Ready Player One – A botched attempt to make an 80s movie in 2018

| Cris Alvarez

A better title for Ready Player One could have been Ready Cheesy One. At some point in the film, maybe halfway, it struck me that the film was a bad remake of any number of 80s Spielberg movies. Then I did the proverbial imagined palm to the forehead and remembered that this is a Spielberg produced film. I immediately wanted to ask the legend what happened to his touch.

The number of issues I had with this film makes it difficult to figure out where to start. To be fair, I did take a step back and put myself in a kid’s shoes to consider whether it might be fun for the younger crowd. It had a lot of action, flash, and bang but it seriously lacked the heart that we got from these movies when they came out thirty years ago. I decided that when you have a cheesy plot and a simplistic script, you need charismatic actors to make it work. Alas, RPO sorely lacked the necessary ingredients. The best acting came not from the young stars but from the old guys and the game avatars. The human stars were the two- dimensional characters of the film and on top of that they were simply boring. Their motivations and attitudes were cliché and made for a yawn fest. I think the editor also got bored because the pacing mistakes were awful. The starts and stops in mood were almost hilariously jarring. I suppose the idea was to speed past the drama and get back to the video game effects as fast as possible. Oddly, the movie was so heavy on narrative at the start I was getting bored at minute one.

As for the game aspect of the film, there were a few cool peaks involving some very interesting dance game scenes, but the ground combat and car races were simply blase. The producers also could not maintain the logical consistency of the “Oasis”, the name of the game world everyone played in. Logical inconsistencies were so prevalent in this movie I wondered if anyone took the time to even worry about the movie-game mechanics. I can imagine that experienced gamers will be more than willing to pick out the things that don’t make sense. For example, if hundreds of people have been playing one particular racing game, dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, over and over to win, and have not succeeded, why would all the drivers on the bad guy team drive the same type of vehicle? The good guys did better with a mish mash of exotic vehicles so why didn’t the baddies try out various vehicles instead of multiples of the same exact one. Oh, that’s right. The bad guys are dumb. The bad guys also showed zero teamwork though they had been playing together as a team over and over in the game. The movie’s credibility sank from the start.

There’s another problem with the game world we’re shown. The heroes always seemed to have just the right tool when they needed it in the game to survive or win. Yeah we got the usual quick narrative as to how and why but it seemed all too convenient at times. Basically, the movie threw game obstacles and solutions at the characters, both good and bad, as the plot saw fit. It barely followed any semblance of sense. Aargh.

The movie did have some shining moments. I mentioned the dance sequences, but there were also some great scenes with the older actors that involved human issues and not game ones. The avatars at times showed real humanity that was touching. But then the movie would immediately shift from emotion to some action or slam bam sequence so fast it made me wonder if the movie was scared to bore younger audiences with touchy-feely stuff. There were also some fantastic Easter eggs that involved, table top role playing games, classic rock, and of course old school video gaming. My favorite was a plot focus on the first game I played as a kid. In fact it was a game I loved and played a lot. However, there were so many hidden eggs in the movie, I started to choke on them. After a while it felt like every old and new game property that wanted a piece of the action wormed its way into the movie. The producers were obviously really nostalgic for the late 70s and 80s. I’ll point out that’s the hay day of Dungeons and Dragons.

So let’s see, I slammed the acting, the editing, and the overall production. I still haven’t mentioned the music. It mostly stunk. They pulled a GotG by using classic rock at importune times to work up the audience. Then the incidental music took up the slack by being overbearing throughout. It was like a cranked up, poor version of the music that we heard in Spielberg’s old 80s movies. There were even a few segments that sounded like Disney fanfare parade music. Side note. I’m a huge Disney fan. But the Disney-esque music in this movie was horribly misplaced.

So in sum, the movie started pretty poorly, throwing characters at us that we barely cared about. The bad guy was cardboard and of course had a speaking defect to add to his creepiness. Why Hollywood keeps using speech impediments to make someone look creepier or more evil is a disgusting discrimination I’m surprised is still used without comment from audiences. The movie eventually threw in some interesting drama and character development and I had hope. That hope was short lived and the movie made sure to drag me down again into pits of despair. They dredged me up occasionally with a few more peaks but the valleys were too numerous. Oh, what could have been. The art design was fine and solid but nothing particularly noteworthy. It’s interesting that almost no movie based on a video game has succeeded. It looks like a movie trying to start a video game franchise from nothing also doesn’t work. If you must see RPO, wait for the small screen.