We finished off our light-fare Steven Spielberg marathon with one of my favorite films (perhaps my overall favorite) of 2018 – the adaptation of Ernest Cline’s hit novel, Ready Player One.
Ready Player One is a unique novel, one that I loved, and one that almost certainly does not lend itself easily to a film adaptation. In many ways, the entire novel is an homage to 1980s pop culture – surely its fingers spread across a larger time span than that, but the ultimate conceit behind the novel is: What if a child who grew up immersed in the ’80s culture ended up being the creator of the new virtual internet, and he populated it widely with references to the things he loved in his childhood? (OK, to be fair, the real point was probably more one of “What’s the best way to get 10 million Gen-Xers to buy a book?” but I’ll let that slide.)
But references alone can’t quite support a film, and the plot line of the book was not exactly the most adaptable, and it was a bit too squarely focused on the main character, with our hero only meeting most of his supporting cast IRL at the very end. And so, when he took on the project, Spielberg brought in Cline himself to co-write a completely overhauled screenplay, and I think the results were both fantastic and fascinating. The fascinating part is that the screenplay manages to hit basically every major beat of the novel, but the details – every single one – are completely different. Having recently read the book, when I first went into the film in the theater I had expectations about how things would play out, but I realized very soon that while it was the same plot it was a completely different story. It was as if your friends were driving you into the city for the day, but on a whim they decided to take some back roads you’d never been on. You know what direction you’re going and you know where you’ll end up, but the scenery is all new so you may as well tilt your seat back and enjoy it.
Rocking the Ben & Jerry Curl
The year is 2045, and in a very crowded and somewhat dystopian future, much of the world’s entertainment takes place in a virtual reality upgrade to the internet known as the Oasis. The Oasis is the brainchild of a reclusive genius named James Halladay, who was obsessed with peri-’80s pop culture, and, having (in hindsight, ill-advisedly) forced out his Oasis partner Ogden Morrow was – at the time of his death several years before the action in the film begins – the richest man in the world.
And he had nobody to leave his fortune and control of the Oasis to.
Oh, did I forget to mention the whole “last light of Durin’s Day” thing about the keyhole?
So before his death, he created the greatest Easter Egg hunt ever conceived. Three obscure clues that lead to three difficult challenges, the reward for completing the challenges three keys which open gates which lead to the next clues; the first person to collect all three keys is the winner – and takes control of all of Halladay’s fortune and stock in the Oasis. It is, in effect, the biggest lotto jackpot in history, with the highest stakes imaginable, and it’s not just blind luck – there’s an element of skill involved.
LOLLERFACE
Naturally, this means that (for a time, at least) everybody in the world was trying to solve Halladay’s Easter Egg hunt. But, once the first clue was cracked and the first challenge (a periodically-scheduled high-speed car race through a perilous virtual New York City) discovered, nobody could master it. So, years later, the only people still trying are the dedicated ‘Gunters (short for Egg Hunters) – your typical weaponized autists who occasionally “clan up” to consolidate their resources – and the Sixers. The Sixers are a virtual army funded by another of the world’s largest companies, Innovative Online Industries (or IOI). While their biggest moneymaker is their Orwellianly-named Loyalty Division (read: debt services), IOI is pumping massive resources into winning Halladay’s game and taking control of the Oasis.
Dear sir, I am second cousin of Jame Holliday and for saving of internet needs to transfer solo and completely control of Oasis to you before Oasis lost to LOL peoples…
Once IOI takes control of the Oasis, they and their CEO Nolan Sorrento have calculated that they can convert up to 80% of an Oasis user’s field of view to advertisements without causing seizures. So they’re a pretty easy villain – the corporate megalith tempting people into debt and then squeezing them for every last drop of labor they can provide, and creating a massive army of nameless, number-only virtual avatar clones (operated in the real world by actual employees, of course) in an attempt to take control of probably the single greatest market resource in the world, only to turn its current, basically libertarian platform into a corporate cash cow, and suck the life out of it just as certainly as their Loyalty Division does its debtors. An easy villain.
Still I can’t think of a good reason not to put back the number one unit and carry on with the failure mode analysis.
