Ready Player One (some nerd)

[Henry Gale]

IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1677720/) / Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One_(film))

https://static.tumblr.com/ouoa1be/C6cp4yc0r/share3.jpg.jpeg

[Ivan Drago]

Seeing tonight! Review going up Thursday or Friday.

[Dukefrukem]

Hurry!

[Spinal]

Considering the source material, the 82% RT score so far is pretty impressive.

[Henry Gale]

Yeah it's a definite step up from the book. It manages to channel the enthusiasm for the things that Cline felt the need to aimlessly and endlessly list and reference in his book often without much narrative intention or interesting direction, and here actually implementing those sort of infinite nods into different sort of cinematic gestures like music cues, visual flourishes and homages, and not just with insular parts of dialogue (though it sometimes does nudge close to overdoing it in that way too).

Bottom line, it works because Spielberg just knows how to compelling tell a story entirely within this medium, and even though the actual plotting is fairly sloppy here and there and it might not have nearly as much intelligence or emotional depth as thinks it does or maybe would've needed to actually thrive, as a director he fundamentally understands (being a key architect of the modern blockbuster) how to simply make a movie move and kinetically engage you as a viewer. Even if the screws of the script aren't as tightly fastened as they could be, he completely understands how to hold your attention and make you forget it could've easily, totally fallen apart in someone else's hands.

Weirdly the thing that stuck out to me most is since that it's widely perceived that the second act, particularly in a standard adventure movie, is the hardest one to crack, and that here, of all movies, where I had very tangible issues both up front and then again as it winded down, I felt like the movie suddenly came into its own in that middle third, and I was able to let go and enjoy myself most in the middle of the hunt. There's a prominent movie play-through (which in the book I think was WarGames, for some reason...?) that at first seems like a wildly bad idea in terms of the film's reverence and untouchable nature that turns into something actually turns into a stretch of really smartly played, light-hearted fun. It's the moment where the film's reverence and engagement with the pop culture it's often passingly referencing suddenly gains traction and congeals with its storytelling in unexpected and enthusiastic ways. By the end of it I was weirdly open to the movie taking more detours of that sort by re-imagining and exploring re-worked versions of other movie worlds. But alas, it has its own more standard story to take care of, and then the movie is more business (though still pretty fun business!) as usual.

Rylance's performance is the thing that might be a big factor as to whether or not the movie works for you. Either you think he's playing it straight and overdoing it, or you feel that he realizes the fun he's having and that his awkward self-awareness (though still through strong commitment in his performance) is the underlying, slightly sardonic comedic tone that largely saves the movie from feeling overly precious or in love with itself.

Almost like a meticulously-crafted awards speech, it packs itself with references and shout outs to the things that it feels got it to where it is today, but in that acknowledgment to the debt it feels it owes, there's a sincerity and craft to it that makes it something (if maybe less perceptibly than it should feel) its own. It's far from a perfect movie, but it's a perfectly fine one, and considering the mess it sounds like on paper, both in Spielberg being the one to tackle this, but also perhaps on the actual paper it was previously published, it feels so much more cleverly streamlined and easy to have a good time with than I worried I would've been able to.

Do I wish Spielberg still finds the time to create a whole new original fantasy adventure world that feels worthy of the characters in this idolizing before his career is done? Of course. But for now, this is a nice little vacation back through the time and places he both directly and indirectly helped build, while from our side of the screen still feeling like there's enough humility there to maybe keep himself from realizing that's the main reason he's doing it. And for a man who's revisited so little of his own work outside of Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park, you can't help but feel like this is a somewhat therapeutic way of him celebrating the time he's long left behind, wishing he could reignite that for a new generation through the technological language they now understand, all while having those who were young back in the 1980s to feel like kids again too. Maybe even with their own kids.

*** / 6.8

[TGM]

I was honestly expecting this to be an obnoxious mess, but it actually turned out a hell of a lot better than expected. Good stuff!

