Or you can just hang out with your friends-people you’ve never actually met, but you feel like you intimately know-as Wade does when he’s in the Oasis as the chicly rebellious, “Final Fantasy”-styled Parzival. You can gamble in a casino the size of a planet or climb Mount Everest with Batman. You can be a fearsome warrior or a sexy anime vixen. You can be whoever you want to be, go wherever you want to go, do whatever you want to do. To escape their dreary lives, Wade and his neighbors strap on their headgear and enter the Oasis, a sprawling virtual reality where everyone spends the bulk of their time. Wade lives, as so many others do, in “The Stacks,” a densely populated cluster of cruddy trailers piled high atop each other and tied together by scaffolding. The year is 2045 and the place is Columbus, Ohio.
Readon player one series#
This is essentially “ Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” complete with a scrappy, crafty underdog attempting to solve a series of challenges posed by a whimsical, mystical genius in hopes of winning a grand prize at the end. Somewhere in the middle of all this retro mayhem (which Cline himself co-scripted with Zak Penn) is an actual story-which itself is a throwback to something that’s never specifically named.
The movie’s copious needle drops drag us deeper into the decade, from Van Halen’s “Jump” and Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” to George Michael’s “Faith” and Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” At times, the selections can be painfully on the nose the use of New Order’s “Blue Monday” to set the tone as we enter a large, laser-filled dance club is absolutely perfect, however. It’s an ambitious mix that can be thrilling while it lasts, and yet it fails to linger for long afterward, leaving you wondering what its point is beyond validating the insularity of ravenous fandom. “Ready Player One” is at once familiar in its fabric and forward-thinking in its technology, with a combination of gritty live action and glossy CGI. – The Extra-Terrestrial,” Harrison Ford in the “Indiana Jones” films, Tom Cruise in “ Minority Report” or Tom Hanks in “ Catch Me If You Can.” The actor who plays Wade Watts, Tye Sheridan (“ Mud,” “ X-Men: Apocalypse”), even resembles a “Close Encounters”-era Richard Dreyfuss. But he’s very much a figure in the same driven, single-minded vein as Henry Thomas in “E.T. The young man at its center is an obsessed gamer named Wade Watts who goes by the moniker Parzival in the massive virtual reality everyone inhabits in the movie’s dystopian future. “Ready Player One” may have sprung from someone else’s brain originally, but it’s a Spielbergian hero’s journey at its core, complete with lens flares early and often. This is, after all, the decade he helped define, asserting himself as one of our greatest and most influential filmmakers. Spielberg would seem to be the ideal director for such a thorough (and overlong) trip down memory lane.
Readon player one movie#
This is a movie that has a literal Easter egg-and it is indeed a “movie,” not a film, as Spielberg himself pointed out earlier this month during its South by Southwest premiere. There’s no way to catch it all in one sitting. Rex from “ Jurassic Park” as well as King Kong. So much of what constitutes the humor in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernest Cline’s best-selling novel is along the lines of: “Here’s a thing you know from your youth.” And: “Here’s another thing.” And: “Here’s an obscure thing that only an elite few of you will get, which will make you feel super-smart.”Ĭhucky from the “Child’s Play” movies shares the screen with The Iron Giant and the DeLorean from “ Back to the Future.” A thrilling auto race through the virtual streets of New York finds the characters daring to outrun the T. You may be able to answer “yes” to all three of these questions (as I was), and yet still not be able to register much more than a chuckle of recognition in response to the vast majority of voluminous pop-culture references scattered throughout “Ready Player One.” The action is breathless and non-stop, both in the virtual reality and the reality reality, but wallowing in ‘80s nostalgia is only so much fun for so long-even if you’re a child of the era (as I am)-and it only really works when it serves to further the narrative. Do you know the name of the high school the characters attended in John Hughes’ movies? Did you play “Pitfall!” on the Atari 2600 when you were a kid? And are you aware of what lurks behind the door of Room 237?
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