the majority--get too much hype (sometimes being advertised a full year in advance), over-rely on computer animation, and are automatically accompanied by the expectation of at least one sequel, probably four. And it grows tiresome. Lucky for us, once in a while a movie gets released with incredible quality and without any expectations at all.
Following swiftly on the heels of the excellent drama The Post comes this innovative rollercoaster ride from Steven Spielberg.
Set in 2045, Ready Player One imagines a future with an increasingly economically disenfranchised population preferring virtual reality to real life.
The virtual reality system called the OASIS is designed by an eccentric introvert who upon his death reveals with a video his Willy Wonka-ish plan to bequeath ownership of the OASIS (worth half a trillion dollars) to the gamer who finds three hidden keys and obtains the Golden Egg.
Game on!
Ready to play is one Wade Watts (Sheridan), a teenager whose online avatar has hair perpetually blown by unseen winds, and whose best friend is a gamer he's never met called Aech (Miller).
Like a VR version of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, except much bigger and much faster, hoards of gamers race in competition against each other beset by pop culture adversaries including King Kong.
Meanwhile, a corporate giant helmed by a sleaze named Sorrento (Mendelsohn) wants in on the action, and is ready to game the system in any way required to win the fabulous fortune.
What results from this premise is an often hilarious and wildly entertaining ride, yes, but also quite a bit more than that. There is substance in the juxtaposition of seeming powerlessness in the real world with the seeming god-like powers in the OASIS. When Wade meets an avatar called Art3mis (Cooke) in the hunt, Aech warns him that for all Wade knows, attractive and exciting Art3mis is actually a three hundred pound dude named Chuck living in his grandmother's basement.
The 2009 Bruce Willis film Surrogates may have inspired some of what we see here. Bruce's suave virtual self compares with everyone in the OASIS presenting an unintentionally comic, vastly more powerful version of the self. But on the whole, Ready Player One offers a unique vision and operates at multiple levels.
On one level, the hunt for the keys shows us a world where anything is possible and looks totally real. Aech, for example, is about as big as the Hulk, and Sorrento's avatar looks like Superman in a business suit. On another level though, we see that an infantilized and dehumanized population desperate to escape life is harrowing.
READY PLAYER ONE
Starring Tye Sheridan,
Olivia Cooke,
Ben Mendelsohn,
Lena Waithe,
T.J. Miller,
Simon Pegg,
Mark Rylance
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Zak Penn, Ernest Cline
Based on the novel by Ernest Cline
Runtime 140 minutes
Rated PG-13
Stewart Kirby writes for
TWO RIVERS TRIBUNE
and
THE INDEPENDENT
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