Ready Player One review

"Come with me / And you'll be / In a world of pure imagination". So goes Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory's "Pure Imagination", a version of which scored the first trailers for Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One and promised an imagination fuelled adventure in the process - a promise only reinforced by main character Wade Watts' description of The Oasis (a virtual reality that most of the population of Earth spend the bulk of their time in 2045) as a world where "the limits of reality are your own imagination". So with that in mind, how is it that Ready Player One has ended up being one of the most deeply unimaginative and creatively bankrupt films I've even seen?

The answer is simple but depressing: it's a film that seems to be operating under the wild misconception that grouping a lot of recognisable things created by other people's imagination under one roof counts as using your own. It doesn't, obviously, and yet it's so busy doing this throughout that it forgets to do much of anything else, meaning that while those looking for a seemingly never ending parade of pop culture references presented to the audience with all the intelligence, elegance and wit as an episode of The Big Bang Theory are in luck, those looking for an engaging story or interesting characters or... well, a real movie, are going to end up feeling more than just a little bored and frustrated with a film that simply doesn't even seem to be trying.

The story, itself little more than an excuse for a handful of visually extravagant but ultimately pretty vapid action sequences, sees various groups searching for an Easter Egg that will give them control over the Oasis following the death of James Halliday, its creator. One of these groups is led by Wade Watts (in-game name Parzival), whose love for the Oasis and its creator is seemingly endless; another is led by Innovative Online Industries CEO Nolan Sorrento, whose only interest in controlling the Oasis comes from how much money could be made through introducing targeted advertisements, pay to win micro-transactions and differently priced membership tiers.

There's a half-hearted critique of capitalism in there that Ready Player One has all but completely chickened out of by the time the credits roll, but beyond that? It's effectively just a version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" updated for a post-Internet world, one in which Willy Wonka is dead, the potential heirs to the throne know they're being tested, and John Cadbury is on the tour alongside the children. In fairness it's a fine, simple structure to hang a film around - but the key to unlocking that sentence is that other stuff needs to be hung around it, which ignoring the aforementioned obnoxious pop culture references, Ready Player One entirely fails to do. Instead, we're left with nothing but cookie-cutter characters, embarrassing dialogue ("A fanboy can always spot a hater" - shudder), a plot you've seen a million times before, and actions sequences that are both far too visually busy for their own good and impossible to get caught up in thanks to the aforementioned issues with character and story, resulting in a film that left me by and large bored out of my mind.

I mean, where's the sense of wonder that usually accompanies this kind of Steven Spielberg movie? Where's the heart and soul he's known for, the earnest sentimentality that virtually defines his filmography? Other than one short scene towards the end, they're entirely missing, which means that if not for his name in the credits it would be pretty difficult to identify this as being directed by arguably one of the greatest American directors working today. Instead, it's a bland, unartistic and seemingly entirely passionless affair, the kind of film that feels like it should've been released for free on the Internet as part of a viral marketing campaign for a terrible free to play game rather than a huge piece of would-be blockbuster cinema.

And I can almost see some of you who have already watched Ready Player One sitting there, shaking your heads and silently mouthing the words "but I enjoyed it", and you know what? That's fine. Hell, it's downright understandable - I don't expect many to share my opinion here, mainly because the moment to moment filmmaking of Ready Player One is passable at its very worst and actually pretty nifty at its best, by and large lacking the kind of obvious hallmarks that most people use to identify if a film is any good or not. But is there any real difference between Ready Player One's core appeal, and me simply sticking a picture of Zelda under this paragraph?

I don't think so, and that's the whole problem. It might seem fairly harmless, but imagine if every big film had the same lack of respect for its audiences intelligence, trying to skate by purely through tickling the stupid part of your brain that gets excited when it sees something it recognises. We'd quickly find ourselves in a completely stagnant cultural landscape, and while that might've made for an slyly subversive subplot in a significantly more interesting and self-aware version of Ready Player One, it's not a future I particularly want to experience. It's the cinematic equivalent of empty calories, filling you up without offering anything of real value, and while that might satisfy in the moment you have to be able to recognise that it's simply not good for you.

And the message behind all this lazy nostalgia bait? It's not intelligence or teamwork or compassion that matters, but how much meaningless trivia you've managed to commit to memory. It's Gatekeeping: The Movie, pandering to the worst kind of "oh, you like Star Wars? Name everyone who worked on the Death Star" nerd in the process, and it's deeply embarrassing to sit there and see that kind of knowledge treated as worthwhile. Fact is, Wade Watts would be an unbearable, boring asshole in real life, and I really don't have much patience for a film that goes out of its way to glorify that kind of person, especially when they already don't need the encouragement.

But it's the shameless, cynical hypocrisy of Ready Player One that rankles the most. Ultimately, what we have here is a film that pays lip service to the power of imagination while refusing to use it's own, a celebration of pop culture that contributes nothing to it, and an ode to the importance of stories that doesn't have anything new to say. Yes, it probably is the best possible version of itself - but at a certain point we have to look beyond its surface level sheen and realise that what it is simply isn't any good. A bad film made well is still a bad film, after all.

★☆☆☆☆
1 star