"Ready Player One"

DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN-DUN-BAH-DUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM! It’s a hard knock life for Wade, it’s a hard knock life for Wade, instead of kisses he gets kicked, instead of treated, he gets tricked, it’s a hard knock life.

Game-changing director Steven Spielberg takes a whack at the “taking a source material few people, or at least me, ever heard of and turning it into a blockbuster” bandwagon, and he almost does it. I will tell you this is the most entertaining film he has produced in years. And not just because I was psyched by the Easter eggs you guys talked about, the Iron Giant, the DeLorean, but it was a story that was compelling to make want to watch to the end.

But there is a catch.

The movie started off very bleak, which it kind of had to. They live in the future we are rapidly approaching, and the only way out is a treasure trove of eighties pop culture. Wade meets a mysterious avatar known as Art3mis, and from there the roller coaster starts climbing. She says Halliday hates rules. James Halliday is the creator of the virtual world, OASIS, and when he died he left his avatar up for grabs in which players had to find three keys to unlocking his avatar and his virtual riches. Remembering Halliday hated rules Wade looks into the Halliday Journals, the college library-like archive of everything Halliday held dear. There he hears Halliday casually say, “What if we just go back really fast, like put the pedal to the metal?” using this train of thought, Wade beats the Super hard Mario Kart race by driving backwards into the wall and under the track, getting past Kong and getting the first key. Wade, Art3mis, and their friends, Aech, Daito, and Sho, each get a key, and unofficially band together to search for the next key. Along the way, they match wits with IOI, a competitive team bent on winning the OASIS led by Nolan Sorrento. Wade and his team journey into the Overlook Hotel and discover the second key. This scene, however, serves a different purpose as Aech was the literal representation of people who have not seen The Shining, including myself. He follows the scary ass twins into the bloody elevators and is attacked by a naked zombie lady, though I'm sure that was there to troll us.

I’m getting off the subject. After the retrieval of the second key, the IOI cracked the final rhyme and put a shield up around the final key, brought to you today by T.J. Miller. This is where I think the ride loses its momentum. Throughout the movie, Wade and his avatar are heralded as heroes for finding the keys, which thirty years ago would have the response. Today, he would have been hunted down for the keys. But he uses his newfound fame to rally up an army of mindless goggle-wearing slaves to battle Sorrento and his IOI to get the last key, which is playing the Atari 2600 game, Adventure. I forget where else I saw this, but I feel we are approaching a trend in which the fate of the futuristic world relies on something from the past. In this case, the existence of virtual reality, being in the hands of greedy government officials, is in the hands of an eighties gaming system. I’m sorry, but that is a sh*tty way to end a story.

The movie plays with the fact that fantasy differs from reality, especially when IOI started playing dirty, Wade and his friends had to ditch their avatars and find each other in the real world, revealing that Aech is a girl, and Sho is eleven years old. And even Halliday admits to Wade that reality is the only thing that’s real, and Wade reveals that Halliday’s biggest regret was losing his best friend.

Here are some things in the movie that made sense. iR0k is voiced by a T.J. Miller-type gamer who has built an arsenal of weapons and tricks of the trade; I think that was meant to throw us off by making us think he is going to speak in a Cave of Wonders-like voice, but instead, it’s Weasel.

I was expecting Halliday to Ben Kingsley himself, from Ender’s Game, and actually be alive. He was, but only in the game.

Here are some things in the movie that don’t make any sense. Wade’s parents are dead. We don’t know why or how. He is stuck with his Miss Alice Hannigan, whom he avenges for her for some reason after she is killed.

The OASIS is available for everyone in the world, and the people who Wade considers his friends all happen to live in the same city he does. Yay, whoo.

Halliday is dead. We don’t know why or how. Even during his conversation with Wade, he never mentions what he died of. If you pause, you can read Kira’s obituary, and she died of cancer. Maybe he did too? Or perhaps he committed suicide. What if the suicide is triggered by someone winning his fortune? Then that means he would have been on life support for five years.

Wade’s car being the DeLorean, I think, is a middle finger to us all. Oh, you saw it in the trailer? Well, guess what? It’s Wade car! Yeah!

When Wade wins the OASIS, he rearranges to get people to wane off of it by closing it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fine, but what does that do for them in the sh*tty world they still have to live in? The water isn’t clean, the air isn’t clean, and the dirt isn’t clean.

I feel Wade and Art3mis’ relationship was rushed in the end. They only kissed because the script said they had to. They never really blossomed. If Ernest Cline and Zak Penn are indeed making a sequel to the book and the movie, can you guys focus on their relationship? I still want to see where it goes.

I will end on some lighter things. The four-armed guy getting devoured by the alien really was funny. I don’t condone the use of the F-bomb,  let alone any profanity, in a PG-13 movie, since many films are now geared towards children, but “It’s f*cking Chucky” was probably the best use of it ever.

I hope you liked this. Be sure to subscribe and leave a comment about what you thought or if you want to recommend a movie for me to review. Thank you for reading. I'll return next week with another movie. See you then.

Released on March 29, 2018
Rating: PG-13
Stars: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn
Director: Steven Spielberg

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 72% Certified Fresh
IMDb Score: 7.6/10

Awards
Academy Awards

• Best Visual Effects Roger Guyett, Grady Cofer, Matthew E. Butler & David Shirk - Nominated

(Click here to view more awards for "Ready Player One".)

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Screen Junkies - Honest Trailers - Ready Player One
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