I read Ready Player One a few years after it came out. It was filled with pop culture references from the 1980s. the heroes were uber nerds that played video games, listened New Wave music, and could recite every episode of School House Rock. In short, this book was written for me. when word came down that Steven Spielberg was going to make the film adaptation, well, who better for the job? No one, that’s who.
Ready Player One is a simple Quest story. Our hero spends most of his time in The Oasis, a virtual world along the lines of The Matrix where everyone on earth is jacked in and living out their dreams. A few years back, the creator of the Oasis dies and leaves behind a challenge to everyone:Find my Easter Egg and you’ll own the Oasis. We then watch as Wade/Parzival does battle both in the Real World and the Oasis to get to the Egg. The book was heavy on the arcade games of the 1980s, Joust and Pac-Man both play pivotal roles. But the film takes a different route. A car race is a bit more visually exciting than watching someone play a video game.
I’m not much into films anymore. I hated The Florida Project, couldn’t get past the opening minutes of Mudbound, and the last film I really loved was probably The Grand Budapest Hotel. I really loved Ready Player One. It wasn’t just the 1980s set pieces, though a lot of that was great fun, I liked the story. I liked the good guys and hated the bad guys. I know, that’s kind of old fashioned. Good guys? Bad guys? Modern film don’t need no stinking Good Guys and Bad Guys! But, yeah, they kind of do. The hallmark of most modern movies is that films are technically perfect, people know how to make movies these days. But the writing, well, the writing in 99 and 44/100% of modern films sucks.
Take Tomorrowland. It had the potential to be Ready Player One, a fantasy world of what Disney thought the future would look like in the 1950s. But instead, it was vile and violent and gory and pointless. In the wrong hands, Ready Player One would have met the same fate. Thank god for Steven Spielberg!
Yeah, Ready Player One is a movie aimed squarely at old guys like me who spent hours to get to the Ninth Key and saw Men at Work in concert. But the point of the film is that the real world isn’t worth living in anymore, and well, that feels a hell of a lot like the real world of today.
I liked all the actors, loved the special effects, and the sight gags were too numerous to mention. But the story, THE STORY, made Ready Player One worth seeing.
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