Spectacle Without Substance

For a few years there, the novel Ready Player One was a huge deal. It had this kind of "nerd cred" attached to it, a story that (at least supposedly) respected geek culture and the materials geeks loved. It was nerdy, but in such a way that it captured the attention of the masses (or, at least, the nerd masses). It became an phenomenon, prompting talk about a film, what could happen with a sequel, and all the other franchising opportunities that go with it. Where the original story loved geek culture, Ready Player One became geek culture.

And then, just as quickly as it arrived, and became "the thing", it vanished off everyone's collective radar. Some of that was likely due to author Ernest Cline's follow-up works as Armada was essentially Ready Player One but applied to a battle across the stars (which, wait, isn't that The Last Starfighter?), while Ready Player Two was, apparently, and even more shallow recreation of the original novel. Cline's cred fell the minute everyone realized he was a one-trick pony.

That's not to say that a film adaptation of Ready Player One would have done better if it had come out soon after the 2011 novel's original release (instead of in 2018), but certainly it would have performed better. If anything, though, the movie only stood to highlight the flaws in the original story. This is a film that, like the book that came before, is deeply in love with a very specific vision of geek culture, a vision crafted not only by Cline but then filtered through the Hollywood system and directed by Steven Spielberg. It's got a lot of big set pieces, but everything it tweaked and crafted to sell geek passion back at the audience. It doesn't have anything to say, and frankly doesn't have any affection for pop-culture, it just regurgitates it back at viewers as if that's the whole joke of the story. And, really, when it comes to Ready Player One, that's accurate.

In the film we're introduced to Wade Watts, aka Parzival (Tye Sheridan), one of the many players of OASIS, an only world / game system / VR console all wrapped into one. On the OASIS, as the marketing materials say, you can do anything, be anyone, create anything; all it takes is time and money. The OASIS, created by James Halliday (Mark Rylance) and run by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), has become the dominant form of entertainment in the world as people play through all its imaginative set-pieces, all largely still following what Halliday designed (before he died).

Of course, everyone in the game is playing because somewhere, deep in the game, are three Easter Eggs that will unlock ownership of the OASIS, granting the system to whomever finds it first. Wade, joined by his Online friends Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Aech (Lena Waithe), Sho (Philip Zhao), Daito (Win Morisaki), have to find the Easter Eggs and gain control of the OASIS lest the company gain the keys to their own kingdom and turn it into a corporate wasteland, packed full of ads and micro-transactions that suck the very soul out of the game.

Well... sort of. The thing is, this game already seems like a corporate nightmare the second Wade boots into it the first time. It's a collection of licensed worlds, chock full of pop-culture properties that Halliday was in love with when he grew up, and all of it is already full of micro-transactions ("you want this, get this much coin"), so it's hard to see just how much worse it would be with the company that already runs the game running it even more. The movie never really establishes that fact, beyond a kind of "you can't trust the suits" mentality which only plays if you don't think about it at all.

But then, thinking about any part of this story only pulls you further and further out of the story. Ready Player One is basically Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but set in a video game world (and with slightly less child endangerment). In fact, considering its love of all pop-culture from the 1970s and 1980s, you'd think there would be some reference to Willy Wonka in the movie, but no. Still, in essence, kid with golden ticket has to go find more golden tickets and prove to the creepy purveyor of the factory that he's worthy of taking the reins to the kingdom. And he does this by, what, loving pop-culture and finding stupid and esoteric clues that no sane person would ever design?

Thing about it like this: to solve the first puzzle, a race across a city scape where monsters and mayhem reign and King Kong (literal King Kong) blocks the finish line, Wade watches a scene from Halliday's life (because Halliday apparently recorded his whole life for... reasons?) and see a scene where Halliday says, in normal conversation, "I wish we could just go backwards." That than prompt his to drive backwards from the starting line of the race and unlock a secret path all the way to the end. Firstly, that clue is beyond dumb as it's hardly even a "clue", but secondly, if I were a player in this game I'd be pissed that this was the solution. It's a cheat and involves no skill or respect for the OASIS, it's just a massaging some dead guy's ego because a dumb kid obsessed over his life. Ugh.

All three "clues" in the story at like this, dumb crap that no one in their right mind would be able to figure out, nor should they. It's just stuff strung together for the author (and them the screenwriter) could string together a lot of pop-culture references (from John Hughes movies to The Shining, and then slasher flicks and The Iron Giant, among others). And then we get to a giant climax, where all of the Internet basically comes together to be a force for good and destroy the evil corporate overlord because that's what the Internet does: it can be trusted to unite people to work for their own best interest. Sure.

From start to finish this movie boggled my mind with its stupidity. I had a violently negative reaction to everything going on, as much because the film acted like it was so smart for being all up it's own pop-culture ass, but also because all the characters are written like this is the way it should be. The characters are all shallow, vapid idiots obsessed with pop-culture that they're separated from by a good 80 years. Most of what they love aren't timeless classics but just stuff, stuff that hasn't aged well and most people, even now, don't really care about. But because some Willy Wonka-figure says, "this is the crap I like," they all fall for it as well. No one thinks for themselves or has real opinions, they just keep chasing the clues of some guy that isn't even alive anymore.

Is this what Hollywood thinks geeks are like? Is this what Cline thinks geek culture is all about? I have to think, on both counts, yes. Hell, Cline has now written three books that are all like this. If there's one hope it's that, more and more, people are getting fed up with this view of geek culture; they're all seeing through this stuff-obsessed view of what it means to be a "real geek". Ready Player One gives us a world where griefing teenage edgelords become stuck in a world of trivia and stuff and are somehow glorified for it. The nightmare is that maybe, one day, this is really the case.