The 250th Review: Recapturing the Magic

The question is: if Steven Spielberg is the Willy Wonka of cinema, will he ever find his Charlie Bucket? As Steven Spielberg continues to paddle through what has become an absurdly fruitful late period. Indeed, I last reviewed one of his new films as of two months ago. The sheer depth and scale of his influence become clearer with every passing blockbuster. On the one hand, there are the keepers of the flame, led by J.J. Abrams, for whom E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Raiders of the Lost Ark are like foundational texts. And on the other hand, there are Denis Villeneuve, Michael Bay or Edgar Wright, who grabbed elements of the master’s style and dashed off with them in their own directions. Yet from the new generation of directors who grew up immersed in Spielberg, you would struggle to pick out, the one true heir, a filmmaker who understands that a simple shot of a face upturned in wonder can be the most powerful special effect around.

In its best, most lucid moments, Ready Player One feels like an urgent post-scriptum from Steven Spielberg, the eternal big kid, just making sure we understood the message of his early work straight. It is based on, but quite freely adapted from, a cult science-fiction novel by Ernest Klein, set in a near-future dystopia in which the entire planet is hooked on escape. There is a moment, not long into Ready Player One, where hundreds of cars, including a DeLorean, the A-Team van and the Plymouth Fury from Christine (which happens to be driven by Lara Croft) are all racing each other through New York when, having already outmaneuvered the Jurassic Park T-Rex, King Kong swings into view. And as the giant ape appears, all doubts are dispelled, it is clear the film is going to deliver on its thrill-ride promise and more.

Cline published Ready Player One in 2011, before Gamergate and the fanboy wars of the Marvel vs. DC movie rivalry exposed some of the uglier sides of pop-culture tribalism. One of the game’s biggest obstacles involves overcoming the fear of “kissing a girl.” The gendered ways in which online discourse has emerged around these issues might explain why in the room I was seated in, it was mostly (though not all of) the women who had a bone to pick with the Spielberg film, and I loved it. For all the film’s messages about rejecting cynical corporate commodification of pop culture, as represented by Sorrento and his company, the movie itself never interrogates its own role in that commodification. Pause in your enjoyment of its various cameos from film characters, items, and locations, and you may notice that almost every familiar character in the film, from the Iron Giant to King Kong to Godzilla to Harley Quinn to a murderous Chucky to an elaborate film location this review is not supposed to mention, are all without exception, owned by Warner Bros. The very same studio that made Ready Player One. The possibilities for pop-culture celebration in the OASIS are allegedly endless, but nothing associated with Warner Bros.’s rival Disney (including all those Marvel heroes) is invited to the party. That, of course, is a legal matter, but also one that is fairly ironic, given the film’s apparent hatred of all things corporate. In addition to everything else it accomplishes, Ready Player One is an effective little commercial for the Warner Bros. back catalogue. But let’s be honest: most audiences wanting to see Ready Player One will not be digging through it for referendums on Gamergate or keeping score of which pop-culture allusions belong to which studio. They just want a wild ride, and it is safe to say that Spielberg delivers that.

 Eventually, we meet the real-life people behind the avatars. Art3mis is really Samantha, played by Olivia Cooke as a pensive redhead made shy by her birthmark. Though, the one actor who gives a genuine crafted performance is Mark Rylance, who plays Halliday as a spooked angel trapped inside his frizzy head, appearing a lot in flashbacks. He makes Halliday a brilliantly compelling tragicomic figure. Some of the most intriguing moments of Ready Player One involve flashbacks to Halliday in the early OASIS planning stages alongside the Steve Wozniak to his Jobs, Ogden Morrow, played with characteristic wit and humour by Simon Pegg. A more reliably great comedic presence in the film is Lena Waithe’s Aech, whose reason for playing a hulking, masculine character in the OASIS is largely glossed over; the fact that she is actually a lesbian black woman playing a muscle-bound heterosexual white man online is one of the book’s most interesting twists. But Waithe still shines at every opportunity as Wade’s closest friend and frequent adviser. She also has the line that comes the closest to diving into the heart of a story where heroes and villains give themselves digital costumes that include Superman’s curling forelock and an Alien chest-burster. “You’re wearing the costume from your favourite movie?” Aech teases Wade. “Don’t be that guy.”

The one issue I have with the film is the heavy use of the T.J. Miller-voiced comic-relief villain i-R0k. Though Miller’s character is the only one who does not have a real-world alter ego—which may have been a conscious choice on behalf of the movie to avoid cutting away to the former Silicon Valley star, who acrimoniously left the HBO series shortly before being accused of sexual misconduct. In contrast to his promotion of the movie at Comic-Con last summer, Miller has been largely absent from more recent publicity for the film, but his voice work in the film serves as a constant reminder that the consequences of the #MeToo movement have not reached all men. The other issue I have is with Mendelsohn, who does little to differentiate Sorrento from Rogue One’s Orson Krennic or The Dark Knight Rises’ John Daggett. Sorrento and his legions of drone players are also racing to crack the game, not because they want to preserve the fantastical digital haven that Halliday has built, but because they want to commodify the online experience and milk its human inhabitants for all they are worth. Intriguingly, the film boils this conflict down in a line that may prove divisive for those who have been burned by the very gamer and pop-culture lover Ready Player One aims to celebrate: “A fanboy can always tell a hater.” Wade says dismissively to Halliday during a tense confrontation. The film never stops making distinctions between the “true fans”, who have an encyclopedic knowledge of every pop-culture item Halliday was obsessed with, and the pretenders. It is embracing a kind of fandom gatekeeping that has, in recent years, soured and turned toxic, especially online.