Our hero (so we know he’s going to win, right? It’s not a spoiler, right?) is known in the Oasis as Parzival – a ‘Gunter who is going solo and refuses to clan up, and named after the Knight of the Round Table who found the Holy Grail on his own. In the real world, Parzival is played by the orphan Wade Watts, a late-teens kid who is himself obsessed with the long-past ’80s culture and Halladay’s game in particular. Wade lives in the Columbus “stacks”, which are just what they sound like, a bunch of mobile homes stacked on top of each other hundreds of feet high, a sort of low-tech high-rise of the future, with his Aunt and her endless procession of loser boyfriends. Wade has found a hideout – an intact van at the heart of a massive pile in a junkyard, and he typically spends his days retreated into this van and hooked up to the Oasis, collecting “coin” to pay for various Oasis needs and enhancements and doing research on Halladay.
The lack of Mr. Fusion indicates that this is the Mark I version of the vehicle
One day while racing his pretty awesome virtual replica of the Back To The Future DeLorean in the first challenge along with his best friend Aech, Parzival catches sight of a spiky-red-haired avatar he recognizes as Art3mis, a famous ‘Gunter blogger who is also convinced that doing a deep-dive on Halladay is the way to win the challenges. Parzival is once again unable to avoid what appears to be the final obstacle in the race – a gigantic King Kong – and he saves Art3mis from dying (technically, “zeroing out” her avatar) in the King Kong ambush.
Following this encounter, Parzival goes to the Archives to view a security-cammed scene from Halladay’s life that he has always thought was important – the moment when he is forcing Morrow out of the Oasis. Parzival catches a snippet of conversation that he suddenly realizes might be crucial – when Morrow wistfully says that things always have to move forward, Halladay asks why they can’t go back, as fast as they can. At the next race, Parzival lines up at the back of the line, and instead of going forward he throws his car in reverse. A trap door opens and he is set upon a “safe” virtual course running underneath the regular course, easily winning the first key. His name goes up on the Oasis leaderboard, followed shortly by Art3mis (who saw him do it), and Aech (Parzival talked) and two other of Aech’s compatriots Daito and Sho (Aech talked) – the first grouping of the ‘Gunters who would later be known as The High Five.
Gee, Bob! A quarter!
Once the first challenge is mastered, things move pretty quick. First, although they insist they aren’t clanning up, Parzival and Art3mis (along the rest of the High Five) begin doing research together on the second clue, which they believe relates to Kira, a woman that Halladay went on an ill-fated date with but who eventually became Morrow’s wife. But more importantly, Sorrento uses some mercenary work to link Parzival to Wade Watts, and tracks him down in the real world. When Parzival, suspecting IOI’s sinister motives, rejects Sorrento’s lucrative offer of employment, Sorrento blows up the stack that Wade lives in, unaware that Wade was in fact in his van hideout.
Random strangers from the internet meet, and they’re both hot and single! What are the odds?
While Wade is trying to send out a panicked warning to the rest of The High Five that Sorrento has tracked him down in real life he is abducted – but it turns out it’s not by Sorrento’s goons, it’s by Art3mis’ goons! Art3mis turns out to be Samantha Cook, the leader of a small underground movement that is fighting IOI whose genesis stems from her father’s incarceration and death in an IOI Loyalty Center. Now that they are together in real life, the Egg Hunting (and, of course, the inevitable budding romance) can kick into high gear.
They said this was the Look-Her-Over Hotel, right?
Samantha and Wade cleverly infer that Halladay’s date with Kira was going to see The Shining (“She wanted to go dancing. So we watched a movie.”) They follow the second clue to a Shining-based challenge that Art3mis wins first – by avoiding a ton of horror death traps in the Overlook Hotel and navigating some floating zombies to ask a Kira avatar to dance. It all makes sense on screen, I promise.
By this point, the mercenary operations led by Sorrento have them tightly on Samantha and Wade’s tail and as the Sixer army begins making their way through the Shining challenge, IOI forces ambush Samantha and Wade in the real world. Samantha allows herself to get captured so that Wade can escape, whereupon he meets up in real life with the remainder of The High Five.
Why don’t we just dig under it, like in Wakanda?
The oologists (“Egg scientists”) at IOI almost immediately crack the third clue and find the third challenge in a castle on Planet Doom, which Sorrento quickly surrounds with an impregnable force field created by an artifact known as The Orb Of Osuvox. They have it arranged so that only the Sixers have access to the inside of the force field, and as such only the Sixers can attempt the third challenge, which turns out the be something related to the playing of an Atari 2600 game – but which game is not clear.
