review: Ready Player One

It's almost pointless to review Ready Player One, Ernest Cline and Steven Spielberg's loving tribute to popular culture. Those who think it looks cool are bound to see it and enjoy it, and those who think it looks like a flashy, loud, substanceless mess are going to steer clear.

If you're on the edge, let me say, it is a very good movie. Yes, there were times when I felt uncomfortable with its over-reliance on pop culture. But I'm going to draw a distinction here.

Family Guy is chock-full of pop culture references. I am not a fan. In my (admittedly limited) viewing experience, nine times out of ten, Family Guy's idea of humor is "look, we just made a random pop culture reference!" without any attempt at creativity, insight into the reference itself, or even cohesion with the scene or storyline. To the writers of that show, the fact that they made the reference itself should be enough to get a laugh. I think of such laughter as mere "laughter of recognition." You laugh only because you delight in knowing the reference, but there's rarely anything actually funny happening on the screen.

Ready Player One usually doesn't go for laughs, but its difference in how it treats its many, many pop culture references is that those references are used for flavor. The references are so constant -- sometimes multiple references in just a single screen shot -- that it's easy to mistakenly assume that the movie is dependent on them. They're not. For the most part, this movie (I understand this probably isn't true of the book) could actually remove the specific references and plug in generic names and concepts, and the main storyline would hold. Yes, you would lose the fun of "oh, look, it's [fill in the blank]!," which is a great deal of this movie's appeal, but the story would hold.

The story is set in a future in which most of the world lives in over-crowded poverty, making escapism more in demand than ever before. The vast majority of people find that escape in the Oasis, a virtual reality world in which more or less anything is possible. You can be the Iron Giant, or play a life-size version of 80s Atari games, or do something absolutely ridiculous, like, to quote one example, "climb Mount Everest -- with Batman."

The Oasis and the people who manage it (not to mention the makers of Ready Player One itself) seem to have somehow eliminated the issue of copyright infringement; Warner Bros. cartoon characters, popular horror film villains, and random film and television icons interact freely within the Oasis.

The story concerns a race to find/ solve a series of clues hidden inside the Oasis by its late designer, James Halliday (Mark Rylance). Whoever first solves the entire series of clues not only inherits a fortune from Halliday's estate, but also inherits sole ownership and control over the Oasis.

You can tell the good guys from the bad guys based on cliches: The good guys are brave and plucky, and must fight against odds and poverty, while the villains are rich and ruthless and care only about profit. I say this not with complaint; they're cliches because they work. I'm not sure if I would enjoy a movie in which the hero is a corporate CEO out to crush a poor teenage boy, and thankfully, Ready Player One doesn't force such rule-bending on its audience.

I want to address two things in this review: First, there's the extended sequence in which the main characters find themselves at the Overlook Hotel, interacting with scenes from The Shining. It seems an oddly random choice to devote so much screen time to this particular bit of pop culture, and it's almost like a mini-movie unto itself. I don't know how much of this sequence is CGI used to insert the new characters into actual 1980 footage and how much of it is a result of production design lovingly re-creating every detail of the Overlook (right down to the look of early 80s cinematography), but this is a masterful sequence.

Second, I want to address the heaps of criticism that have been thrown at the movie for its perceived shallowness. Even Spielberg himself publicly stopped just short of apology, making a distinction between this being a movie (as in popcorn fluff) as opposed to a film (as in a serious work of art). I've always had a pet peeve about filmmakers apologizing for their own work. It strikes me as hypocritical, as if they're anticipating or reacting to criticism and saying, "hey, I'm not crazy about it either!" In this particular case, apologism is an insult to the many people who did such a great job on this film -- oh, I'm sorry, I guess I mean "movie." The characters are likable, the special effects are fantastic, but what really impressed me was the production/ set design. It goes beyond the standard Hollywood professionalism, and well into the realm of "inspired." From the multi-level mobile homes that make up the "Stacks" of future Columbus, Ohio, to the slightly different styles of clutter* in each of the characters' homes, every frame of this is -- yes, Mr. Spielberg, it's true, even if you are too scared to admit it -- a work of art.

*side-note: I seem to have a highly niched respect for this concept of "individualized clutter"; I remember praising Only Lovers Left Alive for the same thing. But there's a reason for this. Far too often, Hollywood production designers think, "okay, 'clutter,'" throw a bunch of loose papers and fast food wrappers onto the set, and call it a day. Yes, that works, but it's neither inspired nor detail-oriented -- nor even realistic. If you examine anyone's particular clutter, you'll see signs of that person's particular habits, interests, and culture. It's a detail that is often over-looked by both makers and viewers of Hollywood movies. But the people who made Only Lovers Left Alive and Ready Player One get it.