Ready Player One

“Does it look like I’m trying too hard?”
“Yes, listen to yourself.”

Perspective is everything and Ready Player One is just a sad sight. If you’re wondering what trying too hard looks like, Spielberg’s long-awaited return to the sci-fi genre, Ready Player One, is the cinematic equivalent of exactly that. Ready Player One is a celebration of pop culture and human imagination that lacks any imagination in itself.

It would almost be funny, if it wasn’t so infuriating, that Steven Spielberg managed to combine possibly every annoying thing about male-centric nerd culture into two and a half hours of lifeless dialogue and mind-numbing action sequences. The narrative unfolds in the blandest fashion possible — white nerdy male hero saves the world and gets the girl.

The sense of adventure we have come to expect from Spielberg movies is nowhere to be found. The world-building is so carelessly done that it’s hard to buy into any of the drama due to lack of tension between the real world and the Oasis. Spielberg never told us whether activities in the Oasis have any impacts on the real world. When the point of view switches back to the real world and you see people on the streets wobbling back and forth with their headsets on, you’ll realize how pointless it all is. It’s the absurdity of every online argument ever, epitomized. And if he can’t tell us why the Oasis is so important to the real world, why not destroy it altogether?

The writers made sure to cram in easter eggs of almost all of 80s pop culture, but they have little to do with the context. It feels more like a parade of knowledge, bloated with self-aggrandisement, rather than an expression of genuine passion. The film’s strange notion that somehow we are supposed to take the hero’s extensive pop culture knowledge as a emblem of honour is just laughable.

If Ready Player One is intended to be a cautionary tale, then it certainly did its job. Because if that’s a glimpse into the future ahead of us, it’s a future I want no part of. I get it, seeing your favourite robots and monsters fight each other on the big screen is cool, but to call that a good story? No, thank you.

(Originally posted on 1 Apr 2018 @projectunwrapped)