VGFlicks: Ready Player One (Part 2)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

(Once again: Spoiler Alert!)

The craziest race is about start again!

Did you know this movie’s 140 minutes long? And there’s a lot going on. I’ll try my best to keep this review at four parts. When Part 1 ended, ParZival (Wade’s avatar) and Art3mis were at the starting line for the race, ready to try again, after Wade Watts had a revelation on how to win the race.

The craziest race? Yeah, right - you can only win
by cheating!

When the race starts, instead of racing with the others, Wade drives the car backwards. This opens a pathway that he drives his Delorean backwards into, which takes him through a secret passageway under the racetrack, from which he gets to watch all the action going on above him. Then, with ridiculous ease, he pops out at the Finish line, behind the very angry King Kong who’s been foiled for the first time in five years.

I suck at solving Rubik's, but I still want this.

Upon reaching the plaza past the finish line, ParZival is greeted by an invisible orchestra and Anorak, James Halliday’s OASIS avatar, congratulates him. And so, he gets the first key - as well as a clue towards the next key. With the victory came a huge amount of money, which Wade proceeds to spend around the in-game store on weapons, outfits - even items for real life, such as the full-body VR suit that will replicate on his real body the sensations of his avatar being touched in the OASIS. Sounds cool as long as there’s no fighting going on. Getting hurt IRL when your avatar gets hurt sounds like a bad plan. He also gets a Zemeckis Cube, a Rubik’s Cube with some ability. Considering what film series Zemeckis is most famous for… it’s probably time-based.

I-R0k is never given a real life name. Nolan Sorrento is never given
an avatar name. Nobody cares anyway. Especially for I-R0k.

Nolan Sorrento, CEO of IOI, goes into the game (and he keeps his password on his VR seat! That’s not safe.), and meets with his henchman I-R0k. When I first heard the name, I thought of Eyerok, that boss from Super Mario 64. But no, it’s just some guy with a skull for a body. For the record, I-R0k is voiced by T.J. Miller, and we only hear the guy, never see the player behind the avatar. Which I consider a good thing nowadays. I don’t expect to see him in other stuff anytime soon. I-R0k is very useful to Sorrento, getting an almighty artifact for the man on Doom Planet of all places. It’s an orb that can protect a large area from all attacks, and whose effect can only be turned on or off by reciting a spell.

If it's a riddle referencing a famous work of fiction from
the 1980s, then even I can figure it out!
... ... ... ... ...
...Nope. Drawing a blank.

After Wade won the first key, Art3mis soon followed. ParZival then told his friend Aech about it, and after he succeeded, he told his own friends Daito and Shoto. Now there are five names on the scoreboard. The clue to the second key talks about a creator hating its creation, a leap not taken, retracing steps and escaping the past. ParZival returns to the Halliday Journals, which contain not only the entire video database of Halliday’s most important interactions, but also a complete collection of all the works he has grown up with in the 1980s (and somehow all the companies owning the right to those games and films allowed him to?), for all the players to watch as they please. However, Wade’s avatar is now a superstar in OASIS, and so fans surround him when he walks in, but he's pulled away by Art3mis in a costume of Goro from Mortal Kombat. She has a costume for him, too - Clark Kent’s glasses, suit and tie. Immediate incognito!

"I'm not dong X." Smash cut to doing exactly X.
It's overdone, I can no longer laugh at- ...Ha! hahahaha!

It kinda weirds me out that James Halliday kept video
records of most of the important moments of his life.
Did everyone else know? Or was it a secret?

In the Journals, ParZival and Art3mis are brought by the robotic Curator to the recorded segments of Halliday’s life. They watch a recording taking place after Halliday dated Ogden Morrow’s would-be wife, Karen Underwood (also known by her gamer tag, Kira). James had Karen come over, and though she wanted to go dancing, they watched a movie instead. ParZival remarks that this is the only time in the entire database of the Journals where Karen is mentioned, and the Curator places a bet that there are other recordings where she’s mentioned. ParZival takes him on that offer, betting all of his money. After a quick search, the Curator has to admit defeat - the first winner of the first key was right. The Curator tosses him a quarter. Well that’s a measly reward.

"You can't claim to know all that well someone that you
have only known in teh virtual space!"
"You know I could say that about you too, right?"

Thinking she’s figured out the clue, Art3mis invites ParZival on a date at the Distracted Globe, a nightclub in the OASIS. The first created by Halliday, in fact. A date, huh? Bad idea, says Aech, whom ParZival meets with later. After all, who knows? Art3mis could be a G.I.R.L.! (For the few among you who don’t know, if any, it means “Guy In Real Life”.) Also, note that it’s Aech who says that, the avatar with a voice that sounds like it was put through the software TV news utilize to mask the voice of people who want to stay anonymous. ParZival still goes to the club, and puts on Buckaroo Banzai’s suit for the occasion.

Oh, by the way, this scene also features the suit from Thriller, a much-needed nod to Michael Jackson considering the original book was severely lacking in references to prominent figures of 1980’s black culture.

I know he's thrilled about his date, but that's a little too on the nose.

