Ready Player One doesnt score many points

It seems to me there’s a dichotomy between cinema and video games. It’s to do with immersion. In cinema the audience enjoys a collective experience in which it really has no agency, whereas with a video game the player gets to have genuine agency in the outcome. One is a much more immersive experience than the other.

I’ve never understood why gamers watch others play when they could just as easily be playing themselves; hence I don’t get the appeal of e-sports but then I suspect I’m not supposed to. But this dichotomy is at the centre of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One which for all its CGI folderols is an empty, soulless, heavy-handed piece of fantasy cinema.

It is essentially Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for the PS4 generation. In the not too distant future – 2045 – the world has gone to hell in a handcart. The reasons aren’t explained too clearly, like so many things in this film, but the bandwidth wars – whatever they are – have something to do with it. Given that our real world sucks, we have all retreated into a cyber world, a Virtual Reality construct called The Oasis where we live and game as avatars.

The creator of this VR paradise James Halliday (Mark Rylance) has died but has left a video telling the world that whoever finds the Easter Egg, the hidden treasure, at the heart of The Oasis will win his fortune and control of the VR world. The Hi-Five a gang of gamers led by Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), in the best traditions of Spielberg films an abandoned orphan, want to change their lives by finding the Golden Egg. However nasty corporate boss Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) wants to stop them and control The Oasis for himself. Like I said, Willy Wonka in cyberspace.

Ready Player One for me was heavy-handed and clunky. The plot lurches from the VR world to the real world with little rhyme or reason. The fact that there is an almost constant voice-over telling you what’s happening is an indication of its narrative weakness. Things happen because they happen, there’s no cohesion or internal logic to anything.

The characters are generic and unappealing. Also, since more than half of the film takes place in The Oasis, they are computer generated avatars. This takes us into the realm of the Uncanny Valley and no matter how much anime technique they use on the eyes, they still look weird and difficult to engage with.

Similarly, because they are avatars there are no real stakes; they can’t die they just zero out and all of the credits they have amassed disappear. What happens to these people IRL as it were when they lose all their credits is never explored.

Indeed, many areas that might make Ready Player One a more interesting story are never explored. How does a society function when everyone is in VR? What happens in a world where debts can be bought by corporations and people turned into indentured slaves? Or a world where no one appears to eat, sleep or work? How does the VR existence interface with the real one?

Spielberg and his writers Zak Penn and Ernest Cline – the author of the YA best seller on which the film is based – have done a pretty poor job of world building both sociologically and geographically. The only surprising thing about the world of 2045 is that it has a police force and they reliably turn up just when the plot demands that they do.

Instead of creating a believable landscape they have instead crammed in as many Eighties pop culture references as possible. You’ll have seen them in the trailer, which should have been a big clue to the film’s lack of narrative. In the first car chase for example you’ll spot the 66 Batmobile, the A-Team van, the Back to the Future DeLorean, Kitt from Knight Rider not to mention King Kong and the Jurassic Park T Rex.

But this is all empty spectacle which replaces narrative. Characters pop up like the movie-making equivalent of shouting ‘look, a squirrel’! It’s over-stuffed to the point of satiation. Sure, there’s a fanboy pleasure in seeing Gundam fighting MechaGodzilla, but there are just too many of them; the film is relentless in its cultural references. They’re not there to serve the plot, as in the similarly-themed by much better Wreck-It Ralph (2012), they are just there because they are there.

Earlier this month Spielberg gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he said he wouldn’t know how to make a full VR movie because ‘I don’t have as much control over where the audience is looking…I’m not sure it’s a storytelling medium’. With this film he rather proves his own point.

The one thing that struck me about Ready Player One were the endless references to other, better films like The Shining. There are also persistent references and shout-outs to Robert Zemeckis of Back to the Future fame. That’s when I realised that the real Easter Egg at the heart of this story is that it has the wrong director – Zemeckis is a much better fit for this movie, with a much lighter touch, and it’s a shame he couldn’t have been persuaded.

In the end Ready Player One is a film about the inevitable triumph of pop culture which suggests that in the coming bandwidth wars we are all going to lose.