Capsule Summary (minimal spoilers):
Ready Player One is a movie based on the book by Ernest Cline. It takes place in the near future, where overcrowding and poverty have a stranglehold on much of the population. Years ago, a brilliant team of programmers created The OASIS, a virtual world that’s mostly video game-based, but has aspects of online social communities, virtual worlds, like Second Life, as well as many other possibilities. The creator of the OASIS passed away a few years ago, and set a challenge to everyone who enters OASIS – be the first to solve three challenges inside, and the you win ownership of the OASIS.
The film focuses on Percival, aka Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a regular young guy who’s trying to solve the challenges. With his friends, they’re all after the same thing, while a company called IOI is using thousands of its employees to do the same thing. The chase is on!
This movie is full of hundreds of references to the ’80s and ’90s. It’s visually exciting, and fun to watch. It is directed by Steven Spielberg, so you know it’s already one level above your standard movie. You will have to watch the movie multiple times to spot all the references, some of which are a bit obscure.
It’s a very entertaining film with a relatively unknown cast, and gives it a fresh appeal that is rare to find these days. Highly recommended!
Main Review:
Percival has studied up everything there is to know about OASIS’ creator, Halliday (Mark Rylance). He believes it’ll give him an edge up on the competition, which isn’t faring much better. Halliday’s co-creator Morrow (Simon Pegg) isn’t really involved in the OASIS much, but is still around. It’s been 5 years since Halliday offered up the challenges, and not a single person’s figured out how to win the first one of the three. He’s teamed up with Aech (name redacted), so they can work on them together. Neither has done the standard thing of joining a clan to pool resources. Along comes Art3mis (name redacted), another loner who has done online tutorials and is a pretty decent player herself. She is a strong enough competitor to spur Percival and Aech to work harder at a solution. Meanwhile, the IOI Coporation is trying to gain control of it all, because, after it all, this is a company worth $500 Billion!
It’s amazing how many references just pass by. Halliday’s coffin was a photon torpedo casing that they used to bury Spock in The Wrath of Khan. Art3mis rides the motorcycle from the anime film Akira. You see plenty of things from science fiction movies and characters from video games. They litter the landscape. Someone spent a lot of time and got a lot of permission to reproduce these things in the film.
I must confess that I haven’t read the book, but I did get a copy and held off until the film was released. I’m sure purists will not be entirely happy with what they see on screen, and I can definitely see things skipped in the storyline to reduce it to fit the 2 hour, 20 minute runtime of the film. Let’s just say that by itself, the story makes a lot of sense if you know video games, but it’s not entirely necessary to know that to enjoy the film.
I wholeheartedly recommend this film, if it’s the sort of thing you would enjoy, I suggest seeing it in the theaters, because there is so much imagery that you really need to see it big.