VGFlicks: Ready Player One (Part 3)

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

(Spoilers abound here. Read carefully.)

"Wait, are you really Aech or..."
"I don't have my voice modulator on, just believe me!"

While Wade is fleeing the IOI people who have just captured Samantha, he’s grabbed by a person he recognizes as his best friend, the cyborg orc Aech… or rather the player behind Aech, Helen Harris (portrayed by Lena Waithe). There had to be a reason why that character’s voice sounded so modified. In the book, where her avatar is a tall white man, her decision to conceal her identity is better explained: As a black lesbian, she was disowned by her family and tossed out. Mind you, as far as avatars go, I’ll take the cyborg orc over a tall white dude any day. I’m not even getting into the unfortunate implications!

I still haven’t read the book, but from what I understand, in that version, your OASIS avatar can only look like a normal person. How did that ever become the best game ever? I’m more willing to believe the version in the movie, in which you can literally become any character, even an existing one.

Toshiro (Daito) and Zhou (Shoto). they're awesome.

Wade and Helen get to her van, but it’s being ID’d by an IOI drone. Out from it comes Daito’s player, named Toshiro Yoshiaki (portrayed by Win Morisaki), who smashes the robot with a baseball bat. Everyone gets in the van and flees in time. In there, Helen’s also got Shoto’s player… An eleven year old kid named Zhou, portrayed by Philip Zhao. That is one cool kid right there. Helen, being the technical smarts of the team (seeing as she builds mods for OASIS and hacks stuff), devises a clever plan to rescue Samantha. Thankfully, Wade remembers his earlier meeting with Nolan Sorrento, head of IOI, and knows what the man’s been using to log in… including his password.

It's like being trapped in the game, literally!

Crash through the ice in three... two...

Samantha is seen at the IOI, locked in a cubicle, a helmet attached to her head keeping her inside the OASIS, with electric ankle bracelets. She’s forced to act as a slave to the enterprise and its nameless goons. Meanwhile, Sorrento (still as evil Clark Kent) arrives at Castle Anorak on Planet Doom, where a long line of IOI Sixers is testing every single game on the Atari 2600, with each game being tried leading to the avatar of the person playing it, standing on ice, falling through and dying. Fairly quickly, might I add, barely a minute into some of those games. The IOI searchers are trying to figure out which game leads to the third key. Sorrento meets with I-R0k and makes him activate a legendary artifact gathered by IOI earlier, an orb that can create an impenetrable force field around a fairly large perimeter. The Orb is activated by a magic spell, and protects Castle Anorak.

First rule of the impenetrable fortress in a work of fiction:
Before the end, it will be penetrated. ...That came out wrong.

"Don't try anything funny, Sorrento.
We're dead serious."

When Sorrento logs out, he pulls the VR goggles only to see he’s held at gunpoint by Wade and Toshiro. Wade threatens to outright kill Sorrento unless he tells them in which cell Samantha is held, and how to contact her. Toshiro keeps his weapon pointed at Sorrento as Wade leaves with the info, revealing an insane plot twist: This exchange was happening inside the OASIS, with the two players’ avatars wearing perfect replicas of their real-life selves, with Aech orchestrating the whole thing. Okay, that is either pushing it… or totally awesome. I’ll go for “Awesomely pushing it”.

I refuse to believe that hacks in video games can do that in 2045.
But even if I don't believe it, it's still pretty friggin' cool.

Freedom! Well, that was quick.

With that information, Wade contacts Samantha and, using info on the IOI slave cells, tells her how to escape. Not really easy since she can’t pull off her helmet at first and does everything blindly, still seeing the game instead of the real world, but soon she’s free. She tells Wade to get to Planet Doom and raise an army, and then gets ideas of her own to take down IOI from inside. Meanwhile, Sorrento sees a reflection that clues him in that he's still in the OASIS, so he pulls off his helmet and prepares his forces in the real world.

"They've freed her already? They worked fast."

I forgot to mention that in this adaptation, aside from I-R0k who’s Sorrento’s right-hand man in the OASIS, he also has access to a henchwoman. Her name is F’Nale Zandor. She has actual fighting abilities, she leads the IOI army in the real world, she is the brains of many of their find-and-capture operations, she takes part to their major raids, and has control over IOI’s drones, so she’s also the one who ordered the bombs set up and blown up on Wade’s home. She wasn’t in the book; as a matter of fact, I-R0k is also nowhere near as important in the book. Sorrento did nearly everything by himself there.

