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So walking out of Ready Player One, I didn't plan on making a video about it. I didn't like the movie, but I didn't really want to pick on it either. I don't think there's anything wrong with a certain amount of celebration for nostalgia and fandom. I mean, this channel indulges in a little nostalgia almost every video, so, you know, who am I to judge?
But the more I thought about it, the more that one particular scene really got under my skin. Maybe you remember it, but I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't, because it's really easy to miss. It's when the character Samantha breaks into the villain's VR rig and takes a look at his files. Then everyone has a good laugh about the fact that he apparently likes Nancy Drew.
Now, it's easy enough to say, "Well, he's the big scary bad guy, and he likes a children's detective series mostly aimed at little girls. Haha, easy joke." But it really stood out to me because of the sneering way that the character said it. Every other piece of pop culture in the movie is treated as a beloved classic. Back to the Future, Atari 2600 games, old rock songs by one-hit wonders. They're all treated with the same sort of reverence that's usually reserved for characters in really earnest Christian dramas, quoting scripture or something. But not Nancy Drew. And that really bugged me.
Not because I think any of those things are bad. I like Space Invaders and Doc Brown as much as the next guy. But because it cemented the fact that this movie isn't really about nostalgia and loving old stuff from when you were a kid. Not for everyone, at least. No, it's celebrating a very specific form of fandom: the kind nostalgically remembered by the 40-something guys who wrote this movie and the book it's based on. Oh, and all the modern geek culture stuff that Warner Brothers could get the rights to, which is fine, but also very limited. And that becomes really obvious when characters discuss Buckaroo Banzai like it's Citizen Kane, but dismiss Nancy Drew, something that millions of people also have nostalgia for, as goofy trash. You kind of can't have it both ways.
So, in the spirit of Nancy Drew, I'm gonna be putting this movie under the magnifying glass and trying to get to the bottom of what about it feels so totally empty. And to do that, I'm gonna have to start with one simple question: Why did Steven Spielberg want to make this movie? No, seriously, why? Let's think about this for a minute. Spielberg is a 71-year-old man. By the time stuff like the Atari 2600 came out, he'd already made Jaws and was in the middle of releasing Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He had no childhood nostalgia for any of this stuff, like the writer of the book did. Well, except maybe King Kong. So why did he make it?
According to him, it's because he was so fascinated by the implications of the world of the story, where everyone spent most of their life inside VR. But I find that kind of hard to believe, because the movie itself doesn't seem that into exploring that idea at all. Like, Ready Player One is mostly a really breezy movie about how fun it is to play video games with your friends. He doesn't really have anything meaningful to say about VR.
So my theory is different. I think Spielberg decided to adapt this book because he got a little desperate and a little bored. You might be thinking, "Desperate? How could Steven Spielberg, the king of Hollywood, be desperate?" Well, here's the thing. Spielberg has a really well-earned reputation as Mr. Blockbuster, the guy who makes the crowd-pleasing hits. But if you look at his releases in the past twenty years or so, that's not really him anymore. He's made good movies, definitely. Stuff like Bridge of Spies and Lincoln are very good-looking, well-crafted movies and more entertaining than they're sometimes given credit for. But the light and fun blockbusters? I just don't think he has that much interest in them anymore.
Movies like Minority Report and War of the Worlds are big sci-fi movies, sure, but they're also very dark and have this really paranoid, downer, post-9/11 feel to them. Which works. I actually really like both those movies. But when he tries to recapture the old magic of Spielberg, Raiders, E.T., that kind of thing, you get this, this, and this. He keeps trying to make the movies that his 30-year-old self would make, but I'm just not sure that he can.
Then there's the boredom. To some extent, at least with his bigger movies, I think Spielberg has tragically caught a case of "Cameron disease," where skilled and successful directors get so invested in the tech side of filmmaking that they treat almost everything else as an afterthought. Symptoms include protagonists who are the least interesting part of their own movie. All the signs are there. I mean, he even keeps saying he's gonna make another CGI tentpole, a sequel to a movie that almost no one cared about, and a film he made with another man diagnosed with Cameron disease, Peter Jackson. With movies like The Post, he doesn't rely on that stuff much because you can tell he's actually engaged with the character and the story may interest him. I'm not sure the story of Ready Player One does. He doesn't seem to care too much about these people or their character arcs, instead devoting most of his energy to Mechagodzillas and space battles.
