"Ready Player One" (Without Spoilers)

I have a lot to say about Steven Spielberg's adaptation of "Ready Player One," and a great deal of it doesn't actually have to do with the movie itself, but its subject matter, which is all about a certain breed of media fans and fandom. So I'm going to break this up into two parts. This entry will give only a brief, spoiler-free review of the film and discuss it in the context of everything else currently going on in fandom circles. The next post will discuss the film in more detail with spoilers, and we can get into the specifics of the film's many, many nerdy references. Capisce? Good.

In the world of 2045, the world has fallen into ruin, and many people find escape in the virtual reality world of the Oasis, a digital wonderland created by a man named James Halliday (Mark Rylance). Upon his death, he leaves behind an "easter egg," giving over control of the Oasis and his fortune to whoever can solve a treasure hunt full of clues and games based on the pop culture that he was obsessed with. A boy named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), who goes by the avatar Parzifal in the Oasis, and his friends Aech (Lena Waithe) and Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), become the frontrunners in the game. Against them are the evil Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) and the IOI Corporation, who want the Oasis for themselves.

Despite the fancy technology, there's nothing too complicated here. The story is a basic fetch quest, the goodies are the usual band of scrappy kids, and the baddies are cartoonishly evil. Ben Mendelsohn and Mark Rylance are the MVPs, playing the loathsome corporate shark and the kindly eccentric genius respectively. Olivia Cooke is the standout among the kids, especially in the cat-and-mouse infiltration scenes in the real world. Despite the pop-culture references aimed at Gen Xers, this is a children's film from top to bottom. With its thrilling chases, monster brawls, and awkward teenagers going on first dates, "Ready Player One" shares more DNA with "The Goonies" than "TRON." Oh, and sensitive parents should take note that Spielberg has fully embraced the S-word.

It is great to see a depiction of the internet that handles things like digital avatars in such a competent fashion. At least a third of the film takes place in entirely virtual environments, so we're often following CGI animated characters modeled after common video game types. And it's one of the movie's better tricks that Parzifal and A3ris and the rest are actually about as compelling in virtual form as they are in the flesh. The characters aren't all that deep, mind you, but this is still something I've never seen handled so well in a live-action film, and it gives me hope for future media about life online. A "Snow Crash" movie, for instance, could definitely use the Oasis as a template for the Metaverse.

And it's also nice to see the characters interacting with pop culture in a more realistic way, cataloguing and obsessing over trivia, and sometimes literally speaking in references. Thanks to Spielberg's clout, the pop culture being invoked is actually real, and we get to see the interaction of items from fandoms as disparate as Japanese mecha, Monty Python, ancient Atari video games, and the recent "Suicide Squad" movie. A lot of the fun of "Ready Player One" is spotting and recognizing the various toys that Spielberg and company were able to clear the copyrights to play with here. On the other hand, the whole thing also smacks of a somewhat troubling kind of wish fulfillment.

At its heart, "Ready Player One" is all about elevating the James Halliday character, a socially challenged nerd obsessed with the pop culture of his childhood in the 1980s. And he's beloved to the point where Wade and his friends are obsessed with everything that Halliday was obsessed with, largely ignoring anything made after the late '90s. A character named "Kira," for instance, is immediately assumed to be a reference to 1982's "Dark Crystal" rather than 2006's "Death Note" or 2013's "Orphan Black." The movie does its best to downplay or lampoon the more unhealthy forms of geekery, and one of its morals is that it's important to go outside and live in the real world. Still, troubling behaviors slip through.

It's downright uncomfortable watching scenes of Sorrento reciting trivia about John Hughes films to Wade, in an attempt to persuade him that he's trustworthy. Nearly as bad are the breathless exposition dumps where characters have eureka moments about old video games or movies. There's this sense of desperation to show there's real value to parroting all this obscure minutiae, or really that there's value in being this kind of overzealous fan. And I'm not convinced there is - at least not the way "Ready Player One" suggests. Halliday is set up as a cautionary figure, but only to an extent. The rest of the movie is all about celebrating the joys of fervent, passionate nerdom.

Over the past few years we've seen the kind of damage that fandom gatekeeping and us v. them mentalities can wreak. The movie is a fun romp, but it also reflects more worrying ideas and values. I count myself a fan of many of the '80s and '90s pop culture referenced in the film, but I'm not really a fan the way the characters in the movie are because I'm not an obsessive. I'd lose any challenge of my bona fides in a hot minute. And what's worse, I'm decidedly not a fan of some of the properties referenced. "Buckaroo Banzai," for instance, always struck me as pretty dull. And I don't think you're allowed to be critical of much in the "Ready Player One" world.

More on that next time...
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