VGFlicks: Ready Player One (Part 1)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

This movie is very, very recent; it was released this year! So if you haven't seen it and don't wish to be spoiled, I suggest you go see it before reading this review, as I reveal everything that happens. I make comparisons with the book as well. You can skip this review if you don't want to have the film spoiled to you.

On the topic of VR: I haven’t tried it all that much. My first attempt at using VR was last year, and the game was Surgeon Simulator, but at the time I didn’t know the procedure to beating the first level, so I didn’t get much out of that. I played some more VR this year, at a convention, and tried Job Simulator. It was a lot more fun, and I kept coming back to play it some more. Would have played again, but other people wanted to try it as well.

These two short experiences haven’t changed my mind on three things I believe regarding virtual reality gaming:

-That the price tag is not nearly approachable enough for a lot of players, considering the growing yet still limited library of games that can be played with it (though maybe I’m not up-to-date on that). Also, not every VR game can be played on every VR set;

-That VR takes a LOT of prerequisites (computing power, a large empty room, maybe someone monitoring as you play so you won’t trip or fall);

-And, most importantly, nobody looks cool playing VR. Silly and dorky? Perhaps. Cool? Not at all. I’ve yet to see someone play VR and look cool doing it. This meme is basically me:

Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg and adapted from the novel of the same name by Ernest Cline, prominently features VR gaming. And I can’t imagine the mental gymnastics required to give some semblance of coolness to that form of gaming, but they make a damn good case for it.

Now, on the topic of the story: I haven’t read the book. I have, however, been told that it’s really not that great. The base concept is interesting: What if one video game became the only solace for a mankind that refuses to acknowledge the state of the real world as it stands? It’s interesting because, like a lot of science-fiction stories and other futuristic satires, we’re actually coming closer every year to this situation. It’s a worrisome thought, and science-fiction has always explored humanity and society through its stories, which can be framed as cautionary tales or allegories.

However, a great concept can be brought down by poor writing. A key element of the story is that the creator of the video game in question had immense nostalgia for the 1980s, and as such has peppered that game with thousands of elements of that decade’s pop culture. From the DeLorean to Stayin’ Alive, passing by the old arcade games… And Cline describes each of his passions from the ‘80s in grand detail. There’s geeking out, then there’s “spending pages and pages talking about old media just because you can”. The author also uses the book to rant about other things, such as how religions and their believers are stupid and there’s no God. So he sounds like the worst kind of atheist. The book also seemed to revel in the gatekeeping and elitism that is all too present in many fandoms nowadays, a sickening trend in my opinion.

And the less I say about this the better. This post is just plain awful.

Even if it's a joke... it sucks as a joke.

Adapting the story of Ready Player One for the silver screen had this author working with one of his idols, Steven Spielberg. The director himself was quite prominent in the pop culture of the 80’s, so working on this adaptation allowed him to revisit some of his older works. Has Spielberg managed to turn a mediocre book into a good movie? This intro has been long enough, let’s get into this already. Just be aware that I will talk primarily about the film, but I will occasionally talk about elements I have read about the book.

The year is 2045. A series of natural catastrophes has done a number on the planet, and overpopulation has led to most of humanity living in crowded slum areas. Imagine a trailer park, then imagine many of them stacked on top of each other, like precarious Jenga towers made of trailer homes. You get the picture.

Oh, this looks so easy to topple.

Boxing, Tennis... Is this the OASIS, or Wii Sports 2045?

Rather than accept this fate or try to change it for the better, people instead spend most of their time playing OASIS, an extremely advanced VR game in which you can be anyone, and do anything. The game, originally released in its Alpha version in 2025, was created by James Halliday (portrayed by Mark Rylance), an eccentric man with an intense and undying love for all things ‘80s, the decade during which he was a teenager. He wasn’t alone, working on the project with his business partner, Ogden Morrow (portrayed by Simon Pegg), under the banner of the studio Gregarious Games. Halliday always strived to keep his game available for all (it only costs 25 cents to buy it) and ad-free, allowing people playing the game to instead contribute to it with their own economy and talents (damn near anything can be created or sold/bought in it). The game itself is described as humongous, with hundreds upon hundreds of planets to visit (and yet there doesn’t seem to be any kind of loading screens whatsoever! The future is fantastic!). Over time, this is how Halliday came to amass his wealth.

Fifteen years later, everyone is in the OASIS, using their avatars to interact and having access to very advanced technologies to improve the VR experience (such as suits that replicate on a person everything their avatar feels in the game, or multidirectional automatic treadmills that allow a player to stay in one place when moving instead of walking around their house, bumping into everything). The world’s economy has basically converted to the in-game currency of the OASIS, like a globally-shared currency, which is a bad idea on so many levels.

The most awkward game creator ever.
But it's not really an issue.

