- UK release: March 2018
- Director: Steven Spielberg · Writers: Zak Penn, Ernest Cline
- Studio / distributor: Warner Bros.; Amblin Partners; Village Roadshow
- Genre: Science fiction adventure / virtual-world quest · Runtime: 140 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Tye Sheridan (Mud, X-Men: Apocalypse) as Wade Watts; Olivia Cooke (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) as Samantha; Ben Mendelsohn (Rogue One, Animal Kingdom) as Nolan Sorrento; Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies, Dunkirk) as James Halliday
- Rotten Tomatoes: 72% critics / 77% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
There is a particular kind of suspicion that greets a Steven Spielberg blockbuster these days, the sense that the man who built the modern summer film should by now be making something weightier. Ready Player One will not settle that argument, because it is unashamedly a ride: a two-and-a-half-hour chase through a virtual playground stuffed wall to wall with the pop culture of the last forty years. The surprise is how good Spielberg still is at this, and how lightly he wears the very nostalgia the film is selling.
The setup
In 2045 the real world has more or less given up, and almost everyone spends their waking hours plugged into the OASIS, a vast virtual universe where you can be anyone and go anywhere. Its late creator, James Halliday, has hidden three keys inside it, and whoever finds them inherits the OASIS outright. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a teenager from the stacked trailer slums of Columbus, is one of the millions hunting for them, and one of the few who treats Halliday’s obsessions as a map rather than trivia. Ranged against him is Innovative Online Industries, a corporation that wants the keys for itself and has the indentured labour and private army to brute-force the search. What starts as a game turns into a fight over who owns the one world left worth living in.
The cast
Sheridan, who was so good as the watchful boy in Mud, makes Wade a likeable everyman, eager rather than smug, which matters in a film that could easily have curdled into a fan’s smugness. Olivia Cooke gives Samantha, the rebel he meets inside the OASIS, more spine and wariness than the part strictly needs, and the romance lands because she refuses to be merely the prize. Ben Mendelsohn does corporate villainy with relish, all clipped menace and middle-management pettiness. The film’s quiet heart, though, is Mark Rylance as Halliday, who plays the dead genius as a shy, fumbling man stranded by his own gifts, and gives the whole nostalgia machine an unexpected note of melancholy.
The craft
This is where Spielberg reminds you why he has the job. The OASIS sequences are dense with detail yet always legible: a demolition-derby road race past King Kong and a rampaging T. rex that is one of the best action set pieces he has staged in years, and a long central detour into a beloved Stanley Kubrick film that is both a technical showcase and a genuinely funny piece of staging. Janusz Kamiński shoots the grimy real world in cold steel and the virtual one in candy colour, so you always know which side of the visor you are on. Alan Silvestri’s score does the emotional lifting, and the sheer density of references could have been exhausting; instead Spielberg keeps the camera moving and the plot ticking, so the spotting becomes texture rather than homework.
How it stacks up
The obvious touchstones are Tron: Legacy and The Matrix, films that also asked what we lose when the digital world becomes more appealing than the real one. Ready Player One is lighter than either, closer in spirit to Wreck-It Ralph, happy to treat its universe as a toy box rather than a thesis. It is also, plainly, a Spielberg film talking to its own past: the wonder of E.T., the runaway momentum of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the corporate menace of Jurassic Park. The novel’s critics will say the film softens Ernest Cline’s encyclopaedic source into a greatest-hits reel, and they are not wrong, but the trade buys pace, and pace is what this kind of adventure lives on.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warmly divided, sitting around 72%, with audiences a little higher at 77%. The praise goes to Spielberg’s energy and the bravura set pieces; the doubts cluster around the nostalgia overload and a worry that a film about the emptiness of escapism is itself happy to wallow in it. That last point has some force. The film never really lands its argument that we should switch off and go outside, because it is having far too much fun inside. But I am not sure that contradiction sinks it. Taken as a chase picture about a kid, a girl, and a puzzle, it delivers more cleanly than its detractors allow.
Verdict
My number sits a touch above the critical middle because the things this film does well are exactly the things I rate: world-building, momentum, a virtual universe with rules you can feel, and a closing stretch that earns its sentiment rather than just demanding it. It is not the satire of online life it occasionally pretends to be, and the supporting players blur a little in the crush of references. None of that stops it being the most purely enjoyable big-budget adventure of the season, and one I would happily watch again to catch what I missed the first time. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. Worth the largest screen you can find, ideally in IMAX or 3D, where the OASIS sequences have the room to breathe.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film has settled in as one of Spielberg’s better-liked late blockbusters, more fondly remembered than its mixed notices suggested, and it arrived just as the “metaverse” went from novel premise to corporate buzzword, which has given it an accidental topicality. No sequel has followed, though Ernest Cline’s own Ready Player Two novel continued the story in print. It is now widely available on disc and digital and turns up on streaming services depending on your region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, horror, infrequent strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Most of the violence is between players in a virtual reality world where wounds are fantastical and participants cannot be seriously harmed. There are battle sequences, stabbings, shootings and martial arts style combat. In the real world, there is hand-to-hand violence, without sight of injury. A man punches the face of his girlfriend’s teenage son.
Threat and horror: In the safety of the virtual reality world, the friends encounter characters and settings from real world horror films. They enter a simulation of THE SHINING where they are threatened by ghosts, zombies and gigantic axes and where a player is swept away on a torrent of blood. Freddy Krueger and a Chucky doll, armed with a knife, both fight in battle sequences. Players are chased by King Kong and a T. rex.
Language: There is infrequent strong language (‘f***k’), together with milder terms such as ‘pissing’, ‘shit’, ‘balls’, ‘dickweed’, ‘damn’, ‘brokeass’, ‘goddam’, ‘hell’, ‘God’, ‘asshole’, ‘pissed’, ‘badass’ and ‘douchebag’.
Sex / additional issues: There are mild sex references: a villain jokes about the ‘hos’ of Father Christmas; a player rubs her hands over another’s touch-sensitive body suit.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
