I'll finally throw my hat in the ring for real discussing this. I read the book a few years ago, and the film deviated from it in many ways needlessly and frustratingly. I won't be a purist since I know films aren't made from books verbatim, but to change massive moments like Art getting captured (in the books, it's Wade that gets taken), or entire key hunts, or anything related to Blade Runner, or the fact that they didn't actually meet each other for real until the very end of the book took away from it a lot. I won't continue on the book vs film discussion and will just dive in to the film as a whole. So, if I address plot moments initially from the book, that's just what happens. This review's going to be a beast.
This was a profoundly sad film. Like, even when the good guys won in the end, it was just a long chain of depression, misery and sadness. Of course it's fictional so the horrible things can be amplified because after all, it's a rebellion vs evil empire situation. The world is garbage so everyone is forced to live in a virtual world and doesn't know how to interact with each other. Instead of improving the world, there's nothing more we can do with it and oh well, just escape because that's all we have. That's so sad to me as a concept. I guess I'm glad it was a little realistic in one simple aspect - the kids won and took over the company, but nothing else really changed besides shutting down the Nexus (that's what I call it) for a day or two a week, besides shutting down those obviously unconstitutional and illegal and plenty of other things slavery centers. At the end, nothing really changed, other than the lives of a couple kids and the limiting of that IOI corporation along with the removal of the head and chief of security. Did Wade use the powerful company he ran along with the others to start fixing the world? Nah. He just got a deluxe apartment in the sky at the cost of his family (ok, his aunt and his not-uncle), his privacy, his safety, and almost his life. Cool cool cool.
But think of all that was lost along the way for the entire world. Every character that got involved in the battle on that planet lost everything from that nuke. People put in their lives to build up those characters because that was validating for them, and in an instant, it was all nixed. I'm sure in their world, many people spent real money and a whole lot of time and energy, and were all wiped out. I don't know if I missed a line saying everything was reset, but since it wasn't an item from the system and instead from a third party (the IOI company) I don't know if they'd fix it. I mean maybe they handled it like the White Belt Uprising, we had to reset everything back several days because white belts gained admin powers and started deleting the forum itself. Or, maybe it was just one of those clean sweeps, I think like that game Everquest, when they wiped everything and every character started from scratch. I only know of that game because I had a family member that built and sold characters for it, so maybe I misremembered it but I think they hard reset the entire universe of that game. Either way, did the people stop playing the game and live their lives normally? Nope, they went back to playing except on the off days.
This felt like a kids film to me, but it couldn't be a kids film because it was jam packed with references and content made for people like me in my 30s. That's a massive problem with this picture: they didn't know who their target audience was. The plot was simplified and dumbed down, so it didn't make me think. It was chock full of forced emotional moments that it didn't resonate, it was just a long chain of bad things happening to somewhat good people because that's the way life is or something. And then we got the terrible teen romance, with the guy trying to save the girl and eventually winning her heart. Yawn. The whole third act of this extremely long picture (seriously, two hours and 20 minutes was too much for what little they had to offer) was just a mess. It juggled so many balls, and yet it was so lackluster in the resolution. Despite all that, there was no social commentary to speak of, no real takeaways, and nothing beyond "wow that must have been expensive to make with all that CGI." It was all just pop culture references jammed down our throats.
References. I love references, I make more of them than I should realistically, but it's part of the game. This film was just stuffed to the rafters with them that it made me get tired of them. Seeing the 60s Batmobile crash during the race in the beginning wasn't a "tee hee it's the Batmobile" moment as much as it was the kind of reaction Tony Stark made when he exaggeratedly rolled his eyes. Yeah, I feel gross referencing a bunch of references with yet another reference, but that's the state that this movie put me in. It wasn't nostalgic for me. It didn't make me miss the Ninja Turtles (which I could rant about because they used the NEW ninja turtle concepts from the garbage remakes instead of the ones from the original films) or Goldeneye on N64 or anything else. They threw them at us so fast and so aggressively that we'd have to pause the film to catch them all. Seriously, that final battle where everyone's rampaging, what was the point of throwing dozens of little references that we couldn't possibly all catch at once? It was an overload, plain and simple. When an article written after the film came out is legitimately titled "Ready Player One: 101 References You Might Have Missed" and takes several minutes to read through, you know you've gone too far. When the Iron Giant gave the thumbs up while falling into the lava, I wanted to shout at my TV, but the film was mercifully almost over.
An issue with the plot as a whole for me was that basically everything it would take to win the game required basically nothing about knowledge of these references that they abused us with, and instead with an esoteric throwaway line in some video journal he made 30 years ago. It'd be like if the secret of the ownership to the UFC after Dana died fell to us having to root through his old horrible vlogs he used to make. Remember those? I sure do. A buddy of mine even drunkenly sent an email to Loretta Hunt after the infamous vlog where he trashed on her piling on, and she responded with a well-measured and very reasonable response. I don't know if they continued to talk after, but my point lies with the bizarre obscurity that makes basically no sense. This guy Halladay (sp?) loved his games so much, they were all he lived for. He made this alternate reality because he hated the one he lived in, and despite that, winning the ultimate prize had nothing to do with understanding his love for all things pop culture. It had to do with some girl he had a crush on all those years ago. Are we to believe that he lived the rest of his life pining for the one that got away, one that he took to supposedly see "The Shining"? Probably one of the better scenes in the movie, the authenticity they put into the Overlook, but it was all about some girl that married his best friend. That's pretty messed up.
I discovered a drinking game for this film, and it was pretty basic. Drink when people say someone's name, when they get a key, when they go to the Nexus and so on. They also had what they called "hard mode," which makes you drink every time a character is killed or "zeroed out." Now, the end of that film, if you took a drink for everyone that croaked, you'd die. So, that's something. Since I'm not planning on ever watching this again, I won't know how bad it gets.
5.5/10, getting that half point bump above a flat 5 because it was visually intriguing.
