Video review: "Ready Player One"

Many of us are living significant chunks of our lives inside virtual spaces these days, probably without even noticing. Example: My son and I have been co-playing a fantasy war game on our phones, bonding over downing gruesome beasties and recruiting an especially powerful new hero. I’d defy anyone to label it anything other than a positive shared experience.

But there is a downside to constructed realities in general and video games specifically, one that “Ready Player One” explores in the form of a dystopian future where most of the important reactions happen inside the Oasis, a virtual reality where people can pretend to be just about anything.

Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is a high school senior living in poverty -- both in the real world, where he resides in stacks of trailer homes, and in the Oasis where he plays a low-level nobody named Parzival. But there is a grand contest going on, put on by the deceased co-creator of this world, and the winner gets to control the entire Oasis.

Needless to say, some corporate bad guys are gaming the game to try to get an advantage. Ben Mendelsohn plays the CEO of a conglomerate that is flooding the system with anonymous players called Sixers all working in conjunction to win the booty. But the whole world is upended when humble Parzival manages to unlock the first door.

Soon an all-out war is brewing. Wade finds allies in Aech (Lena Waithe), his longtime friend and running buddy, as well as Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), a legendary player that he has been harboring a crush on. All the legions will gather to do battle.

Like a lot of director Steven Spielberg’s more popcorn-y movies, “Ready Player One” is a visually dazzling picture that’s a lot of fun, but also hides some hefty themes just under the surface.

In the Oasis people can do stuff that’s straight out of a 14-year-old’s daydream -- Parzival races the DeLorean from “Back to the Future” in a smash-and-dash race, for instance. But they also spend much of their lives wearing VR headsets and suits, eschewing the dank corporeal world for one filled with pleasures and eye candy. I don’t think it’s accidental that whenever the filmmakers pull us out of the Oasis to see what’s going on in the RL (real life), the movie’s energy takes a dip.

Based on the novel by Ernest Cline, who co-wrote the script with Zak Penn, “Ready Player One” is an entertaining movie that also shows us the dark side of the entertainment machine.

Video extras are decent, though not as lavish as you’d expect from a big-budget Spielberg picture. They consist of six making-of documentary shorts:

• “Game Changer: Cracking the Code”
• “Effects for the Brave New World”
• “Level Up: Sound for the Future”
• “High Score: Endgame”
• “Ernie & Tye’s Excellent Adventure”
• “The ‘80s: You’re the Inspiration”

Movie:



Extras:

Review: "Ready Player One"

I’ve been playing video games for 40 years, so it’s no surprise I would truly dig a book that’s about them, and the movie they made of the book -- from director Steven Spielberg, no less, a filmmaker who’s always been plugged into the pop culture of the day.

The Oasis in “Ready Player One” is essentially every video game rolled into one. Based on the novel by Ernest Cline, who co-wrote the screenplay with Zak Penn, the story is set in a dystopian future in the year 2045, where life on Earth is hell and all meaningful interactions take place in the virtual world of the Oasis. People wear VR goggles, gloves and other gear to act out their dreams.

Think of it as Star Trek, Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft all rolled into one -- along with every creature or gadget from every science fiction/fantasy film ever made.

There, you can do almost anything you can dream of: live as an 8-foot-tall ogre cyborg, drive the DeLorean from the “Back to the Future” movies… even fall in love.

But the Oasis has a downside. It’s become the center of world economy, which means it’s a ripe target for those who would exploit it for their own gain, like Innovative Online Industries, or IOI. They’re swarming the grid with their drone-like army of avatars, known as Sixers, to solve the riddles left by creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance) after this death, which will lead the finder of three keys to the mother of all Easter Eggs.

The prize? Nothing less than control of the Oasis itself.

Though it differs from the book in myriad ways, small and huge, “Ready Player One” is still a dazzlingly entertaining movie that also nudges its audience to consider the weight of their own existence in RL (gamer lingo for “real life”). As fantastical as this world is, we’re left with the conclusion that nobody should spend all their time wrapped up in a comfortable cocoon spun out of technology.

The story brings together a band of young freedom fighters waging war against the tyranny of IOI and its conniving leader, Nathan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn). To get a flavor of his M.O., in one scene Sorrento cheerfully informs his corporate board that once they take over the Oasis, they believe they can fill players’ visual fields with advertising up to 80% “before inducing seizures.”

Chief among the rebels is Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a humble teenager who goes by the handle Parzival in the Oasis, taking the form of an androgynous, albino-haired punk. His best friend is Aech (pronounced “H”), the aforementioned ogre, who’s the fun-loving, self-assured yin to Parzival’s dweeby yang.

The most famous “Sixer Fixer” in the Oasis is Art3mis, an elf-like warrior played by Olivia Cooke. Parzival and Aech soon join forces with her, with Wade predictably falling in love with the avatar of someone who, as Aech points out, could very well by a 300-pound dude from Detroit.

Like James Cameron’s “Avatar,” most of the prime action in the movie plays out in a CGI dreamscape, punctuated by occasional returns to the “real” world, which is dank and grim. There’s so much to see and take in, and so many little Easter eggs and pop culture references, you’d have to rewind and freeze-frame the movie to catch them all.

(My personal favorite: the chant used for an important spell is the same used in 1981’s “Excalibur.”)

