Ryan McNeil
There is no doubting we live in nostalgic times. Between the bands we flock to see reunited to the throwback shows we binge-watch, much of those consuming pop culture seem to prefer it coming from a certain vintage. It provides a joyous feeling – an escape.
However, there is an often overlooked danger in nostalgia. The establishment of a canon, and the declaration of a desired era leads to a narrow collection of core material…and an even narrower list of who’s allowed to call the works “theirs”.
Based on the Ernest Cline novel of the same name, READY PLAYER ONE is the futuristic story of The Oasis. A virtual reality created some fifty years prior by an enigmatic James Halliday (Mark Rylance), The Oasis is a global escape for earth’s entire population – a vice some use as salvation, and others as exploitation. Upon his death, Halliday announced to all users that he had hidden an easter egg inside of The Oasis. To find it, one would need to truly get the creator, and what drove him. A combination of things he loved and understanding of why he loved them would lead to three challenges that each gave a key as its reward.
Claim all three keys and the easter egg? The Oasis is yours, along with its net worth of half a trillion dollars.
IOI – the biggest software company in the world – is fiercely trying to claim the prize, but having no luck. The quest seems designed more for an underdog…a valiant hero…a misunderstood romantic soul. Someone like Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan).
Moving about The Oasis under the handle “Parcival”, Wade is a ‘Gunter’ – an Easter Egg Hunter who believes in the idealism and influences that represent The Oasis at its purest. He can quote The Gospel According to St. Kubrick, and sips from a chalice of TAB. His chariot is powered by a flux capacitor, and he sings constantly from the Hymnal of LeBon. None of that, mind you, has helped him – or any other Gunter like him – get any closer to any keys of eggs.
During a seemingly unbeatable quest, Parcival and his best friend Aech (Lena Waithe) happen upon a talented Gunter riding an Akira motorcycle. They are both drawn to her for a litany of reasons, and get in good with this enigmatic Gunter named Art3mis (Olivia Cooke). The three soon figure out how to beat the first quest and become celebrities within The Oasis. This attracts the adulation of all other Gunters, and the ire of IOI.
The company’s head, Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) tries to bribe Parcival and his guild into working for IOI. When they flatly refuse, he marks the tribe as an enemy of the company. This leads him to reach out to a troll named i-R0k (T.J. Miller) to stack the deck with secrets and toys…but none of it can take away from the ultimate quest;
Prove that you are the best gamer in The Oasis and win control – for personal gain, or greater good…depending on who plays a perfect game sooner.
There’s a greater sense of joy present in this film than the book on which it was based. It feels more like a true hero’s journey and less like bunch of fanboys standing around quizzing each-other. There’s a moment early-on where characters are using memorization of minute details to prove “worthiness”, and it feels…ugly. It feels like the longer you spend pouring over random facts, the greater you believe you’ll be in the eyes of another fan. Mercifully, it’s an attitude quickly dispatched. Parcival has more in common with Marty from BACK TO THE FUTURE than he does Randal from CLERKS.
Credit Spielberg for that – for getting to the beating heart of a story and not getting mired down in its obsession with 80’s culture. It’s as though he understood the difference between a love letter and being lovesick. Likewise, he seems to understand the emotional response one feels playing a video game, and is able to translate that into a cinematic experience. No small task that – many have failed trying to adapt games into films.
While at first, Spielberg might have felt like far too meta a choice to direct a tale as obsessed with 80’s culture as this, the fact is he was the best choice to make sense of all the clatter and chaos. If this was Roger Rabbit, Spielberg is our Eddie Valiant.
READY PLAYER ONE uses The Oasis to make its point in a dystopian future, but in many ways its themes could be seen in the world we inhabit. How many of us are guilty of retreating into our LED’s for a more idealized reality – an escape. There we can customize our personalities, take attention away from our flaws, and drown in only the content of our choosing. The Oasis allows users to hide from their problems, their shortcomings, and life itself. There is no such thing as tedium, monotony, or self-consciousness. The Oasis allows all participants to be gods and warriors.
It’s like this series of ones and zeroes we in the audience keep retreating into. A place where we can be smarter, more confident, surrounded with people we wish we could walk up to at the bar and start up a conversation. It’s a beautiful plane of existence – offering some a window of opportunity they wouldn’t otherwise have. However, it isn’t entirely real, and like The Oasis, there’s a danger in failing to understand that. It’s important to believe in possibilities, but not if it comes at the expense of truly chasing down those possibilities in our lives.
Somewhere, muddied in the middle of Ernest Cline’s novel was an idea. It was a messy, half-hearted plea towards devotees of pop culture – begging them to loosen their grip on what they loved. It seemed to want fanboys the world over to eject the videotapes, put down the joysticks, take off the headphones. It mumbled a request to allow the world into one’s passions…instead of getting lost in the world of the passion. The plea wasn’t quite asked at full-throat, and in fairness – it still isn’t. However, Steven Spielberg does petition fans more directly. He looks at the gatekeepers of his own past works and asks them to stand down. He underlines that anyone with time on their hands can pass an entrance exam – but that tells you precious little about who they are; and that’s what matters.
To that end, READY PLAYER ONE tries to put us back on the path. It wants us to break free of our tribes, and welcome all new players to the game. It doesn’t go far enough, mind you: Art3mis is still the victim of “Trinity Syndrome“, and a story about eschewing fanboy tendencies repeatedly reaches into the pop culture quiver to make its point. Still, the film actually dials much of that nerdiness down – doing away with some of the books obsessive quests and replacing them with tests that require more heart. It’s a step, and every journey of a better society begins with singular steps.
This is a film where one world-builder tries to atone for the failings in the world he has created, and it’s almost impossible not to see a parallel to Spielberg in that quest. Here is a storyteller who knows full well how many of us pretended to be time travellers and treasure seekers on the playground. He knows about the aliens we imagined biking with and the dinosaurs we imagined running from. He heard us every time we said “No Girls Allowed”, and feels a modicum of shame for how often he said it himself.
READY PLAYER ONE is a plea to step out of The DeLorean…take off the fedora…point the bigger boat back to shore. We’ve stood at these cabinets racking up high scores long enough; it’s time to let someone else have a turn.