Ready Player One

Here's a post on Ready Player One. 

But first....

Hi there! Dave-El here back from the valley of the shadow of death.

OK, I’m just being dramatic, it wasn’t that bad. But last week I was sick and it did get worse than I expected at one point.

As I reported… er, bitched about last week, spring sprung a bad allergy attack on my ass which devolved into a cold which further devolved into a worse cold. I missed work on Thursday. I was already scheduled to be off on Friday as part of the Easter weekend. The plan was for my wife, daughter and I to go visit some of my family in southern North Carolina for a couple of days. My aches and coughs were enough to put the kibosh on those plans but then I became nauseous. I spent a good part of Friday bent over a toilet or lying on the bathroom floor. It was a very rough day.

On Easter Sunday, I was feeling much better, making it to church that morning, out to brunch afterwards and then we went to see Ready Player One.

And now we're off to the movie....  

I had order tickets on line with reserved seats, had my phone scanned like a boss by the ticket taker and then we went to take our seats when I realized I had made a mistake. Instead of our seats being on the back row, we were on the very first row which meant we had to look straight up. Thankfully, this theater is one equipped with recliners so it wasn’t particularly uncomfortable. And once the movie was underway, we were totally immersed in the world of Ready Player One.

And what a world it is. About 25 years in the future, reality sucks and life is hard. Our protagonist Wade Watts is a poor young man, orphaned and living in the worst kind of trailer park with mobile homes stacked on top of each other side by side with mountains of garbage. But virtual reality is awesome in the form of an online world known as the OASIS where Wade is the sleek, powerful daredevil Parzival, a go getter adventurer who like others in the OASIS  is on a quest, "Anorak's Quest" hidden within OASIS, a game programmed by the late James Halliday, the creator of OASIS. The first to find the Easter egg within Anorak's Quest is promised full ownership of OASIS and a crap ton of money. 

Also on this quest are agents for an evil corporation that wants dominion over the OASIS  for its on nefarious purposes. But Parzival is not alone as he is joined by other virtual reality compatriots who, bit by bit, become friends and allies in the real world as well.

Ready Player One is directed by Steven Spielberg which is pretty cool. Spielberg, having just turned 70 years old, has of late focused on movies that befits his role as an elder statesman of the motion picture industry. Films like The Post, Bridge of Spies, Lincoln and more have aspired to more mature subject matter. But when he was first starting out, Spielberg was an arbiter of what we now know as the movie blockbuster, movies rooted in science fiction, horror and fantasy: Jaws, Close Encounters of the 3^rd Kind, E.T., Jurassic Park.

Ready Player One reflects all the youthful exuberance of a young Spielberg with awesome spectacles and thrilling action sequences. But what helped Spielberg survive and prosper for so many decades from young blockbuster impresario to elder statesman of thoughtful films is an understanding of character.  In Ready Player One, we really care about Wade and his VR alter ego, Parzival. We care about Art3mis and her real world counterpart, Samantha and all the rest of Wade’s friends.  

And Ready Player One is packed with pop culture references with appearances by King Kong, Marvin Martian, Tim Burton era Batman and an Adam West era Batmobile, the DeLorean from Back to the Future, the Shining, Aatari games and more. The movie starts off with Jump by Van Halen and ends with You Make My Dreams Come True by Hall & Oates which is a pair of perfect  bookends to a movie that owes so much not just to pop culture in general but particularly to the 1980s. 

With a beating heart provided by characters we genuinely care about, a love of pop culture,  and  a lot of spectacle and thrills, Ready Player One is a fun thrill ride that doesn’t disappoint.