While Sorrento inspects Samantha's cell and finds out she's gone from it, Samantha makes her way to Sorrento’s high-tech VR setup. She uses it to find info on the Orb, even learning the magic spell needed to turn it off. Meanwhile, ParZival is using his fame as the finder of two keys to contact all the players in the OASIS and convince them to join the fight for the future of this game, the ultimate showdown (of ultimate destiny?) against IOI. Oh yeah, tell everyone how this quest gave you money, and a love interest, and friends - surely everyone’s had your positive experience. He asks for everyone wishing to help save the OASIS to show up on Planet Doom. Aech activates her Iron Giant, which I guarantee will be used for diplomacy and peaceful treaties - nah, it’s here to kick some ass, screw the nonviolent version from the original movie, amirite? ParZival’s call works and an army of millions arrives for this final battle.

She logged onto the game using the IOI set-up, yet it's
still her avatar in the Sixer suit. Somehow.

Millions of players, versus the Sixers of IOI who are
apparently an army in the six digits? Sounds fair.

Samantha logs back into the Oasis using an IOI Sixer setup, and while the army outside the dome is shooting at it with everything they got, she uses her new position inside the dome to get close to the artifact. She can’t reach it, but she sends a floating device with a speaker that transmits her voice, and she recites the spell. And it works! The force field goes down, and the army raised by ParZival runs into battle. Eeeeeeeeee

I think I just had a man-squee. This is so damn awesome. I got a bunch of points of criticisms about this movie overall, but damn if this isn’t just the best thing ever.

Hey, it's a war. Anything goes, even the Iron Giant
actually fighting.

The Sixer at the Atari 2600 is playing adventure and has gotten quite far into it, too, so it must be the right game. Art3mis manages to retrieve ParZival on the battlefield - easy, just look for the guy parading in a goddamn DeLorean - and relays that info to him. They gladly tag-team to kill a bunch of Sixers, using famous fictional weapons and even the goddamn Chucky doll. The efforts seem fruitless since all the IOI mooks who get killed in-game can just return to new stations, log into new accounts, and resume the fight. Literally everybody outside in the streets of the real world, VR headsets on, are pulling their best fighting moves, with a flabbergasted F’Nale watching this as she drives around looking for Helen’s van.

It looks silly IRL, but then again each one of these kids
has an awesome avatar that pulls these moves off way better.

I act like it is, but Mechagodzilla isn't even the final boss.

Sensing defeat, Sorrento checks his inventory and pulls out MechaGodzilla. Every good game needs a final boss, right? To help the Iron Giant piloted by Aech, Daito brings out the freaking RX-78 Mobile Suit Gundam. I would stop referencing the references if they didn’t matter so much to this battle! Daito’s mecha doesn’t last very long, but gives the heroes enough time to put a plan in motion, with Art3mis shooting through the Mechagodzilla’s eyes and tossing a bomb in there, a Madball no less, that blows up Sorrento’s avatar and defeats the robotic atomic lizard. The team gets to the bridge leading to the Castle, but I-R0k blows it up before they get to it. Aech sacrifices her Iron Giant, falling over the chasm to let them cross it. I-R0k is still shooting at them with his overpowered arsenal, but a well-placed shot from Shoto rips that monstrous avatar’s arm off. Two heroes are now in the castle, but Aech and her Iron Giant fall into the lava beneath.

Look at it another way, I-R0k:
Now you can put a chainsaw there.

Sorrento has noticed the IOI uniform on Art3mis, and now that he's out of the game, he's searching for her through his offices. Realizing that she’s in real-life danger, ParZival tells her to flee, then shoots and kills her avatar. Just as she was about to be found out!

"Still not accepting my 50-million offer?"
"Let's see... 50 millions... versu 500 billions... Nah, I'll
pass on your offer, Sorrento."

