A breathless romp through virtual reality, Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One presents a T-Rex-size irony: A film that cautions us against the exhilarating escapism of digital simulacrum that divorces us from reality -- VR, 3D, Facebook, online games, movies -- is first and foremost an exhilarating escapism manufactured upon a massive digital simulacrum. Spielberg, one of the first directors to turn Hollywood into a factory of digital effects, certainly knows this. But with unruffled confidence and youthful velocity, the 71-year-old gambles that the thrills would override the insincerity -- that nobody would mind the self-defeating scruples as long as the breakneck ride keeps us glued.
By now, Spielberg's oeuvre has been much dissected. This is a prolific American director who deftly switches between two modes: the popcorn (Jaws, the Indiana Jones movies, Jurassic Park, War Of The Worlds, The BFG) and the serious (Amistad, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, Lincoln, Bridge Of Spies). You can say he moves between children's movies and adult endeavours, or between practicing the American concept of commercialised cinema and the American concept of freedom and liberty -- culminating in his previous film, the newspaper drama The Post, released just two months ago.
To see Ready Player One now, right after the earnestness of The Post, is to experience an astonishing contrast in Spielberg's cinematic agencies. Adapted from Ernest Cline's novel, the film is a whooshing sci-fi escapade inside a virtual reality game populated by avatars, monsters and magical weapons. At 140 minutes it's densely stuffed, bursting at the seams with game-geek paraphernalia as well as a stash of 1980s pop-culture references that roll out almost non-stop, from a Joan Jett song to Kubrick's The Shining to Atari video games, from Back To The Future to Buckaroo Banzai. Spielberg zips us into all of this with ebullience, and at times it can feel a little too much, the rollicking turning into a bombast (I watched in on IMAX 3D). It's worth finding out, too, if the millennials born in the late 1990s would dig the rash of referential nostalgia evoked by the film (King Kong on the Empire State and T-Rex from Speilberg's dinosaur park all make appearances).
The story takes place alternately between two planes of reality. In the real world of the year 2045, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is an orphaned teenager living in the stack slums of Ohio. As in most dystopian stories featuring young adults, life is full of grime and hopelessness, and everyone escapes the weight of reality by donning goggles and logging into a VR game called Oasis, an immersive, alternative universe of fantastical make-believe. The designer of the game is a grandmaster of geeks called James Halliday (Mark Rylance), an awkward genius who finds the real world -- and real girls -- too formidable (typical geek traits?). When Halliday dies, he makes the Mother of All Wills: any player who can find the Easter Egg through the three keys he has hidden in Oasis will inherit a huge fortune as well as the full administrative control of the massively multiplayer online game.
Wade in real life becomes Parzival in the game, and his race to secure the keys and the Easter Egg is joined by the avatars of young players Artemis (Olivia Cooke), Aech (Lena Waithe), Sho (Philip Zhao) and Daito (Myanmar-born J-pop idol Win Morisaki). To crack the clues Halliday has littered in the game, the Egg hunters scour the creator's preserved memories loaded down by his pop-culture experiences -- the songs he liked, movies he watched, places he visited -- and thus Ready Player One becomes a cluttered museum of 80s artefacts. That aside, Parzival and his team face off their nemesis: an army of players hired by IOI, a giant telecommunications company and the world's largest internet provider. Led by the slimy Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), IOI wants to win the race to find the Easter Egg so they can control the game that has become a substitute to reality for millions of people.
For the most part, watching Ready Player One is like watching extended cut scenes from a video game. The hyper-aestheticisation, the exaggerated features, the gravity-defying actions, the psychedelic setting, from a car race through Manhattan to an LSD-inspired discotheque -- the film imagines a VR world for the characters who take the wheel for us (Wade wears goggles, and so do we).
And speaking of irony, while the film's ultimate message is to warn us against the addiction to the beautiful lies of non-reality created by technology and obsession, it also happens that the scenes inside the VR are really more satisfying, imaginative and engaging than the stock dystopian visuals of Wade's real world. The boy's quasi-transformation into the leader of a revolution also reminds us of The Hunger Games, in which brutal escapism is puppeteered by a fascist regime. But while Katniss is Katniss, on and off the game, in Ready Player One it's Parzival -- a fake being -- who thrills us, not Wade, and the film loses its zing almost every time it cuts from the adventure in Oasis into the real world.
And yet, this is proof that Spielberg is a master who knows how to push buttons and starts a roller-coaster that makes us forget everything else for two hours. It couldn't have escaped him that movies, especially Hollywood blockbusters in the modern age, are a form of escapism -- one that originally came before VR or computer games -- and the cautionary tale against our online obsession also applies to cinema. The IOI, a cynical corporate that makes money from making sure people spend their time online, is an all-too obvious allegory to powerful telecommunications companies (pick any you like), or to Facebook, or to Hollywood itself.
For Spielberg, this subtle and persistent tension between his dual roles as an emperor of popcorn and a "serious" artist who tackles hard subjects seems to be the drive that has kept him going with the same energy that he first showed 40 years ago.
Ready Player One
Starring Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn
Directed by Steven Spielberg
