Ready Player One (2018)

Ready Player One has been on my radar for a while now. I read the book several months ago and enjoyed it, although I was mildly irritated by the juvenile-toned wish-fulfilment aspect to the writing. Knowing that Steven Spielberg was supposedly directing it (although he was also supposed to be directing Robopocalypse, which had been MIA for five years, until being handed over to Michael Bay), I held out the hope that the film version might address some of those issues.

Ove the past couple of months, the trailers started arriving. At first, I wasn’t particularly interested, until the release of one with a cover version of Pure Imagination playing over it managed to push all of my geek buttons. I quickly moved from being mildly interested to completely obsessed, even though I knew there was every chance that I was going to be completely disappointed.

Unfortunately, I had decided to go away for the weekend when the film was being released, which meant I had to wait for a full FOUR DAYS before being able to see it.

I had one or two problems while watching it. The first was that I managed to tip my seat up in the cinema to the point that I almost crushed the person sitting behind me. That has no bearing on the film at all, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.

The second was that I really needed another couple of hours sleep to be able to concentrate properly. As a result, parts of the film felt like a particularly vivid dream.

Aside from that, Ready Player One pretty much met all of my expectations (the optimistic ones at least). Aside from the advances in the technology used to make the film, it felt like a leftover from the 1980s (the last decade when they really knew how to make sci-fi blockbuster films that weren’t part of a franchise). Ernest Cline, the author of Ready Player One, was born one year after me in 1972, so it’s not surprising that many of his cultural touchstones intersect with mine.

The story is a cross between Tron and The Last Starfighter (the latter being an inspiration for the author’s second (and lesser) novel, Armada), covering some of the same territory as Tad Williams’ Otherworld books and the Sword Art Online anime series. While the script isn’t particularly deep, it does neatly reflect some of the concerns about the direction today’s society is taking – particularly in the ever-increasing divide between ultra-rich and trailer park poor (in this case trailer parks are now mini-cities with trailers stacked vertically on top of each other).

Geek-culture references come thick and fast. Chucky, Back to the Future, Batman, King Kong, Akira, Silent Running, The Shining, Star Wars, Jurassic Park are some of the few that come immediately to mind, but there’s so much more than that. In terms of copyright clearance, Ready Player One makes The Lego Movie seem a mere dilettante in comparison.

When I was fourteen, this would probably have been among the best films I had ever seen. As it stands, it’s a film that I liked an awful lot. It’s not perfect, but it’s more than good enough. And I’m looking forward to seeing it again.