Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” is not a video-game-centered
dystopian teen adventure but a horror film, a movie of spiritual zombies
whose souls have been consumed by the makers of generations of official
cultural product and regurgitated in the form of pop nostalgia. The
movie, framed as a story of resistance to corporate tyranny, is actually
a tale of tyranny perpetuated by a cheerfully totalitarian predator who
indoctrinates his victims by amusing them to death—and the movie’s
stifled horror is doubled by Spielberg’s obliviousness to it.
Set in 2045, “Ready Player One” follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), an
orphaned teen-ager who lives with his aunt and her abusive boyfriend in
a poor neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, known as the Stacks. Like
everyone else, Wade uses OASIS, a virtual-reality program that serves as
the fundamental form of entertainment and also as a form of business,
because the virtual money that’s won or lost there is credited to or
debited from the players’ actual bank accounts. Wade is one of the many,
likely millions, who take part in a new game for earnest stakes: a
competition to find three Easter eggs, or embedded tricks, in a virtual
game.
That game-within-a-game is the posthumous legacy of the inventor and
founder of OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), who left a video that
was released after his death. In it, he stipulates that whoever solves
the three puzzles will win an unmatched prize: possession and control of OASIS, and possession of his half-trillion-dollar fortune. Halliday was
more than a creator of a dominant pop-culture phenomenon: he was also a
pop-culture fanatic himself, whose fandom was centered on the late
seventies through the early nineties, and he makes the solution to his puzzles pivot on pop iconography and
trivia of that time (as well as on knowledge of one other area of
arcana, namely, an obsession with Halliday’s own life story). And that’s
where Wade—competing in the guise of his V.R. avatar, Parzival—reigns
supreme: he’s a seventies-through-nineties pop-movie and video-game
obsessive whose obsession also ranges to the persona of Halliday and
the story of the creator’s life.
Wade’s real life is lonesome and scary; it’s only in OASIS that he has
something like a social life. There, as Parzival, he has a virtual best friend and gaming sidekick named Aech
(pronounced “H”), who is a hulking mechanical genius who can not only fix
virtual vehicles with the twist of a wrench but also has a workshop in
which he re-creates, large scale, the figures and gizmos of eighties and
nineties movies. (Aech’s pièce de résistance is a massive reconstruction of
the Iron Giant.) In the midst of a high-speed race through a virtual New
York—in which the ultimate obstacle proves to be King Kong—Parzival
meets and befriends another top-flight competitor named Artemis, and
romance shyly blooms between them. Artemis, in real life, is a young
woman named Samantha (played by Olivia Cooke); Aech turns out to also be
the avatar for a woman, Helen (Lena Waithe). She, Samantha, and Wade
team up with two other online warriors to attempt to win the game.
Their main rival for the supreme prize is the evil corporate overlord
Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who runs Innovative Online Industries
(I.O.I.) and wants to take over OASIS for power and wealth (including
filling its virtual spaces with advertisements). And Sorrento has help:
gamers who lose their virtual money are held in his real-life debtors’
prison (or “loyalty center”), where they’re forced to do V.R. work on
his behalf in OASIS, and other pop-culture prodigies are working
overtime in his back room to feed him the profitable trivia of which
he’s ignorant.
Halliday, himself a child of the eighties and nineties, drags his childhood obsessions a half-century ahead and transforms them into the
core of mid-twenty-first-century pop culture. The dozens, maybe
hundreds, of pop references built into “Ready Player One” whiz by with
genial winks or lumber through with a bigfoot dominance (as in an entire
sequence that pivots on a reënactment of “The Shining,” which reduces it
to a few goofball theme-park memes), creating a pathetic, synthetic echo
effect—a paradise of nerd trends that reinforces a narrow view of the
late twentieth century centered not on what mattered but on what sold.
The seventies, eighties, and nineties of Halliday’s—of
Spielberg’s—fantasy world is a time without Spike Lee or Jim Jarmusch or
Lizzie Borden or John Cassavetes or the Coen brothers, let alone Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola; it’s an eighties
without hip-hop, without punk, without Patti Smith. There’s no
counterculture in Wade’s 2045 world, and there’s no counterculture or
artistic alternatives in the imagined world of OASIS, either.