1337 p455w0rd, Br0
In the meantime, the High Five run a real-world operation to rescue Samantha from her Loyalty Center cube, based largely on the fact that Sorrento has his silly password plastered on his VR rig via a sticky note. Wade, as Parzival from the bowels of Aech’s (that is, Helen’s) real-world van, while fleeing from Sorrento’s real-world forces, rallies basically the entirety of the Oasis to launch an attack on the Sixers on Planet Doom.
Sorry, but her number should totally have been 637366
In the meantime, Samantha, having escaped from the Loyalty Center with the help of the others, gets through the force field by logging into the Oasis from inside IOI and impersonating a Sixer, and sets to work disabling The Orb Of Osuvox. Once the orb is disabled, a massive battle begins, with the general Oasis denizens getting the best of the Sixers. The oologists had determined that the correct game to play was Adventure, and while the battle outside was still going on one of the Sixers had managed to complete the game, but this didn’t complete the challenge. As Parzival realizes, this is because the goal was not to win the game. Instead, the goal was to find the first Easter Egg ever hidden in a video game (that’s so Halladay!)
Canadian tuxedo? Check. Atari 2600? Check. About to kiss the heroine? Not happening.
As Parzival is preparing to play Adventure following the conclusion of the Planet Doom battle, Sorrento’s avatar shows up, and in a desperate ploy to keep IOI’s hopes of winning the challenge alive he avails himself of one final artifact – the Cataclyst, which immediately zeroes out every avatar on the planet it is activated on (even the avatar that activates it). And boom! everybody is wiped out. Except, unexpectedly, for Parzival. You see, back at the Archives when Parzival and Art3mis were researching Kira, Parzival claimed that the piece of footage they were looking at was the only reference to Kira in the entire Archives – that Halladay had wiped every other reference. The Archive Curator said this couldn’t be so, and Parzival offered a bet, which he won. The Curator delivered up Parzival’s winnings – a whole quarter. But what Parzival didn’t notice at the time was that it wasn’t actually a quarter – it was an Extra Life token.
So, taking advantage of his Extra Life, Parzival finally gets his shot at playing the final challenge. He finds the Easter Egg and wins the third key. Things aren’t quite over yet, because the IOI forces are in hot pursuit of Wade and the rest of The High Five in the real world, but the remaining drama mostly plays out as denouement.
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation…Attention all planets of the Solar Federation…Attention all planets of the Solar Federation…We have assumed control…We have assumed control…We have assumed control
After Parzival declines to sign a contract that was similar to the one Halladay made Morrow sign, he is transported to a replica of Halladay’s childhood attic, where Halladay himself presents Parzival with the golden Easter Egg, and in the real world Wade is met by none other than Ogden Morrow (who turns out to have been behind the avatar of the Curator!) and given control of the Oasis, which he shares with the remainder of The High Five. In Wade’s benevolent hands the Oasis has been saved from the clutches of IOI. The End.
I love, love, love this movie. It has some issues, of course. One could complain that it’s a bit predictable. Worse, it really looks like there were about 30 minutes worth of plot that got cut out between the completion of the second challenge and the final battle. IOI solves the clue too quickly (we hardly even have enough time with the clue to begin considering it), and Helen and the other High Fivers find Wade with literally no explanation as to how it happened or how they found each other. I know that the movie is already almost two and a half hours long, but given that the rest of the film is generally so tight, the sloppiness there is really notable. Shoot, go for it! Make it three hours, Steven! It’s not like you mind your historical films being 3.5 hours long!
That said, the vision of the film is pretty flawless. Probably over half of the movie takes place in the VR Oasis, and I think it’s perfectly done – very high quality CGI – HOURS of it – but carefully maintained with a patina of virtuality that reminds us which domain we are in at any given time. The ’80s references are copious and nearly non-stop. Almost every character in the Oasis is taken from a film or other pop culture, and you could probably spend months watching the blu-ray on frame-step to try to catalog them all – if you even recognized all of them! I think that it would have been a fair question to ask whether Spielberg had a good fantasy film left in him at this point, but clearly the answer is Yes.
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 