There are so many potential competing narratives to discuss when looking at Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, so many ghosts in the machine vying for our attention. This is Spielberg’s first science fiction movie since 2005’s War of the Worlds, unless you count the CGI aliens in 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It is a movie that has largely impressed the critics, yet has led to much navel-gazing, largely linked to the widespread reappraisal of its source novel in the wake of Gamergate. It is a vision of the digital future that seems more corporate and branded than those we have seen on the big screen in the past, yet it also feels closer than ever before to the (virtual) reality we are just beginning to enter.
What did you think of Ready Player One? Here’s your chance to give a verdict on the movie’s key talking points.
Virtual race-swapping and digital diversity
It’s probably a little unfair that Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel, on which Spielberg’s movie is not so loosely based, has been branded the unofficial bible for Gamergate types in the years since its publication. At first glance, the big-screen adaptation looks like a pretty progressive affair. Of the five members of Wade Watts/Parzival’s High Five team, two are of Asian extraction and two are female – one of whom chooses to appear as a male orc in the Oasis, the virtual-reality world to which everyone escapes from a ravaged, dystopian 2045. Did Spielberg successfully fix the novel’s flaws by giving Olivia Cooke’s Samantha Cook/Art3mis more to say and do and fudging Aech’s problematic virtual race-swapping? Or is this still essentially the story of one geeky white male (Watts) aspiring to succeed and replace an older and even geekier white male?
Too many Easter eggs can make you sick
In the book, the Oasis is filled with references to 1980s pop culture because its creator James Halliday grew up on video games, comics and movies from that era. But Spielberg has radically expanded the field of play to include nods to everything from The Shining (1980, but with the distinct feel of a 70s movie) to Mechagodzilla (first appearance 1974) to the T rex from the film-maker’s own Jurassic Park (1993). There’s the sense that this expansion makes the movie feel more mainstream than its source material because its reference points are so much easier to spot. At the same time, it also lessens the idea that this is a digital wonderland where only the most po-faced of geeks can succeed. Do you agree?
A new vision of virtual reality
Ready Player One stands out from many of the virtual worlds we have previously seen on the big screen. The Matrix was a terrifying digital world created to keep human brains from turning into mush while our vital substances were harvested to power the machine hegemony that replaced us. Tron was similar in its depiction of a vivid and sinister autocracy. By contrast, the Oasis at times feels more like a chirpy virtual Disneyland. Despite all the movie’s progressive pretensions, was there not something rather corporate about the way so many of its denizens chose to appear as avatars based on famous franchises, rather than imagining their own bespoke virtual identities?
A place in the Spielberg sci-fi pantheon
Ready Player One is barely recognisable as the sort of open-hearted Spielbergian sci-fi we saw the Oscar-winner regularly deliver in the 70s and 80s. Would you agree that this was an example of late-era Spielberg in journeyman big-budget mode, a skilfully made piece of high-octane, CGI-heavy mainstream cinema to place alongside the Jurassic Park movies and War of the Worlds?
James Halliday and Nolan Sorrento
Mark Rylance plays Halliday as a blend of Willy Wonka, Steve Jobs and Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Meanwhile, Ben Mendelsohn’s scheming corporate bully, Nolan Sorrento, is given a new backstory as a former intern of Halliday’s who wanted to monetise the virtual-reality world at the earliest opportunity. Did you appreciate the subtle shifts here between novel and film?
Digital worlds versus actual reality
At the end of Ready Player One, having secured the golden Easter egg that gives him ownership and control over Halliday’s creation, Watts chooses to close the Oasis for two days a week to force people to spend time in the real world. Yet there is little sense that he plans to do anything much with his newly acquired riches about the grinding poverty that exists outside the digital realm, which rather undercuts the value of his admittedly well-intentioned concession. Sorrento may have been defeated and his corporation forced to deviate from its more nefarious leanings, but did you really buy the movie’s determination to promote the value of real life over a plunge down the digital rabbit hole?
