Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One sets a broken world against a shiny one and asks which the audience would choose. The answer, in 2018, was the shiny one.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Wade Watts and the OASIS
The film lands in a dystopian 2045, where much of humanity escapes into the OASIS, a virtual reality entertainment universe built by James Halliday and Ogden Morrow of Gregarious Games. Wade Watts, a teenage orphan in Columbus, Ohio, lives in stacked trailers called “the Stacks.” He plays as Parzival, a name pulled from Percival of Arthurian legend.
When Halliday dies, his avatar Anorak announces a contest. Whoever finds the golden Easter egg wins ownership of the OASIS outright. The egg sits behind a gate that needs three keys, each earned through a challenge. The hunters call themselves Gunters.
Sorrento and the Sixers
Nolan Sorrento, CEO of Innovative Online Industries, wants the OASIS for himself, and he wants to load it with intrusive online advertising. He runs an army of indentured servants and employees called “Sixers” at the hunt. He also hires the mercenary i-R0k to learn Wade’s real name.
The first challenge is a race nobody can win. Wade wins it by driving backward, taking the Copper Key from Anorak. Art3mis, Aech, Daito and Sho finish afterward. The scoreboard names them the High-5.
A Cast Built for Two Worlds
The cast does the heavy lifting of selling both halves of the story.
- Tye Sheridan as Wade Watts / Parzival, a Gunter who wants out of the Stacks
- Olivia Cooke as Samantha Cook / Art3mis, a pink-skinned, pink-haired avatar named for Artemis
- Ben Mendelsohn as Nolan Sorrento, the IOI chief chasing full control
- Lena Waithe as Helen Harris / Aech, a mechanic whose avatar is a male cyborg
- Mark Rylance as James Halliday / Anorak, the dead co-creator
- Simon Pegg as Ogden Morrow / the Curator, who worries about unhealthy dependency on the game
Halliday’s Journals and the Pop-Culture Pile
Wade visits Halliday’s Journals, a simulated archive run by the Curator. There he and Art3mis learn Halliday once dated Morrow’s wife, Karen “Kira” Underwood. They go to the Distracted Globe night club for clues, where Wade confesses his love and his real name.
The film is stuffed with references — Back to the Future, The Iron Giant, The Shining, King Kong, Godzilla. Spielberg directs with a steady hand, and the visual effects houses Industrial Light & Magic, Digital Domain and Territory Studio keep the OASIS legible.
What the Film Actually Argues
Ready Player One premiered at South by Southwest on March 11, 2018, and Warner Bros. released it in the United States on March 29. It runs 140 minutes. The tagline promises “A better reality awaits.”
That promise is the film’s problem. The real world here is poverty, debt and stacked trailers; the OASIS is where anyone can be anyone. Spielberg knows the escape is a trap, but he makes the trap gorgeous, and the movie never quite reckons with how good it feels to live there. The pop-culture references are the noise. The dependency Pegg’s Morrow warns about is the actual subject, and the film treats it as a punchline more often than a warning.
It is a well-built adventure with a hollow center, and the hollow center is the point it keeps declining to make.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