However, Halliday died in 2040. Before his passing, he chose to leave control of the OASIS and his wealth (half a trillion dollars - not exactly loose change) to the one (or few) dedicated player(s) who were to find the Easter Egg hidden deep within the MMO. Discovered only by gathering three well-hidden keys. So well-hidden, in fact, that five years later, nobody has found even a single one of them. Players have figured out where and how to get the first: Beat an impossible race with deadly and possibly insurmountable obstacles. Nobody’s done it yet, and most players have given up.

The Trash Land level of Columbus, Ohio.

That woman is pole-dancing. I bet her avatar has impossible curves.

Meet protagonist Wade Watts, portrayed by Tye Sheridan, a pretty nerdy-looking kid (and that’s 'Hollywood nerdy', which means “mandatory good-looking nerd”). He’s shown living in Columbus, Ohio, in one of the Stacks and going about with his daily life. Namely, going away from home to play the OASIS on his own personal set-up, in a decrepit van hidden within a huge pile of scrap cars. To hammer home the importance of the OASIS, the two minutes he takes to get there show multiple people, VR set on head, doing various activities such as piano-playing or pole-dancing. Yep. “Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB”, I guess.

One of the many planets shown in the viewer's first look at the OASIS.
A casino. Sure, grand idea.

Wade straps himself over his multidirectional treadmill, puts on the headgear, and we get our first glimpses of the OASIS, a universe-sized (but probably not No Man’s Sky-sized) world where AAAAAALLLLLLLLL the franchises seem to coexist. In thirty seconds, we see Minecraft, TIE Fighters, Batman… and the list just goes on. This is Catch that Reference: The Movie. Or is it Easter Egg: The Movie? I think that second one works better within context. In this movie about a search for an Easter egg, some people have found over three hundred Easter eggs. And there’s probably more.

Of course, all of these would be a lot easier to notice if the colors weren’t also dimmed in the OASIS itself. The universe and planets look gorgeous, but as soon as Wade’s avatar that looks like a Final Fantasy hero appears on the starting planet, everything becomes tinted with gray or brown. Props for realism, but in a video game created so that people could escape the grim reality, maybe they’d want to brighten up the colors. But hey…

Maybe I’m just too used to the colorful Nintendo universes.

Pictured: Wade's avatar ParZival, and his best friend Aech.
We might need some graph to remember which character
belongs to which user.

While Wade walks around the starting planet, he contacts his online friend Aech (“H”), who’s currently in the middle of a battleground on Planet Doom, the most dangerous part of this virtual world. Don’t worry, that orc cyborg will survive just fine. Oh hey, “Orc Cyborg”. Those are two words I had never realized we needed together at least once in a story, and here we are. Glorious heavens! Also on a side-note, remember when I said that a big part of the world’s economy now resides in the OASIS? What happens to avatars who die in there, does that mean their players lose all of their money? That doesn’t really sound like a great thing. I suppose the book makes that detail a little clearer, but the movie barely brushes the subject, only saying that if your avatar dies, you lose everything you had, money and items included - just makes my point even clearer that transferring all your money in the OASIS is a terrible idea. Speaking of, we cut to Aech on Doom, killing Freddy Krueger and later shooting at Duke Nukem. God, if I stopped every time a reference without plot relevance popped up, I’d still be reviewing this three weeks from now. Good thing Aech has allies on the planet, Daito and Shoto, two avatars with a traditional Japanese style to them.

I don't recall ever being so caught up in the game I forgot
something on the oven and it caught fire.

That scene also explains the existence of Artifacts, powerful items that are sought by everyone due to what they can do in the game. We also get to see that while Wade has access to treadmills and straps to remain in one place, other players don’t have those and just play around their house, with the risk of bumping into things - or being so caught up in the game that reality’s forgotten, like that mother too busy to play to notice her son warning her about the oven catching fire.

Wade - or rather his online avatar named ParZival - is heading off to the race on the starting planet for which the prize is the first Key and clue towards finding the Egg, The race that nobody has beaten.

James on the left, Ogden on the right.
Before the fame, before they had literally the most-
played video game of all time.

We get some more exposition about James Halliday. The man was speculated in-universe, post-mortem, to have Asperger’s Syndrome, and the various videos of the man available within the OASIS have Mark Rylance playing up that aspect. Halliday is very awkward, a bit asocial, pauses at odd times, has a bad case of anxiety, and in case the setting wasn’t making it obvious already, he wants everybody to hear everything about his passions every time he gets a chance to talk about them. In the video he made shortly before his death and in which he revealed the hunt for the Egg, he seems more at ease talking behind his avatar, Anorak (who looks like your average run-of-the-mill wise old wizard), than he does as himself. He then makes it clear that the Keys won’t be found by just looking under every stone; they will be found only if one makes sense of Halliday’s life, personality and hobbies, all of which become relevant to solve the clues.

The usual D'n'D quest giver.

It's such ridiculous over-the-top villainy;
blocking 80% of the player's screen would kill the game!

