Ready Player One Review, Trailer, Plot Synopsis And More
rom filmmaker Steven Spielberg comes the science fiction action adventure “Ready Player One,” based on Ernest Cline’s bestseller of the same name, which has become a worldwide phenomenon. The film is set in 2045, with the world on the brink of chaos and collapse. But the people have found salvation in the OASIS, an expansive virtual reality universe created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance). When Halliday dies, he leaves his immense fortune to the first person to find a digital Easter egg he has hidden somewhere in the OASIS, sparking a contest that grips the entire world. When an unlikely young hero named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) decides to join the contest, he is hurled into a breakneck, reality-bending treasure hunt through a fantastical universe of mystery, discovery and danger
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Ready Player One Teaser Trailer
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READY PLAYER ONE Final Trailer (2018)
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Ready Player One Posters And Photos
Ready Player One Review
The OASIS is the true star of Ready Player One and to their credit, Spielberg and his collaborators – including, his longtime cinematographer Janusz Kamiński and the many VFX artists of Industrial Light & Magic – do a bang-up job of bringing the VR setting to cinematic life. As he did with Adventures of Tintin in particular, Spielberg takes advantage of the mobility that comes with a digitally rendered universe populated by mo-cap characters; shooting Ready Player One‘s OASIS-based action sequences (most notably, those that involve finding Halliday’s three keys) in ways that are physically impossible in the real world. Ready Player One is similarly top notch when it comes to world-building and succeeds in making the OASIS feel massive, even as the film explores but a fraction of the pop culture-informed VR landscapes that it has to offer. As for the much-discussed pop cultural elements themselves, they by and large work together to create a cohesive mythology that stands on its own, regardless of how familiar (or not familiar) viewers are with the pop culture being referenced.
Where Ready Player One struggles is with respect to its storyline and characters. The adapted screenplay by Cline and Zak Penn (The Avengers) changes and improves upon the plot of the original novel, yet still ends up being a frustratingly regressive take on the hero’s journey narrative. Ready Player One similarly takes steps to make the character of Art3mis more fully-developed and complicated than the archetypical female love interest, but doesn’t go far enough to break the mold in that respect. It feels as though a more deconstructive approach would have better served Ready Player One overall, from the way that it fleshes out its human players to the way that it explores what the OASIS means to them and how they choose to express themselves with their avatars. Instead of wrestling with this often messy relationship between pop culture and fandoms, Ready Player One goes for easy but over-simplified messages about corporate greed and the importance of not losing sight That said, Spielberg does find a self-reflective quality in the James Halliday character, as Rylance once again thrives in a role that allows the director to meditate on his own legacy as a storyteller (similar to what Rylance and Spielberg did with The BFG). Ready Player One similarly begins to find it heart when it pairs Wade Watts – who, despite a fine performance by Sheridan, is something of a bland and two dimensional protagonist – together with his friends in the OASIS, including his good buddy Aech (Master of None‘s Lena Waithe) and the siblings Sho and Daito (Philip Zhao and Win Morisaki). The scenes in which this ragtag group of players join forces are easily the movie’s best and the moments where Ready Player One comes closest to recapturing that old Spielberg sense of adventure, but with a modern twist (see how Wade is, refreshingly, the one white male in the group). Waithe is especially fun here and her character, to be frank, is much more charismatic than Wade, with a more intriguing backstory to boot. Ready Player One further does a solid job of handling heavy amounts of voiceover exposition and maintains a steady pace throughout its first two-thirds, culminating with a set piece in the OASIS that allows Spielberg to playfully pay his respects to a fellow filmmaker and friend. The third act unfortunately drags by comparison as more of the action shifts to the real world and the threat posed by the soulless IOI. Ready Player One‘s vision of the future is simply less innovative than the OASIS, even with Wade’s trailer park home in Columbus, Ohio (known as The Stacks) providing a visually striking backdrop. The IOI is likewise something of an overly cartoonish evil futuristic corporation, in spite of Mendelsohn’s best efforts to make Sorrento a memorably offbeat villain in the same vein as his previous antagonist roles (most notably, Orson Krennic from Rogue One). While Ready Player One had the potential to be a fascinating examination of Spielberg’s place in pop culture history through the lens of a sci-fi/fantasy adventure, the final result is slick and technically daring yet makes for a hollow CGI-and-mo-cap fueled offering from the filmmaker. Fans of Cline’s original book will probably enjoy Ready Player One the most – in spite of (and possibly even thanks to) the noticeable changes that it makes to its source novel – as will those who are new to the property, but have found the film’s trailer marketing to be promising. As for those who didn’t like the book and/or have been put off by the movie’s previews: you might be better off revisiting some of Spielberg’s classic movies and the pop culture that inspired Ready Player One instead, if you really want to be reminded of what made you love them in the first place. 8.8/10 |
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