The movie’s fondly remembered eighties and nineties replicates its
exclusions and its rejections; it’s the version that left Kathleen
Collins’s “Losing Ground” unreleased, that left Wendell B. Harris, Jr.,
and Julie Dash and Rachel Amodeo without a second feature, that smothered Elaine May
under snarky reviews. The movie’s icons of nostalgia provide a grotesque
carnival of the undead, a uniform spew of icons emptied of substance,
history, connections. There’s a dance contest based on “Saturday Night
Fever” with the flashing disco-floor lights but without any
story—without the movie’s ethnic gang wars, conflict over abortion, or
dramas of sexual assault. In short, “Ready Player One” depicts a
retrofitted universe that filters out any artist or subject cooler,
bolder, more aware than Spielberg and his films—and, chillingly, that
monolith of virtual reality and the nostalgia that fuels it isn’t
depicted as a tyrannical or terrifying aspect of the movie’s dystopian
premise. Halliday, as if desperate to
recapture the fetish objects of his youth, creates a world of young
mental clones whose minds are emptied of their current concerns and
filled with his own obsessions.
Instead, to those who consume nothing but multiplex movies, commercial
video games, and mass-market music to fuel their imagination, “Ready
Player One” offers a heartening encouragement: fear not, for these
things offer you all the tools you need to be Master of the Universe.
But what lies just underneath that reassurance is a deadly, deadening
complacency—to stick with the most immediately accessible products on
offer, not to look further than what’s delivered by advertising or
algorithm, and to look no further for heroes than the purveyors and
recyclers of their self-consuming, vastly profitable trivia contest.
Spielberg’s very career pivots on the notion of popular art as a source
of virtue. In “Ready Player One,” Parzival insults the villainous
Sorrento with the ultimate Spielbergian credo: “A fanboy knows a hater.”
The movie turns Spielberg, in the persona of Halliday, into the ultimate
cool dad, converting Wade’s heroism into a conjoined set of virtues
centered on filial piety (piety toward a substitute father) and pop
devotion. Yet that coolness is an unintended mask for an underlying
horror: “Ready Player One” is a story of generations of kindly and
avuncular creators, venerators of their own childhoods and the
childhoods of children to come, perpetuating their own senescent,
obsolete, and decaying reign by consuming the brains of the young. A
fanboy doesn’t know a cult because he’s in it.
The movie’s one great exception, its one far-reaching inspiration, is
another twist on paternity—here, Spielberg’s stifled rivalry with his
own big daddy, not the one whom he’s artistically devoted to but the one
whom he chooses, in the film, to wrangle with: Orson Welles, the colossus of Hollywood independence and the victim of its backlash, the founder whose founding work Spielberg both needs and fears because he depends upon but cannot match its reckless originality.
Throughout “Ready Player One,” Spielberg wrestles Welles on the turf of
“Citizen Kane”; in the process, he unleashes the only passionate
inspiration of “Ready Player One,” and, true to Spielberg’s own
zomboidal imagination, it’s a necrological inspiration.
Throughout the film, Parzival looks to Halliday’s life story for clues
to solve the puzzles that he left behind; he does his research in visits
to the pristine vaults of the so-called Halliday Journals, an archive
that preserves the moments of Halliday’s life as theatre-like holograms
in virtual dioramas behind glass walls, maintained by an archivist whom
Parzival, in his quest for crucial nuggets of knowledge, directs to
fast-forward, freeze-frame, or rewind. It’s akin to the library scene in
“Citizen Kane,” where the banker Thatcher’s memoirs come to life, and, in
revising it for “Ready Player One,” it’s the one moment where
Spielberg’s impulses get the better of him, where his ideas burst beyond
his constrained imaginings of Halliday’s nostalgic yearnings and try to
probe something that mystifies, terrifies, and eludes him: the secrets
of a creator greater, more mysterious, more troubled than himself.
(There’s even a hint of Welles’s “Mr. Arkadin” embedded in the notion: a
guilt-ridden grandee who seeks to have himself investigated.) As it
turns out, Spielberg can only go so far with this idea, and he leaves
his own boldest imaginings at the starting gate. His vision of
Halliday’s crises and conflicts proves trivial, sterile, uncreative—as
is proved when, at the movie’s dénouement, Wade unleashes, with a
cringe-worthy gooeyness, the word “Rosebud.”