Honest Movie Review: Ready Player One

Years ago I picked up the book for Ready Player One, I got about six pages in and then threw it away. It's not because I'm not a gamer, not into scifi, or not into pop culture, the book just felt very dry. On the other hand the movie blew me away.

Ready Player One was made for me, I caught the latter end of Atari, love movies, play video games, am white as fuck. I think a lot of people like me realised this early one when the trailers packed as many pop culture cameos in as possible.

Ready Player One is a movie about fan ownership of pop culture, it’s about escapism, it’s about archtypical Steven Spielberg kids fighting EA from putting pop ups into their simulated lives. The stakes don’t seem high, but not every story needs to be about destroying the real world. Spielberg is back on form with this film, for a man verging on about a million years old he brings the dynamism and energy to a film that almost never slows in pace. This is a kids adventure film with enough good humour, fun, and references to keep all the 30 somethings in the theatre entertained the whole way.

T.J. Miller does a stand out job bringing humour into the film as an animated Reaper-like character who plays one of the main bad guys. His jokes always land, and having an antognist that doesn’t really give a shit, while also caring deeply about the world he inhabits is refreshing.

The movie follows Tye Sheridan as some everyman white kid who just doesn’t want to live in the shitty real world and instead spends most of it in a simulated world called the Oasis. He’s part of a small group of people who are trying to crack the mystery left behind the OASIS’s creator. Anyone who gets to the bottom of the mystery will be handed the keys to the kingdom, the stock options of the company worth a trillion dollars, and are allowed to do whatever they like with the Oasis.

Of course an evil corporation wanting to aggressively monetize the platform is also trying to bruteforce the mystery by sending 9 to 5 worker slaves into the Oasis en mass, so the kids always have a healthy number of expendable opponents to take out.

I honestly went in quietly hopeful for the film, and by the time I walked out of the theatre I was a little embarrassed and surprised to say I really liked it. It’s a cool film.

My cohort Matt who watched it with my commented that “I cringed no more than I do in other movies. I feel like if you’re wondering whether or not you want to see it, that line is important”.

I seriously recommend it.