Speaking of the story, though, let's get into it. [Music]
Adapted from Ernest Cline's hit book, Ready Player One follows Wade Watts, a citizen in a futuristic dystopia, an impoverished world where most people spend the majority of their time inside a highly advanced VR game. The game's creator, a benevolent trillionaire played by the always great Mark Rylance, dies and leaves behind a contest that involves solving a series of puzzles revolving around '70s and '80s pop culture that he loved as a kid. This is actually a pretty cool setup. I think it's got a lot of promise. The problem, though, is that the story isn't really interested in digging into this world that it creates, except in the shallowest possible way. And I'm just speaking about the movie here. I haven't finished the book, so I'm not gonna judge that.
Ty Sheridan's Wade Watts, who appropriately enough, I guess, looks like the default setting in a video game's character creation screen, gets the absolute minimum amount of development. And the movie does him no favors by surrounding him with characters that are just a lot more interesting than him. At one point, Art3mis, the character who he ends up with at the end, delivers a speech about her backstory, mentioning that her dad was basically trapped in his job working for IOI, trying to pay back this company that was intentionally burying him in debt, kind of like old company mining towns back in the 1800s. And that was interesting. I wish the movie cared about it more. But no, it can't be bothered with that because, "Hey, look, the Iron Giant's doing the Terminator 2 thing you remember from the movie Terminator 2. People like that."
Yes, sadly, this philosophy is present throughout the whole movie. IOI is one of the biggest missed opportunities in the film. The concept of the loyalty centers, these places where they trap maxed-out employees or customers and force them to work in near slavery to pay off the debt, is legitimately creepy and interesting. But that's always relegated to the background. The main thing our heroes are worried about is that this evil company is gonna add microtransactions and ads to the game. Which, like, I get it. No one likes those. And the scene where they mention how many ads they can shove into a player's face without giving them a seizure is pretty funny. But come on, that's just a much safer, less interesting route to go. And the fact that the main villain feels like an evil real-estate developer trying to tear down the kids' community center in a movie from 1994 doesn't really help either.
America's classic thrillers come to life. The Hardy Boys. Nancy Drew Mystery Adventures. When you really get down to it, the plot of the movie and the plot's intended meaning are at total odds with each other. You can tell the filmmaker really wanted to lean into the whole Willy Wonka angle. In fact, Spielberg even tried to get Willy Wonka, Gene Wilder, to play the role before he sadly passed away. But it just doesn't work. Halliday's intended message is that this pop-culture oasis stuff may be cool, but it's reality that really matters. And his way to deliver that message was a puzzle that requires everyone to obsess over old pop culture and spend a bunch of time in the Oasis. Like, I'm not really sure he thought this one through.
And in the end, after all the world-building, the millions spent on special effects, and the interesting questions about VR that are raised in the first act, what does it all add up to? The hero getting rich, getting the girl, and a gentle little message that, "Hey, going outside every once in a while is a good time." To really, that's it? The guy who directed Minority Report, one of the smartest and most forward-thinking sci-fi films of the past few decades that tackled technology and asked questions about privacy and free will in a digital world, is willing to settle for a story whose purpose could be summed up by one of those little prompts that used to pop up on the Wii, telling you to maybe step away from the virtual tennis for a few minutes and take a break. Like, come on, Steve. Not every great movie or great art makes a great home video.
Now, maybe I'm being too harsh on this movie. I know a lot of people will probably say, "Oh, it's just fun. Turn your brain off and watch some well-done action." But here's the thing. This is Spielberg. He's made Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, The Last Crusade. Great popcorn movies that don't pander to their audience or talk down to it. Ready Player One, on the other hand, seems like the work of a man who doesn't want to make those kinds of movies, but knows that's what's expected of him. Every forced reference, strange joke, and all too convenient payoff feels like Spielberg desperately looking to the audience and going, "This is what you guys want, right? Right?" And the answer, for me at least, is no. It's not.
I mean, seriously, you're telling me that Simon Pegg's character is one of the founders of the Oasis, spent years pretending to be a robot in a virtual library? Already Captain Midnight, 1940 play patrols. You'd better hurry up and join at once, because there's a big adventure ahead. The thing to do now is to get started, because we're going to have not only barrels of fun, but loads of free gifts.