[Ivan Drago]

Yep, good movie is good. (https://615film.com/2018/03/30/ready-player-one-review/)

[Pop Trash]

Yep, good movie is good. (https://615film.com/2018/03/30/ready-player-one-review/)

Nope, bad movie is bad. Or at least mediocre. I liked three things in this:

1) the much ballyhooed The Shining sequence which left me wondering if this would be better if the main character was just Quantum Leaped into 80s movies, if this would be a much better/weirder/interesting film, esp. if it gets thoroughly meta and the main dude was dropped into Spielberg movies.
2) Mark Rylance's vaguely Garth from Wayne's World shtick (I've also heard people think he was doing Crispin Glover).
3) that the obligatory one "fuck" allowed in a PG-13 movie was used to say "fucking Chucky"...that got a big laugh from me.

Other than that, it's way too long. The beginning and end has an exposition dump v/o that comes dangerously close to sounding like "Yup, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation." I didn't care about anyone in this. The supporting cast with out-of-touch stereotypes (martial arts loving Asian kid complete with an accent despite taking place in America, street smart loud quippy black girl). Lots of the movie is devoted to CGI "comin' atcha!" explosion splooge that just goes on and on. Also, I can't stand movies where I feel like I'm watching a friend play a video game, but they won't ever let me play (see also: Speed Racer).

[transmogrifier]

52/100

Basically, this is a jello wrestling match between pure horseshit formula and Spielberg's expertise in the grammar of film, if the jello was tired cinematic references. (I think my metaphor is breaking down, much like the pretty sad attempts at characterization in this wispy piece of smooth, well-edited nothingness.) Seriously though, none of the High Five are even close to memorable, nor is the primary villain (whose defining trait is basically that he is Ben Mendolsen, and we all know he always plays bad guys, ergo Serrento must be bad), nor is the secondary villain (a pale facsimile of Luv from the latest Blade Runner)... Rylance is memorable for being terrible, so that is something. But I guess (having not read the book) I'm disappointed in just how weak the 80s pop culture references are - there are a couple of songs here or there, and of course the extended Shining riff, but mostly its just random shots of well-known characters/items... nothing new is built out of the carcass of easy nostalgia, when in a different pair of hands, this could have been a celebration of and commentary on cultural detritus,, instead, it's just another random fleck of mass-produced time wasting. Still, it is cut with more rhythm and pacing than many other blockbusters, which is something..... but not enough to ultimately matter.

[Dukefrukem]

"carcass of easy nostalgia" might be my favorite line in 2018.

[Morris Schæffer]

Maybe I wanted even more references. Shoulda just gone overboard. Mates and I laughed our asses off with Chuky, Hadoken, the old batmobile and the T2 nod! Oh god especially that one! Apart from 70% of the movie taking place in a virtual space, the visual style is incredibly slick, but superficial. It's just some really tough material here, feels really challenging to turn into a high stakes, genuinely engaging motion picture. The Shining bit is where I perked up, suddenly the movie seemed to move away from surface gloss to something else, something a bit sinister, but it's not quite enough. I've no idea what it's trying to say at the end or why Wade is crying. I think the characters are thinly drawn, Wade is basically Eliot from E.T. but we're miles and miles away from that movie's earnest and heartfelt characterization. Alan Silvestri's music is forgotten quickly. I actually wish his back to the future theme woulda started playing whenever the Delorean appeared. Still, this was something else in theaters, not too shabby at all.

[Dead & Messed Up]

This feels like a wake for the nice guy white nerd. It's fun, impeccably choreographed, edited, and escalated, but it's as transient as the current interpersonal value of knowing the right media things. Which is to say, this movie runs into the fundamental problem of knowing the right movies to cite, but not the actual value of art as a communal and communicative experience. Which is why the film thinks it's fun to turn the Iron Giant into an engine of war and the Overlook Hotel into a hacky haunted house with the woman in 237 reconfigured as a banshee with a knife. The love for media plays as thin as the skeins the heroes remove when they change identities in the Oasis. We know Parzival loves Buckaroo Banzai, but we don't know why, and neither does he, and anyway it doesn't matter.

This is not gatekeeping so much as a depressed observation that this is not a love letter to meaningful pop media; it's a love letter to itself for loving the correct pop media. Art is good inasmuch as it can be compartmentalized into avatars and soundtrack cues and sideways details. Does anybody in this movie ever talk about the value of a piece of work? What it meant to them? If it helped them through a terrible moment in their life or inspired them and altered their path?

