Ready Player One: A Lot To Unpack (Spoilers)

Watching Ready Player One made me realize there's a lot to unpack in my brain upon watching it.

Even before we consider the themes of the movie, I must first talk about about a meta-theme: that these shared cultural touchstones, while soullessly manufactured, are yet still worthwhile. True, the end of the movie bludgeons us with the moral that the real world is better, yet the whole movie is designed as not only a horde of pop culture callbacks, but a society in which these callbacks are the focus of most people's lives, as well as a pitch-perfect representation of such. This bringing together of different elements to create an eclectic culture out of the whole hasn't been seen on-screen since Wreck It Ralph. It is still easy to scoff at this "kiddie stuff" like in the old days; ask any parent who doesn't have time to consume it. However, to go into the culture with this amount of knowledge and to come back out of it with the same realism message seems very caring of the source material to me. Maybe I am expecting Spielberg and company to be just like Nolan Sorrento, the big corporate stiff in the movie, who had to have his pop references fed to him by earpiece. It doesn't seem to be the case.

I haven't read the book. I heard that there was a ton of accusations thrown against the characters as written in the book, and therefore the author. Chief among these was the fact that Wade/Parzival (the main character) stalked Samantha/Art3mis, the love interest. Short of the usual tropes many movies today suffer from (for example, making the love interest overly competent as a reaction to previous complaints of damsel-hood) it seems as if the more blatant issues, whatever they were, have been scrubbed clean. Without having read the book, I can't speak on that issue.

I spent the whole movie restraining myself from blurting out each IP as I saw it. The DeLorean! The Iron Giant! Tracer! Ninja Turtles! Batman! That's the point, I suppose. Movie makers asked the viewing public: how much love/nostalgia do you want in your movies? Movies with this much reference dropping have, in the past, ranged from good (Wreck It Ralph) to bad (The Emoji Movie) obviously, there's a case to be made for people wanting a good story instead of just a bunch of recognizable things on the screen. Movie critics as of late have made this case over and over, usually in reference to The Emoji Movie.

As someone who used to play Second Life (a video game that was the first stab at this sort of sandbox-style ungame in the real world), I feel like the concept of the Oasis is behind the times, if only because Second Life eventually faded away. It's not dead, and other platforms are in full swing right now (VR Chat), but I feel as if we're never going to get to where the movie depicts. Of course, some of that equation comes from a dystopian future, so hopefully we never achieve that dubious goal.

Here's a few unconnected thoughts I had about the movie that doesn't have any big theme, just thoughts that I think.
- A lot of the movie was rushed. More time was spent fawning over the visuals than characters emoting. The scene where Aech reveals her real-world self as Helen was rushed, without any beat at all, not a revelatory beat, not a slo-mo hero pose, not a disbelieving look from Wade, just nothing. It's me, I'm Aech, now let's go!
- The writing for the real-world bad guys was terrible. Ben Mendelssohn as Sorrento couldn't save the character. Everything related to IOI was incredibly 2-dimensional.
- At first I thought I-Rok was voiced by Ryan Reynolds, then Jason Biggs, but we had to look it up to see that it was T.J. Miller. They all are starting to sound alike to me, but at least they're all still funny.
- Maybe it's just my own neuroticism, but the last conversation between Halliday and Wade had a real nihilistic vibe. Like, all it was was a fear of death and an assumption that that's all there is drives Halliday, and therefore the whole story. I know that there's a divide between pop culture enthusiasts and religious folk who don't have to take as much solace in these sorts of things, but as someone who can wear both hats - a geek and a man of faith - it took me out of the story a little. But that's just my own issues, it shouldn't affect most other people.