There’s no way the filmmakers could have obtained the intellectual rights to all the bits of pop culture stuffed into Cline's book, most of it hearkening back to the 1980s and '90s, so they swap them out with other ones, or invent new stuff entirely. I was a little bummed we didn’t get to see Ultraman make a pivotal appearance, though his replacement isn’t exactly mincemeat.

Cline and Penn also significantly alter and truncate the actual quest line in the book, making the three keys themselves the object rather than the gates they open. (Probably a wise choice, as it could easily have pushed an already long movie to the three-hour mark.)

For example, things start off with a slam-bang road race, rather than a very RPG (role-playing game) descent into a classic D&D module that must seem like dim history to Millennials.

“Ready Player One” is part computer-generated thrill ride, part Luddite warning, and all Spielbergian nostalgia adventure. Insert your quarter -- er, about 40-50 of them, at today’s ticket prices -- and get ready for a gleeful romp in the ultimate video game playground.

Eight for '18: Year in film preview

I'm changing things up this year by presenting a truncated year in film preview, rather than the comprehensive one I usually do. I'm doing this for a couple of reasons:

• I'm busy as sh*t.
• There are literally six million 2018 movie previews out there, and I'd rather do my own thing than join the content farm lemmings.

So I present "Eight for '18" -- the eight films I'm most anticipating this year. Please note, these are the flicks I am looking forward to, not necessarily what would come up under a "most anticipated" poll. So don't be shocked because you don't see "Avengers: Infinity War" or some of the other big titles out there.

(Also, please note I left "Black Panther" off because it's coming out in just a couple of weeks, and I wanted to give readers more of a look further down the road. Suffice it to say I'm also stoked about that one. The early word on it has been nigh-orgiastic fervor, which is exciting but also... disturbing.)

In chronological order:

Isle of Dogs

March 23

I've been very up and down on the films of Wes Anderson -- you would literally have to threaten me with the removal of a key body part to get me to watch "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" again -- but I absolutely adored his foray into stop-motion animation, "Fantastic Mr. Fox." He's back with this Japanese-inspired tale of a boy searching for his dog in the secret land of exiled canines that includes voices by W.A. regular Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton as well as Scarlett Johansson and Bryan Cranston.

Pacific Rim Uprising

March 23

What?? Two of my favorite picks debuting on the same day?!? Hopefully they won't cancel each other out at the box office. Guillermo del Toro isn't at the helm, which is concerning. But John Boyega -- using his actual British accent! -- stars as the son of Stacker Pentecost, who teams up with Mako Mori to lead a new generation of pilots of skyscraper-sized robots to take on a new threat of Kaiju monsters.

Ready Player One

March 30

Steven Spielberg tackles the dense, page-turning sci-fi novel about a dystopian future in which everyone is connected (and imprisoned) by technology, existing mostly in a Matrix-like video game universe called the Oasis. It's like World of Warcraft, but, f'reals. It's sure to be visually stunning, as well as an amusement ride of '80s pop culture references for tickle Gen X erogenous zones. I'll just be curious to see how they locked down the intellectual property rights to all the stuff in the book. If I don't get to see Ultraman blasting spaceships out of the sky...

Solo: A Star Wars Story

May 25

The production on this Star Wars prequel looking at the pre-Rebellion life of Han Solo got off to a famously rough start, with the original directors departing the project in favor of Ron Howard. Can Alden Ehrenreich pull off a Harrison Ford impression? He was the best thing about the underwhelming "Hail, Caesar!" as a dimwitted cowboy star, so fingers crossed. Also excited about Donald Glover a s a young Lando Calrissian. I personally am holding out for the big-screen adaptation of "Lando Calrissian and the StarCave of ThonBoka."

The Incredibles 

June 15

It's interesting that for yours Pixar Animation held off on making any sequels outside the "Toy Story" universe, even though one -- the story of an entire family of super-heroes -- seemed most primed for sequelization. Writer/director Brad Bird is back in the hot seat, and the story is very hush-hush, other than Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) is off saving the world while Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) is left to babysit pint-sized firecracker Jack-Jack. No word on who the new villain(s) is/are, but I'd guess either Bob Odenkirk or Jonathan Banks will provide the cackle.

Venom

Oct. 5

Isn't about time we got an entire film devoted to a super-villain instead of just another do-gooder? Venom made an appearance in the (awful) "Spider-Man 3," a strange alien symbiote that bonded with the web-slinger before turning evil. Again, the plot is very secret, but reportedly new Spidey Tom Holland turns up. Most exciting: Tom Hardy hisself plays Eddie Brock, the scummy dude who gets turned into Venom.

First Man

Oct. 12

One of America's quietest heroes, astronaut pioneer Neil Armstrong, gets his own biopic starring Ryan Gosling. Not much information available beyond that -- or even a production still -- but here's all I need to know: it's directed by Damien Chazelle ("Whiplash," "La La Land.")

X-Men: Dark Phoenix

Nov. 2

Years ago I interviewed original Jean Grey actress Famke Janssen, and she expressed her regret that they were pulling the plug on the first generation of X-Men movies before they got to explore what many consider one of the greatest story arcs in comics history, the Dark Phoenix saga. Now the franchise is finally going in that direction with Sophie Turner in the lead role, as the psychic/telepath is transformed into the most malevolent force in the universe. Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult and James McAvoy reprise their roles, with Jessica Chastain taking on a mystery part known only as "Smith."