"Hey! Your Bee Gees are drowning out my Devo! Boo!"

The protagonist gets to the club, with I-R0k following soon from an anonymous tip. Art3mis meets ParZival and explains that James Halliday started working on this planet-sized club after his date with Karen failed, as if he wanted the date to happen there instead. They get to a Zero-Gravity area and jump in, now floating around like the other dancers. They join in and bring out… pfft~ portable disco floors that play Stayin’ Alive. Groovy. Well, there’s my daily reminder on how to give someone CPR. Neither of them notices I-R0k in the audience, Sorrento's dragon spying their every move. Makes it all the more tragic when, after a lot of sensual moves in the air, ParZival confesses his love for her and, in the spur of the moment, his real name.

Five seconds later, batallions of IOI men burst into the club in their spaceships to capture them. The two first do well in fending off these armed gunmen, but are overpowered until ParZival uses the Zemeckis Cube. It rewinds time in the game by a minute (somehow), giving them enough time to flee. On their way out, Art3mis kicks down ParZival with enough force to also send Wade backwards in his room, saying this is not a game for her. She explains that her real-life father accumulated a debt from overspending on equipment from IOI, and was taken into their Loyalty Centers, where he had to work every day (and, probably, a job within the VR game no less) in order to pay it off. Which he never did, instead overworking himself to death. She’s crusading against IOI because there are people dying every day in those prisons. It’s slavery; people working to pay debts, yet accumulating just as much in the meantime, so they can’t get out.

Side-note here: While Steven Spielberg is one Heck of an awesome man, he is no soothsayer. Obviously, he owns no crystal ball to know what will permeate the pop culture of the next two decades. Thus, the movie with hundreds of Easter Eggs to pop culture has no mentions to anything that came past, say, 2017/2018. Makes sense, but it’s a bit jarring when you realize that in the world of Ready Player One: The Movie, pop culture seemingly ended in 2018. Maybe the natural catastrophes are responsible. Can’t blame entirely the OASIS, it came online in 2025. The most recent reference I’ve personally spotted is Tracer from Overwatch. There’s probably references to more recent works in there. It’s not a big point of criticism, but it takes me out of the experience a bit.

Also to think that all the references in this movie will grow older and older with time. It’s odd. How much of this film will be dated in 10 years?

You know... the thought occurs to me now. In the OASIS, you can look
like anyone - no limits to customization, you can even become any famous
fictional character. So, in the case of particularly popular ones, what
are the odds that there are multiples of the same character running around
the OASIS? This Tracer may not even be the only one! What says that
the one we see later is the same user? They might not be!
Cool Tracer, though.

See, this is the sort of awesome idea lying under the
surface of this movie's concept. Holograms of avatars?
That's actually pretty cool.

Nolan Sorrento of IOI arranges a meeting with ParZival, who appears as a hologram in the businessman’s VR room. Sorrento is being fed pop culture references through an earpiece so he could look like someone who knows that stuff, but Wade isn’t fooled. The gamer gets to see the businessman’s set-up, including the little paper on which the password is kept. Because of course he forgot to put that away before the meeting. B055man69, huh? Subtle. Since ParZival rejects all of his offers, Sorrento tells Wade that IOI knows who he is, where he lives… and has the resources to blow it up in a matter of minutes.

Remember when I compared the Stacks to Jenga towers?
They fall exactly the same way!

Wade runs to the Stacks and and tries to call his aunt but the call is intercepted by Rick. But it's too late, as IOI drones set up bombs all over the Stack where Wade lived, and activate them. Wade can helplessly run away as his home crashes down, with the only family he had left dying in there along with who knows how many other victims. Scarred, he goes back to his trailer, only to be put to sleep with chloroform by a guy who snuck in.

When he regains consciousness, he’s attached to a chair and greeted by a girl his age, welcoming him to the Rebellion. He recognizes the voice as Art3mis’, and the girl presents herself as Samantha Cooke.

Some people pointed out that it made little sense for those two (or any other from their group) to be living in the same city, but it can be chalked up to many of them moving to Columbus, where the servers of the OASIS are located, to have the best connection possible to the VR game. Which would make sense. I mean, the coincidence is still a bit too convenient, but a case could be made for it. Now if only a line of dialogue actually explained it...

Oh yeah, I haven't featured them in images much so far.
Leftmost one is Shoto, rightmost one is Daito.

As the two later talk, Samantha figures out the clue to the second key! Wade calls his OASIS crew and the five hurry towards the Halliday Journals. Piecing the bits of sentences together, Art3mis guesses that confessing his love to Karen was the leap Halliday didn’t make, and their only date was spent watching The Shining - a film by legendary director Stanley Kubrick, and an adaptation that Stephen King despised so much, he went and made his own version.

Remember when I said the Halliday Journals contained every piece of media Halliday ever watched or enjoyed? Well, for some reason, it’s also possible for avatars to get into those movies, replicated as VR worlds. I know VR is impressive, but that’s pushing it.

Yes, these are CGI characters in a live-action world.
That was replicated into VR, from an old movie. Somehow.

