Considering the enormous role Steven Spielberg played in shaping ’80s’ pop culture and the string of great filmmakers he influenced later, it is fitting that the legendary filmmaker has directed the nostalgia-heavy Ready Player One, a fun albeit flawed sci-fi adventure film based on the novel by the same name.

The film is set in a dystopian 2045 where most people appear to live in impoverished teeming slums in flats the size of containers stacked on top of one another. The only real escape from this misery for mankind is OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), which is a massive multiplayer online (MMO) virtual reality game that, aside from entertainment, allows users to work, learn and develop relationships.

Had this film been released 20 years ago, perhaps the concept of OASIS would have felt more revolutionary; but today it comes across as something we could experience less than a decade from now, considering that many of the game-play aspects of OASIS are a staple of current day MMOs and that virtual reality is set to skyrocket, technically speaking.

Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Ready Player One, has gorgeous visuals but views gaming culture with a clichéd perspective and fails to understand the world it attempts to depict

But I digress.

Ready Player One follows the adventures of Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a teenage boy from a dysfunctional home who, like so many players, is obsessed with the late creator of OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance). This obsession stems not just from hero worship. When Halliday passed away, his virtual alter ego Anorak announced that an Easter egg had been left inside for the gamer who could solve a series of quests. The player to recover the egg would become the legal owner of OASIS in the real world, a prize worth at least a trillion dollars. As Parzival in OASIS, Wade Watts makes it his mission to find the egg. Soon he meets the famous gamer Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and the two become allies, going on a series of action-packed adventures alongside the rest of Parzival’s clan.

The storytelling in Ready Player One consistently falls flat. The two leads, Tye and Olivia, are adequate in terms of performances but their characterisation is underwhelming. What’s more, the romance between them is unconvincing. When Parzival tells Art3mis that he loves her, it feels abrupt and shoehorned. Not all of the performances are lacking though. As the evil, power-hungry CEO of Innovative Online Industries, which has invested considerable resources into finding the egg, Ben Mendelsohn is both comical and menacing.

My biggest criticism of Ready Player One is how it, occasionally, views gaming culture from a clichéd perspective. For instance, I’ve interviewed dozens of video game developers over the years. Some are considered geniuses, worshiped by the gaming community, and are a bit eccentric, to say the least. However, not one is the neurotic introvert caricature of a video game developer that James Halliday is portrayed to be. Then, there are the gamers themselves, portrayed as awkward anti-social kids in the film. While this depiction may have been accurate in the ’90s and perhaps true for a minority today, in the age of YouTube, Twitch, and with gaming having gone so mainstream, it seems to hold less water for a film set in 2045.

Another example of Ready Player One failing to understand the world it attempts to depict is in how our heroes go about unlocking the James Halliday mysteries. The story tells us that millions of gamers have been trying to crack these puzzles for some time, but they are so simplistic that one wonders how they remained unresolved for so long, especially in the age of reddit, where online detectives operate with the combined brain matter of a thousand Sherlocks.

This isn’t to say that the Ready Player One script is all bad. Storytelling flaws aside, the film is fairly funny, and surprises regularly with unexpected laughs. Where Ready Player One truly holds its own is in the special effects. Here, Spielberg shows all of his wizardry, with gorgeous visuals powered by incredible animations and some nergasmic battle sequences that reference everything from Chucky to the Iron Giant to the DeLorean to the motorbike from Akira. Most importantly, they address the hypothetical question that many have debated for decades on the Internet: “Who would win in a fight between Gundam and Mechagodzilla?”

Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, partial nudity and language

Published in Dawn, ICON, April 8th, 2018