Or does Buckaroo Banzai just have wicked duds?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[DavidSeven]

This is more fun than I was expecting, though it really does surrender itself to popcorn sensibilities and doesn't do much else with its ripe premise. Spielberg does a good job of exercising restraint over the pop culture references. There's enough that the characters seem knowing for plot purposes but not so much that they become insufferable in the comic book nerd sense. In terms of pure escapism and spectacle, it delivers in a way that is reminiscent of a younger Spielberg. The scope of the action feels immense, but it always remains focused, decipherable and engaging. This is where a master separates himself from the wannabes at live-action Disney, who constantly deliver spectacle without the focus.

Less masterful, as typical, is Spielberg's ability to calibrate sentimentality in a way that feels authentic and earned. As a drama, it's middling as the emotions simply don't hit as the film wants them to. As an intellectual exercise, it's non-existent. The film leaves you with no lingering questions or things to ponder, which almost seems impossible given the socioeconomic and corporatocracy issues that seem naturally embedded in the film's premise. The film concludes with a rote sugar-coated ending and curiously downplays the magnitude of a few children being handed totalitarian rule over the world's most valuable resource. I guess that just has to end well, right?

[Peng]

One shudders to think what the book's story is like if this film, by all accounts, has improved on it already. Even as someone so far removed from its gamer culture (although the references here lean towards the cinematic) and thus only has a vague understanding of the culture's controversies in recent years, I still feel some undeniably toxic and/or myopic implications inherent in the protagonist's story that the film doesn't subvert enough, even if it has already changed a lot. That even extends far beyond attitudes/politics to basic storytelling; after a big incident happened to Wade around midway point, the fastness in which he seemed able to just shrug off any trauma so easily and slide into lovestruck mode feels so unintentionally hilarious in its perverseness. And that choice of last scene seems...less ideal, to put it mildly.

But damn if Spielberg doesn't put out his best blockbuster filmmaking chops in quite a while, probably since War of the Worlds? Both the homage-heavy Oasis and cramped dystopian real world mean that the film's style requires a lot of visual clusters. Spielberg navigates them, in action scenes or otherwise, with his usual fluid clarity, which is still able to astound decades later: the first Mario Kart-ish set-piece, the extended Shining homage, and especially the climatic battle that crosscuts between two planes of reality. The spectacle is so rousing that it even easily overcomes the (intentionally) uncanny aesthetics of the game world for me.

And if I ever feel tempted to read the book even just a bit, it would be to see how much Spielberg has added in term of James Halliday's character. Halliday feels so closely, thematically bound to Spielberg, in term of both giants' places in the world of pop culture at large, that the character's arc over the course of the film becomes truly fascinating in how much, if any at all, it reveals about the director's view towards his own status. And Mark Rylance's reliable dramatic restraint invests Halliday's last "flashback", already affecting enough as story itself and as possible parallel to Spielberg, with additional piercing pathos. Seeing him being the MVPs for three films straight with Spielberg, I wouldn't mind if Rylance continues to be the director's muse for the foreseeable future. 7/10

[Morris Schæffer]

https://media.aintitcool.com/media/uploads/2018/freddy_beans/rp1-j_large.jpg

The Japanese poster. :D

[Henry Gale]

Very clean.

[Stay Puft]

Which is to say, this movie runs into the fundamental problem of knowing the right movies to cite, but not the actual value of art as a communal and communicative experience. Which is why the film thinks it's fun to turn the Iron Giant into an engine of war and the Overlook Hotel into a hacky haunted house with the woman in 237 reconfigured as a banshee with a knife. The love for media plays as thin as the skeins the heroes remove when they change identities in the Oasis. We know Parzival loves Buckaroo Banzai, but we don't know why, and neither does he, and anyway it doesn't matter.

Nailed it.

I'd go one step further with this, because it gets into a core problem with Cline's writing, and something that bleeds into this film (so let's just say Zak Penn is equally guilty here, as the film script's co-writer). Cline doesn't understand anything he is writing about. He does his research, but not thoroughly. I don't doubt Cline loves Spielberg and Zemeckis, for example, but has he actually played Mario Kart? Does Cline, or Penn, or Spielberg, or anybody play Overwatch? (Tracer charges into battle at the front of the line for the same reason a Mountain Dew machine turns into a Decepticon in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen).