Going into a theater underneath the Journals, the team walks directly into the Overlook Hotel. No, not a CGI version. The live-action version, within the game, somehow. Like I said, that’s pushing it. The first room has the typewriter, with the “All work and no play” pages flipping away. Daito theorizes it’s a time limit, which gives them about five minutes to roam the hotel and find the second key.

Oooh, I sense some horror shenanigans! On a side-note, although I think that scene is impossible even within the story's context. I love that the OASIS avatars are still CGI here, walking through the realistic Overlook Hotel.

I don't know what's creepier: The twins, or the fact that Aech is by far
the least creepy thing in this entire goddamn hotel.

Aech gets distracted by a rolling ball and encounters the twins from The Shining in front of the elevators, but when ParZival and Art3mis get to him, the game decides to replicate that infamous trailer. You know the one.

Stupid bloody hotel elevators!

That scene goes by way too fast, I can't pick decent images.
Just know that it'll scare the Hell out of you.
And Aech's player must be terrified.

What is that live-action woman doing over this CGI
bottomless pit full of dancing CGI zombies, deep within the
live-action replication of a movie, within the CGI VR
game... Ouch, my brain hurts.

Dragged off by the tidal wave of red, Aech finds refuge… in Room 237. There, he is greeted by a naked, live-action woman in the bath, and she approaches the Cyborg Orc (a combination that will never cease to sound awesome), and what follows is madness. I… I can’t accurately describe it. Aech does come out of it alive though. While he was off in a psychedelic horror moment, Daito and Shoto found the key. The team then figures out that the final step of this level is the ballroom, where zombies are dancing in the air over a pit emitting a sickly green glow. There’s one living woman in the lot, and Art3mis jumps in to reach her. The others get thrown out of the movie, meaning Art3mis is on her own to succeed. She jumps from a dancing zombie couple to the next and reaches the woman, a virtual replica of the IRL Karen Underwood, James Halliday's lost love. And when Art3mis asks to dance with her, the monsters around vanish and form into Anorak, who hands her the Jade Key, which she uses right away to get a clue towards the third and last key.

That's an odd transformation.

I’ll say, though, the scenes in the Overlook hotel are extremely interesting as the film tries to adopt the aesthetic of a movie from the ‘80s, including a bit of film grain and some light shaking. I’m no special effects expert, but I applaud the effects team.

A couple more things to discuss here. In the original book, Art3mis found the second key by herself, off-screen (it wasn’t told how). This movie shows the scene, and Art3mis is really badass. Also of note, the original book had a bunch of additional challenges that had to be completed, for some reason. In it, there were still three keys, but also three gates to find (in the film, the gates are placed right after obtaining keys, and each contains the parchment with the clue to the next key).

As I’ve learned during my research, there are different challenges in the book: Complete the Tomb of Horrors (an infamously near-impossible module of Dungeon and Dragons) and then beat an enemy at Joust, recite all the lines of WarGames AND Monty Python and the Holy Grail (those are two separate challenges, no less!). A side-quest involves playing a perfect game of Pac-Man. These are simply insane.

Meanwhile, the movie only has three challenges, but each of them is deeply relevant to the story of James Donovan Halliday. The first challenge is an extremely difficult race, meant to be impossible if played right; cheating is the only way to beat it, by going backwards really fast. Halliday loved his references to the ‘80s, but he realized they were holding him back in a world that evolves constantly. Hence the desire to go backwards really fast. The second challenge is located within The Shining, a movie that represents the step Halliday didn’t dare to make. It would only make sense to a player who had viewed the one video in the entire Halliday Journals talking about Karen Underwood. His regret was that he never expressed his love for Karen, who later hooked up with and then married James’ business partner, Ogden.

James Halliday, The Imperfect. Who still somehow created
a game with hundreds of planets, supposedly all by
himself.

Two challenges in, and things become clear: Each one requires an encyclopaedic knowledge of James Halliday, just short of worship (and Wade mentions early on that the creator of the OASIS was, in fact, seen like a God in the real world of RPO). However, it also requires that the players don’t treat him like a God, but as the flawed human he really was, and acknowledge his mistakes. Halliday would make sure that the next owner of the OASIS doesn’t repeat the errors he made. A second theme makes itself clear: That while pop culture and VR gaming are great, reality is more important. Tell me how reciting every single line of any famous geek movie by memory would fit into that Aesop?

Gee, that was a rant.

Oh, and we’re only halfway through the movie!

What if drones were spying on us? Oh, you mean,
like in all science-fiction dystopia ever written?

Once again, it's the girl who gets kidnapped.
Hopefully she'll be able to fight in spite of that.

After this, we get a hilarious moment showing a crowd of IOI players having the shit scared out of them by the Overlook Hotel. Sorrento orders the IOI drones to locate Wade Watts or any of his allies, and the robots manage to find their hideout by following the guy who chloroformed Wade earlier to bring him to Samantha. In the ensuing assault by an IOI armed force into the hideout, Wade keeps himself hidden to avoid the IOI men, but Samantha is captured and brought to a loyalty center…

I love to cut these review parts on cliffhangers.

See ya in Part 3.