"Ready Player One" tries hard to find an audience
I wondered if it was on purpose that a movie centered entirely around finding an Easter egg in a video game was released on Easter weekend. Maybe the production company (or whoever makes release date decisions) thought, “Kids will love the irony!”
Except kids don’t know what irony is, they don’t understand any of the pop culture references in this film, and their parents didn’t take them to see it anyway.
Ready Player One, to me, was fantastic, but it seems a very slim age group will have understood and enjoyed two hours of nostalgic pop culture references, video game character cameos and a young, slightly underdeveloped cast.
The film is based on the Best-Selling book by Ernest Cline and follows the quest of Wade Watts (also known by his gamertag “Parzival”) as he and his friends try to find the Easter egg hidden in the world’s favorite virtual reality escape, the Oasis.
See, in 2044 the real world sucks. More people than ever are living in poverty due to an international energy crisis, some even working their lives away in virtual reality style chain gangs to repay real world debt. Our protagonist Wade is no different and lives in Cleveland, Ohio in what is known as “The Stacks”, which is a neighborhood of trailer homes stacked twenty trailers high.
He, and everyone else in the world, fill their days escaping into the Oasis, a virtual reality video game world where you can be anyone or anything and do anything, anywhere just by placing a visor over your eyes. Play live-action Halo in a haptic bodysuit that allows you to feel every shot you take, participate in coin-building slasher games, or take a quick trip to the vacation planet, where you can lay on the beach, snow ski, or climb Mount Everest… with Batman.
But the Oasis isn’t just an escape, but a world of opportunity for the one lucky individual, or clan of gamers who’ve banded together in the hunt, who can find the Oasis’ creator James Halliday’s Easter egg. After his death rocks the world, Halliday announces in his will to the public that he has hidden an Easter egg in the game and whoever finds it will inherit his entire fortune and control of the Oasis.
Ready Player One did well at the box office, raking in $41.2 million in the three-day opening weekend here in the states and pulling $128 million overseas, proving that Steven Spielberg can still pull off a blockbuster hit, ten years after his last box office boom in 2008 with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
This film does so many things right. The casting of Tye Sheridan as Parzival and Olivia Cooke as Art3mis was a solid choice, especially putting Cooke at the helm of such a badass feminine character. Sheridan is easy to root for, whether he’s portraying Wade, the quiet kid who lives with his unfit aunt, or trying to crack Halliday’s clues in the Oasis. The supporting cast was a bit lackluster, but all young so there’s hope for them yet.
My only issue with the film is that it seems the audience that it was made for is unclear to just about everybody. To say this film is brimming with pop culture references is an understatement.
It’d be better to say, this film is made up entirely of pop culture references, the majority of them being references to Halliday’s childhood obsession with the ‘80s and ‘90s, and therefore alienating everyone under the age of 25. People my age and older are the ones who will find the pop culture laden script nostalgic and enjoyable, but children, if they’re even brought to this movie by their parents, won’t have a clue what the DeLorean is, who Bill and Ted are, or what the hell Adventure for Atari is.
Despite the fact that the audience is a bit hazy, Ready Player One has an awful lot to say about humanity’s current obsession with screens, video games, and pursuing virtual reality. Let’s just hope that as we get closer to escaping into a virtual world, we don’t forget to take care of the real one we actually live in.