Ready Player One

2018 blockbuster

Rating: 8/20

Plot: An eccentric creator of a virtual world that everybody is obsessed with in the 2040's passes away. He's left behind an Easter egg within his creation, something that everybody wants to dig through all the 80's pop culture references to find so that they can control the Oasis.

Spielberg, with what might be the worst movie he's ever directed, has forgotten how to tell a story. My greatest surprise when watching this candy-coated garbage of a movie wasn't that it was irritating or devoid of any real meaning or message. From the previews, I had halfway expected that. No, my biggest surprise was that I wasn't entertained at all while watching this. In fact, I found almost every second of this unpleasant. On a Facebook post from one of my blog's 3 1/2 occasional readers, I commented that I "kinda despised" this movie. I didn't fully despise Ready Player One, but since I'm a guy who grew up in the 80's on sugary cereals, plastic toys, and Saturday morning cartoons and should be the perfect audience for this kind of dystopian plunge into artificially-sweetened nostalgia, even "kinda despising" this movie makes it a major disappointment.

From the thick exposition shared through boring Tye Sheridan's boring character Dwayne Wayne's narration through jarring and queasy action sequences in a virtual world that are about as exciting as watching somebody else play a video game through the laughably cliched conclusion, I kinda despised it all, and I left the theater covered in high-fructose corn syrup that I still haven't been able to completely wash out of my hair. It's like I was forced against my will to squeeze into a room stuffed corner to corner with cotton candy in order to search for a nickel that somebody had sworn they left in there before revealing, almost two-and-a-half tiresome hours, that it had been in his pants pocket the entire time.

Let's talk about those Easter eggs and all those allusions to 80's pop culture. It's probably the only thing that can be discussed about this movie. It's as if Spielberg, in a movie where characters are literally trying to find an egg, decided to craft a motion picture that would give his audience a big old Easter egg hunt instead of any characters to give a crap about or a narrative that would keep the viewers' interest. I know I missed bunches of the references because I either wasn't a good enough 80's kid or the characters popped into existence when I was a little too old. One lengthy sequence references a movie that I adore, and that was the one spot in the movie where I got a little excited. Unfortunately, that part of the movie devolved into something pretty silly, but it was a lot of fun for this cinephile to see some of those visuals on the big screen again. Another reference to an Atari game that I fondly remember came too late for me to care, but I did get a kick out of the prominent role a Madball played. I can't really get into any of  those three references further because it'd spoil things. It'll probably spoil things to talk about how the Iron Giant is completely misused in this movie, too, so I won't do that either. Other than those, the references had no effect on me, perhaps because the part of my brain that registers nostalgia has been removed and replaced with circuits and wires.

Even if the references had made me giddy as it seems they've made other people, there's such a lack of depth to all of this that I would have still thought it was a bad movie. There are plenty of opportunities for ideas. Spielberg and the screenwriters could have had something to say about those personas or avatars that we hide within in the 21st Century, love in the digital age, corporations and greed, the role of nostalgia in the creation of new art. Instead, they merely scratched surfaces and threw candy at the audience's faces instead. All of that is there just so Spielberg can get to the next action sequence bloated with references. The narrative rush and dizzying action sequences also left no time to think within this flabby running time. This movie gives you no space to breath and makes it impossible to connect with anything that's happening or any of these characters--real or virtual--who are running around.

Those characters might be the biggest cause of this narrative emptiness. They're floating bodies in a computer's innards. Dwayne Wayne and his girlfriend, whom he falls in love with even though the only thing he knows about her is that she can drive a video game motorcycle really well (something that might be enough in the 21st Century as far as I know), are developed generically. The problem might have been the amount of time we were forced to spend with these characters in virtual reality, but they had about as much depth as Pac-Man, a character who actually doesn't appear in this movie at all. The peripheral characters are even flatter, almost to the point where they don't matter. There's an 11-year-old, Dwayne Wayne's best friend, some other guy, some bad guys. I really can't tell you much of anything about any of those characters. There's a predictable twist with the best friend character that provides a tiny bit of character development, and Ben Mendelsohn's character is greedy and nefarious in that way villains in children's movies are traditionally greedy and nefarious. Mendelsohn, by the way, is completely wasted in this generic role. He's playing a character who is about as interesting as a saltine.

I did kind of enjoy T.J. Miller's character, a gnarly-looking bounty hunter. And I liked Mark Rylance and his borderline goofy performance as the creator of the Oasis, the one character who really does end up meaty. Other than him, these characters only seem to exist because Spielberg has been making movies long enough to know that movies need the have some.

But bad storytelling made it impossible to care. A mess of characters run around all these plots and subplots that never seem to matter. Welp, my parents are dead. Oh, and my uncle is a real jerk. Oh, and did I tell you that I love this girl on the motorcycle? It feels like this movie should have been a mini-series to adequately cover everything about these characters that the writers wanted to cover. At the very least, the movie should have been split into two or three parts. Ready Player One 2, Ready Player One 3. I'm not sure that could have saved this, but they definitely could have made a lot more money. And maybe they could have talked Disney into letting them throw in those Tron cars or something.