Ready Player One Better

"Just think of all the people that you knew in the past
That passed on, they in heaven, found peace at last
Picture a place that they exist, together
There has to be a place better than this, in heaven"

2Pac - Thugz Mansion



Is Ready Player One good?
I asked this question with regard to the movie Interstellar three years ago. "Good" in that case referred to Interstellar's representation of space exploration SF to the wider public. In the case of Ready Player One I'm referring to its representation of computer games.

While leafing through Wikipedia links for my "Cutscene Tagmatization" rant three posts ago, I discovered that my distaste for video game cutscenes is shared, among others, by Steven Spielberg (which prompts me to wonder what he'd think of my game / movie / music analogy at the end.) In any case, this rendered me more amenable to watching Ready Player One for a family movie night when visiting relatives a week later. It's more or less what you'd expect: a children's movie with stock villains and monomythic heroes, effects cranked up to 11, twists telegraphed, plot tangled unnecessarily around primate courtship rituals. And damnit, senor Spielbergo's still got it. I can't hate the damn thing. It was fun to watch. But it did raise some questions about timing and references.

A movie about playing a video game would've seemed fresh and edgy from the era of Tron to around Y2K, but this waning decade finds us already several years past the tipping point where the game industry began to outstrip the movie industry's looting. If anything, a video game about making movies would seem a lot more daring nowadays. Weirder still to see it aimed at a young audience for whom MMOs and FPS clans have always been a part of pop culture. But if you were going to do it, might as well have utilized better poop culture references than Godzilla, King Kong, Doom, Gundam, The Shining and a nameless appearance by a Starcraft space marine. What made this utterly mundane clutter of wolfmen, Draculas and mummies worthy of a Spielberg adaptation?

In place of Interstellar I recommended the more interesting Europa Report. In place of Ready Player One you're better off partying like it's 1999 with eXistenZ, lacking pop culture references but much more insightful when it comes to gaming, gamers' mindset and the wider repercussions thereof. Decidedly not aimed at children, being as it was directed by David Cronenberg.

But if you're going to cobble together a big budget cross-media two hour tirade of references, at least pick better ones. Give me a series of murder mysteries in a town where everyone lives in Morrowind cantons and crabshell houses, inhabited by Haibane sipping tea at the Triplets of Belleville's house, Gordon Freeman draining septic tanks in his hazard suit, Jubal Harshaw and Smiling Jack playing chess, Molly Millions running a boxing gym, Crista Galli running a telecom, the Bebop in place of a mail truck, The Nameless One and Susan Ashworth co-owning a funeral parlor, Tyler Freeborn as an investigative journalist, Strelok running a tanning salon and Jan Jansen running a bar which serves nothing but turnip juice, Haviland Tuf as a pet store owner, the Grieving Mother babysitting Kills-in-Shadow's brood, Karan S'jet as a mysterious agoraphobe who only speaks through electronic means, Rahan as the town's all-purpose scientist, Chairman Yang as the stodgy old heartless industrialist/landlord, Wesley Crusher as the first murder victim and Cadfael as an inquisitive young pre-pharmacy major turned detective.

Come on Spielberg.
Get cracking.