Ready Player One film review - garish and nostalgic, but Spielberg gets games
To call Ready Player One - Steven Spielberg's new film, adapted from the novel by Ernest Cline - self-referential would be quite an understatement. It's a mind-warping cultural Möbius strip: a one-dimensional entity with no end and no beginning, permanently twisting in on itself. It's a futuristic work of science-fiction that is obsessed with nostalgia. It's a film about video games made by a director who was a huge formative influence on the medium, observing his own reflection in a funhouse mirror. It's what happens when fan fiction becomes dominant over the true works of imagination it pays homage to.
This makes it sound self-involved and meaningless, and that is what I expected it to be: a more polished version of Chris Columbus' patronising nerd fantasy Pixels. But the thing is that Ready Player One was directed by Steven Spielberg, and though the great director's best work is behind him, he is still an uncommonly lucid storyteller with a sure sense of what technology can do for him and what it can't. He knows how to spin a fun adventure yarn. And he gets video games.
In the year 2045 - "after the great corn syrup drought and the bandwidth riots" - Earth's underemployed and overcrowded population lives in slums and has little to do. Just about everyone deals with this grotty, boring existence by slipping on VR headsets and escaping into the OASIS, a virtual world created by the game designer James Halliday (Mark Rylance), now deceased and worshipped as a demigod. The OASIS is many games within one. It's the ultimate MMO, where players can be whoever or whatever they want to be as long as they participate in a ruthless digital economy to earn 'coin'.
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