Movie Review: Steven Spielberg Raids the 1980s for "Ready Player One"

Pop culture collision Ready Player One is a winning self-parody that sometimes lacks self-awareness.

Steven Spielberg is responsible for 'blockbuster season' (thanks to Jaws), but he’s not responsible for the blockbuster’s current form: self-reflexive, sarcastic and only sometimes serious.

His last out-and-out action flicks—The Adventures of Tintin, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and War of the Worlds—harked back to olde-timey serials. They winked. They never snarked. Newer hits like Thor: Ragnarok, Guardians of the Galaxy, Kong: Skull Island and the Lego Movies are noisy blockbusters and parodies, all for the price of one. They evade earnestness, unless absolutely necessary. If you ever caught Deadpool doing the 'Spielberg face', he’d eventually turn to camera and, I don’t know, make a fart noise or something.

With Ready Player One, Spielberg finally gets into self-spoofing, tackling his dominant era—the 1980s—with a sense of humour, while remaining plenty reverent to the pop culture universe he wrought. He even casts Mark Rylance as lionised games developer James Halliday, a boy-that-never-grew-up who is meant to mirror Steve Jobs but is better appreciated as a twist on 'film brat' Spielberg. For two hours and twenty minutes, Ready Player One luxuriates in the virtual reality world invented by Halliday and filled with his childhood obsessions, many of them authored or inspired by our director. Yes, Steven Spielberg is back on his bulls***.

Adapted from Ernest Cline’s apparently unreadable book by Cline and Zak Penn, Ready Player One is never all that critical of the VR participants, creators or content. The only villains are the gatekeepers who want to make money by littering players’ fields of vision with ads. Meanwhile, please enjoy cameos from Minecraft, the Iron Giant, the DeLorean and countless other chunks of exploitable intellectual property.

Even self-reflexive parodies are sometimes lacking in self-awareness.

Tye Sheridan stars as Wade Watts, a teenager living in Ohio’s 'stacks', a scaffolded slum comprised of campervans perched atop one another. In the post-revolution year 2044, there’s not a whole lot to do—or a lot of space to do it—unless you’re inside "OASIS", the virtual reality paradise created by the dearly departed Halliday. In OASIS, Wade goes by the avatar Parzival, where he spends time with only friends Aech (Lena Waithe) and Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), searching for the ‘Easter Egg’ left behind by Halliday. The egg entitles its holder to ownership of OASIS, Willy Wonka-style. (Unfortunately, the remix of "Pure Imagination" from the trailer plays no part in Alan Silvestri’s familiar-sounding score.)

Wade and friends have competition from Nolan Sorrento (a toothy, extra-lispy and deliciously villainous Ben Mendelsohn), whose rival organisation, IOI, has virtual soldiers seeking the egg. However, they don’t have what Wade has: an archivist’s knowledge of 1980s ephemera to unravel Halliday’s clues. That brings us to Ready Player One’s most concerning trait: Should we really be making heroes out of guys who spend their days going "well, actually" on Twitter? Seems kinda familiar.

There’s a bunch of reasons Ready Player One shouldn’t work. First of all, it’s goofy, hyperkinetic, largely CGI-animated and intended for children, yet stuffed to the gills with references that are at least 30 years old. Secondly, it’s a children’s movie that spends 10 minutes inside one of the 1980s scariest—and undeniably adult—classics. I won’t spoil which one, but as a non-child, I can confirm it is Ready Player One’s technological and comedic highlight. Unprepared kids may require counselling afterwards.

Annoyingly, Ready Player One also celebrates a very specific kind of nostalgia: that of the 40-something dude. This is not a segment of society that necessarily needs another feature-length tribute, and it’s notable that Ready Player One’s memory of the 1980s is dominated by male heroes. That’s a fact of the decade’s cinematic output, sure, and looking back fondly on the past is fine; still, maybe a critical lens could have helped, because a future spent in the memories of someone who came of age in 1986 sounds like hell. Hearing Van Halen’s "Jump" once after a long while: fun! Building a society around their musical output and spirit: umm, can we speed up climate change, or did that slow to a stop in 2044?

These are my ideological complaints, which were stamped out by Spielberg, a skilled and playful craftsman who only makes gobsmacking action sequences. (I was similarly converted by Tintin, another picture I initially had no interest in seeing, constructed in a technological format that weirded me out.) Given how much of Ready Player One takes place inside virtual worlds, it’s hard to know the degree to which Spielberg or cinematographer Janusz Kamiński blocked scenes or placed their camera. Though, after several decades in collaboration, they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt. Visually, Ready Player One maintains logical cohesion while delivering giddy, pleasure centre-activating delights.

With an early car chase that gets interrupted by Jurassic Park’s T-Rex and King Kong himself, Ready Player One establishes that it’s here for a good and not a long time, and is unlikely to take the mantle of 'beloved favourite' from many of its touchstones. That said, it does stay too long in one way: The final act, with interlocking battles in both OASIS and the real word, stretches on far beyond the point of interest. At that point, you’re just marvelling at the money spent on rendering.

Sheridan, Cooke and Waithe, not physically present as much as you’d anticipate, voice their avatars in a charmingly broad manner. But this is Mendelsohn’s game. He’s carved out a career playing larger-than-life bad guys; here, he gets to be specifically and intentionally funny. In the best gag, we learn he’s not worthy of taking over OASIS because he keeps his Wi-Fi password on a piece of paper taped to his gaming chair. Honestly, that may be all you need to know about Ready Player One.

3.5/5

In Australian cinemas now. Rated M for science fiction themes, violence and coarse language.

Photo: Warner Bros.