Raiding the castle, ParZival and Shoto get rid of the Sixers with a holy hand grenade and reach the area of the arcade machine. They get there just in time for that Sixer to win at the game… and the ice breaks under him and he falls. As Wade figured out, Adventure on the Atari 2600 is the answer to the riddle because it was the first game ever to have an Easter Egg, if you knew how to get it. Alas, before they can start playing, Sorrento and I-R0K arrive from a portal. Sorrento menaces ParZival with the Cataclyst, a bomb that will kill literally every avatar on the planet on which it’s activated, unless ParZival gets the key for him. ParZival refuses, and the businessman starts activating the bomb (to I-R0k’s horror, as the mook has been gathering stuff in the OASIS for over ten years), but ParZival turns this into a fight. Which he wins simply by knowing better video game fighting moves. Oh, and a kick to the crotch…

…which really fucking hurts IRL too when you’re wearing that suit that replicates touch feelings based on what your character feels in the game. You deserved that, Nolan. Actually, you deserve a few more.

Alas, the bad guy has time to activate the bomb after this.

Earth-Covering Kaboom.

And BOOM go not only Wade and Sorrento’s avatars, but also I-R0k, Shoto, all the Sixers and every avatar in the entirety of the OASIS, since it was implied that literally everyone in the game went into that big battle. So uh, hope everybody likes having all their in-game (and, thus, in many cases, real-life) money lost forever. Hey, remember when I said it was a bad idea to have a game’s economy become the actual goddamn economy?

Or rather, we thought ParZival had been killed. Turns out, he wasn’t. The quarter that had been given to him by the Halliday Journals’ Robotic Curator earlier? An Extra Life. It was to be expected that in a game like this, One-Up Mushrooms would be extremely difficult to find. Can’t just buy a Mega Man Head icon at the store! In the original book, it was obtained by playing a perfect game of Pac-Man. A feat that, at the time this was written, only about 6 people ever achieved in the entire history of that retro classic. And with nobody in the game to stop him, Wade can play Adventure and get to the room with the invisible dot that causes the Easter Egg to appear back at the entrance. I’ll admit that it’s very clever. In this movie about a hunt for an Easter Egg, a movie that is ironically chock-full of Easter eggs, the final key is found by getting the first Easter Egg ever recorded in the history of gaming.

"Aech? You're not as I imag-"
"Yeah, yeah, it's the fourth time I hear that today. Hurry in."

Meanwhile, all the gamers in the streets are out of the game and getting a pretty tough reality check. Easy to forget how bad the world has gotten when you’ve been avoiding it for so long to live in fantasy instead. Helen is driving her van around, looking for Samantha, with Wade still playing in the moving vehicle. They find and recognize her pretty quickly, and she gets to meet them. IOI is still a threat IRL, as F’Nale’s drones have found the van. ParZival’s play of Adventure is broadcast to every player’s VR set and he explains what he’s doing and why the game’s Easter Egg matters. It’s an interesting piece of video game history trivia, look it up. It also mattered for Halliday, the type of creator who cared little for the business side of things and favored artistic creation above the rest, also the reason why he made and kept the OASIS almost free to play, in spite of the game’s humongous scope and fame.

Beautiful key, isn't it?

As ParZival finds the Easter Egg in Adventure, the TV and console crash through the ice and the décor around forms into Anorak, who presents the crystal key. But outside, IOI trucks are chasing the van and ramming into its sides, so Wade keeps falling left and right in the game. Still, he catches the key and the gate appears, with three keyholes. Wade tells Helen to get to the Stacks in Columbus, and launches a call out to everyone watching to regroup in that area of the city. ParZival opens the gate with the Copper, Jade and Crystal Keys. Everyone in the van cheers, and so do the employees of IOI who are watching the scene. What? They’re just working for a grade-A asshole who wants to monetize the OASIS to an insane degree, it doesn’t mean they all agree with that.

Yes, IOI's group of brains trying to figure out the clues that
lead to the Keys all look like generic nerds.

And the gate opens on a large room with riches littering the floors, a giant golden egg atop a structure… and also, a table in the center, with what looks like a contract.

The Golden ending?

Weird time to finish here, but I realized I had a lot to say for my final words, and figured it would be more appropriate to dedicate a final part to the last 20 minutes of the film (God, it’s so long) and my final thoughts.