As for who figured out that the first Key was found at the end of an ultra-difficult race and how, that’s irrelevant. What is very relevant, however, is that the quest for the Egg has been overtaken by nameless players all working for rival company IOI (Innovative Online Industries), as the company desperately wants control of the game so that they can profit off it (namely, as a later scene shows, by spamming every player’s visor with so many ads they would barely even be able to play the game). There are hundreds, thousands even, of IOI players constantly hacking themselves back in so that they can try winning the first Key. They’re led by a man named Nolan Sorrento (portrayed by Ben Mendelsohn), who’s a businessman at heart and nothing else (even his OASIS avatar ditches creativity for practicality, being basically Clark Kent if he was an evil businessman). It’s like I said earlier, 500 billion dollars is not loose change. But then again, to them, control of the OASIS is the more valuable prize of the deal.

They’re the EActiviBlizzKonaBisoft of the story. I bet you anything they’ll try to set up a lootbox system in the game if they win.

The DeLorean(™). Time Travel Not Included.

ParZival gets to the race track, meets up with Aech, and finds a spot at the back while IOI’s henchmen, nicknamed the Sixers (due to all being known by their number only), get into their cars. He summons his own vehicle, grown from a miniature car in his pocket, and it’s a freaking DELOREAN. It probably wasn’t cheap, considering how huge that car was in the 1980’s pop culture (and even now) due to Back to the Future. A girl on a bike, wearing a helmet, takes place next to him. He identifies her as Art3mis, a user who’s famous in her own search for the Egg and her crusade against IOI.

IOI, IOI everywhere.

Jesus fuck, who invited King Kong to a race?

The world rearranges itself to create the track, and the race starts. Traps appear everywhere. One section is a leap of faith across a large gap. Subways, trucks, everything gets in the way - but ParZival’s DeLorean is equipped with gimmicks to bypass them, and he gladly gathers the money from other racers who get killed by the hazards. Next area? Wrecking balls. Another gap. Then, a T-Rex in the streets. And to top it all off, King Kong pursues whoever made it that far, killing them, destroying the road to create another big gap and then taking place at the end, before the exit, to catch and kill whoever’s still left. It’s unwinnable. ParZival stops just short of the giant ape, and catches Art3mis off her bike before she gets there. Wise move, as the Kong turn her bike into scrap metal.

She gets to retrieve it in its current state, and pulls off her helmet to reveal her avatar’s face to ParZival. She looks like an elf dressed to go to a punk rock concert. ParZival offers to bring her to Aech’s workshop, where the cyborg orc (yep, still freaking awesome) accepts to repair the bike. It’s also revealed that Aech creates mods for people in the game, and gets paid a lot for it. His latest project? A full-sized Iron Giant! Which will certainly be used in a perfectly pacifist manner, as per the original film’s portrayal, rest assured.

How could such a big, friendly, metallic giant ever be
used to fight? That is nonsense.

This Rick guy looks about as pleasant as a sudden
appendicitis.

After Art3mis leaves, Wade is called back to the real world by his family: his aunt Alice and her jackass of a boyfriend Rick. I heard the two were much worse in the book than in the movie, both being abusive to Wade (who lives with them because his parents died when he was young). Here, Alice was gathering money to get out of that trailer house in the Stacks, but Rick used it all for equipment to use on Planet Doom and died in-game, effectively losing the cash. And blaming it on Wade, of course.

(By the way, in that scene, Wade uses the term “noob” un-ironically and in real life, and it just sounds so dumb.)

I can only imagine Ogden Morrow, James' partner; if he was still a
player in the game, how weird it would be to watch his younger self
in those 3D videos.
But I doubt he wuld care for the egg hunt.

Later, Wade remembers that Art3mis said James Halliday hated rules, and he sees it as a hint of what to do to win the race. He walks into the Halliday Journals, a place in the OASIS where Halliday’s memories were recorded and rendered for all the egg hunters to view as they please, along with every piece of media the creator enjoyed and took inspiration from for this futuristic trip into the 1980s. I’m actually kind of weirded out by the thought that Halliday had highly-advanced cameras constantly recording even his smallest interactions so that they’d be kept in the Journals, for all players to watch. It’s like willingly subjecting yourself to Big Brother… all for the purpose of a game? The Journals are guarded by a robotic avatar with a British accent, very polite and amicable, perhaps a little lonely now that most egg hunters have given up on the search.

In the video ParZival watches, Halliday expresses a distaste for change. He doesn’t like to see things evolve, change around him. The creator wonders aloud, while discussing with Ogden Morrow, whether it wouldn’t be better to, for once, go backwards really fast instead. Wade has a revelation - that’s the clue! He’s figured it out!

In five years, i think somebody out there would have also figured it out...
but what do I know.

And so he heads back to the race track on the next day… and I’ll talk about that in Part 2.