As we saw previously, a generation of directors has been paying homage to Spielberg’s popcorn films, but with Ready Player One Steven Spielberg proves with a stunning aplomb that no one does Spielberg quite like Spielberg. No one has more empathy for American kids from broken homes. No one packs scenes with so much information, or elaborate action set pieces with so much energy while ensuring that you always know what is going on and why. What is striking is that the characters have their discussion in the middle of a furious gun battle in a zero-gravity disco dance and yet you can somehow follow both their arguments and the course of the shoot-out. Spielberg is not just competing with his imitators and his 1980s self. He is blasting his way into the 21st Century. As his spectacular film travels back and forth between an Orwellian dystopia and a computer-generated dream world, he blazes through territory occupied by Terry Gilliam, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan and the Wachowskis, not to mention the directors of The Lego Movie. He is not just making this territory his own but demonstrating that it was his all along.

The C.G.I. visuals of the OASIS, especially in the film’s opening race, are elegant in a way neither Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin nor James Cameron’s Avatar working with slightly earlier motion-capture technology, managed to be. There is a dance scene between Wade and Art3mis in which her swirling dress and their incredibly detailed digitized expressions effectively sweep the audience up in the love story that runs parallel to the film’s big quest. The OASIS that Spielberg puts on screen is a visual marvel. The action has weight and consequence. And it is saturated with pop-culture references, some obvious, some so blink-and-you’ll-miss-it that a Blu-ray and a remote control for freeze-framing will be required to spot them all. There is a strange joy in scanning the screen in search of obscure characters that will make no impact on the vast majority of the audience. A less accomplished director could get stuck in this, causing the film to be a moving reboot of Where’s Wally? the book, but Spielberg strikes the perfect balance. He knows exactly when to pull back to focus on the characters. In fact, it is a high-risk contest and Spielberg switches the action between the real and virtual worlds with dazzling easiness, seamlessly melding the peril in both states of reality and upping the stakes as the keys are uncovered and we approach the endgame.

All of the real-world heroes and their interactions outside the OASIS are so well-done that fans of both the book (which necessarily goes deeper into the narrative’s backstory) and Spielberg’s facility with the tender human connection may lament how much of the film focuses on spectacle. Ready Player One tells a breathless and relatively coherent story. Essentially, the future of civilization that is riding on the outcome of a video game, but the movie, first and foremost, is a combustible orgy of pop-culture eye candy. Never is that more spectacularly true than in the irresistible sequence where Parzival, Art3mis and Aech, enter the Overlook Hotel from The Shining.

 In conclusion, Steven Spielberg made a point of declaring that it was not a film, but very much a movie. Yet I wondered why he needed to make the distinction. Years ago, the words “Spielberg” and “fantasy” went together like “ice” and “cream,” or maybe “Citizen” and “Kane,” and one of the reasons for that is that he grounded his fantasies, even the spectacular extraterrestrial visitation of Close Encounters, in the real world. That is what made those fantasies magical. And for all that Spielberg claims he wanted to avoid references to his own movies, this is in every way a spiritual ode to the boy’s adventure genre he made so popular in the 80s. There is a heart beating at the centre of The Goonies, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, and more; but in Ready Player One, audiences will instead find a gleaming, digital, golden Easter egg. For many of us who grew up with his movies, that will be enough. From AI Artificial Intelligence to Hook, cautionary tales of everlasting childhood have been a Spielberg regular theme. Ready Player One does not mess with the kind of weighty ideas that underpin the first of those two films, which feels like a bigger masterpiece every time you revisit it, but its vision of a world fixated on cultural nursery food has a burning issue and an occasionally piercing satirical bite.

But mostly it is a joy, with Spielberg letting loose for the type of blockbuster moviemaking that made his name but is unfortunately increasingly infrequent in his filmography. And shows that when he is on his game, there is no-one else who comes close. Spielberg has seemingly done the impossible: balancing sugar-rush nostalgia with an involving story to create a pure, uncynical, cinematic ride that recaptures the magic of his early films. Having said that, Ready Player One did leave me feeling slightly sorry for today’s pre-teen and teenage cinema-goers because they so rarely get to see a new fantasy film which does not nod and wink to older ones. Back in the past, you did not need to pass an exam to enjoy Back to the Future, whereas the current Star Wars and Marvel movies assume an encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of films, television series, games, books and comics. You could also argue that Spielberg is the godfather of this kind of cross-referencing. I can still remember watching E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the first time and being startled when ET spotted someone dressed up as Yoda for Halloween. How could one science-fiction blockbuster joke about another, completely different science-fiction blockbuster? My young mind was blown. Almost 22 years on, Steven Spielberg has blown my not-so-young-anymore mind again.

Overall, Ready Player One is too much of a good time, with an exuberance and wonder that recall Spielberg’s early blockbusters and an epic soundtrack of ’80s-anthems.