"This is not a film that we made this is, I promise you, a movie," he told the cheering crowd at Ready Player One's SXSW premiere, distinguishing it from the mostly serious work he's been doing for the last few years. The darkness is there, but it's never there too long, as if Spielberg, who helped shaped the modern-day blockbuster, were hesitant about losing his target audience with anything that might suggest there are any complications to their rollicking, nostalgia-fueled adventure.
#I AM PLAYER ONE WINDOWS#
It's also in the opening shot, in which the camera pans down along the windows of the vertical trailer park where Wade lives, showing us a row of people escaping from desperate poverty into the online world where the film also spends most of its time. There are actually glimpses of that bleakness in the terror on Art3mis's face as she's dragged off to the same corporate indentured servitude in which her father died, trying to work off debt he could never clear. And yet it all feels like a nightmare recounted with a cheery lilt. (Morale at the company must be crushingly low as they wait to find out which internet rando is going to be their new boss.) Their larger-than-life online adventures include an impossible race through a fantasy New York and a battle that enlists the Iron Giant, Mechagodzilla, and dozens of other familiar fictional figures. Wade and fellow "Gunters" like Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and Aech (Lena Waithe) are obsessed with figuring out the secrets behind Halliday's game, which, Willy Wonka–like, will grant the winner control of the OASIS and Halliday’s company, Gregarious Games. Wade Watts (played by Tye Sheridan), the film's undistinguished protagonist, lives with his aunt and her latest lousy boyfriend, and spends his days in an immersive virtual simulation called the OASIS, where he tries to solve the mysteries of a quest laid out by late OASIS founder James Halliday (Mark Rylance). Ready Player One takes place in a near future where everyone is burying themselves in entertainment while things go to hell around them - not that there's anything wrong with that.
#I AM PLAYER ONE MOVIE#
But the new movie adaptation of Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay Cline wrote with Zak Penn, shows occasional glimpses of self-awareness that feel like the equivalent of watching someone's fixed smile slipping. The reference-packed book is devoid of any subtext that might make its geek fantasy, in which a young man saves the (virtual) day with his incredibly thorough knowledge of pop culture, go down less smoothly. Does Ready Player One know that it's a dark story recounted with oblivious lightness, in the same way that someone might tell you what they think is a funny anecdote about a wild night out but that sounds more like a description of alcoholism? It's fair to say that the source material, a best-selling 2011 novel written by Ernest Cline, does not.
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