The first challenge is a point-to-point race that gamers have been stuck trying to finish for five years. Parzival has to be dragged through a bunch of plot and exposition to come up with the solution of driving backwards. Five years, and nobody hit reverse at the starting line? Here's what happens when people play racing games: Somebody will go in reverse. Now let's just say the odds of that happening is extremely low, or even basically zero. The moment the first race finishes without a winner, the odds increase to 100% on the second race. This is the fundamental rule of play. Ask any game developer what the biggest challenge is for a designer, and they'll all tell you the same thing: It's anticipating how a gamer will try to break what they spend years creating.

This film can point at Mario Kart and say what it is. But it does not understand how gamers interact with games. It does not understand the concept of "play" as a psychological or social activity, which is even more damning. That entire racing sequence, and really the film as a whole, as slick and entertaining as Spielberg can make it, is basically Steve Buscemi walking around with a skateboard asking, "How do you do, fellow kids?"

And if anybody thought this was bad, wait until Hollywood gets going on an adaptation of Cline's Armada.

(Nay, if that wasn't obvious.)

[Dead & Messed Up]

The first challenge is a point-to-point race that gamers have been stuck trying to finish for five years. Parzival has to be dragged through a bunch of plot and exposition to come up with the solution of driving backwards. Five years, and nobody hit reverse at the starting line? Here's what happens when people play racing games: Somebody will go in reverse. Now let's just say the odds of that happening is extremely low, or even basically zero. The moment the first race finishes without a winner, the odds increase to 100% on the second race. This is the fundamental rule of play. Ask any game developer what the biggest challenge is for a designer, and they'll all tell you the same thing: It's anticipating how a gamer will try to break what they spend years creating.

This is a really perceptive point. Didn't even think of this, but I'm a huge Metroid fan, so I know that fandom (one of the more intense ones out there, probably) is obsessed with challenging the parameters and thinking outside the box. And you're right, if these people playing are among the most intensive gamers alive, that reverse bit would probably happen within the first few days of that race existing.

[Morris Schæffer]

Good point stay puft

[Wryan]

This gets neither a "yay" nor "nay" from me, as it sorta just sits there, wanting to impress but going about it in such a "groaner" way that you don't really have much interest in interacting with it. I got a few mild laughs (and one big one at the lone f-bomb) and I genuinely liked Rylance's performance (as the socially inept silent genius way too many gamers seem to think of themselves as but aren't), but yeah...this doesn't really understand the world it's created or dipping its toes into. The point about it mooring the Iron Giant and the Overlook on the wrong footing is mostly spot on, except the former is the creation of a participant in-world, rather than Halliday, Cline or Spielberg--not present in books, I believe, but its inclusion here reads exactly how some people probably would warp the point of an icon for their own uses in such a world, simply from not particularly caring or from being so far removed (presuming the film came out in this world around the same time it did in ours). When you can mod Skyrim to fight Thomas the Tank Engine skinned over the dragons, you'd do this too.

The Overlook is worse, though, as it was created by Halliday and is, stunningly obviously, not something someone like him would have done with such a property when he was creating his little labyrinth. But maybe it's fun for the movie audience kids who have no frame of reference for it? I'm not sure who it's for.

Sorrento is fun enough, mostly because of BM, but for all the "real life and death stuff!" whispered about, we don't really see much danger beyond the explosion. It tries to lean into some Black Mirror shenanigans with the loyalty centers, but isn't not nearly as effective as it could have been.

I think the movie's worst offense, though, is that it's presenting an increasingly likely future to perhaps the generation that could make it really happen, inculcating the worst "fun" impulses divorced from meaning instead of disabusing them of them (the "real world is real" Big Message is pretty anemic even if well-meaning). Though much is made that the story/book/movie are for those quicksanding in nostalgia, I think it actually could have a genuinely deleterious effect on how virtual reality systems and universes like this could one day play out. A world where nothing matters because everything's possible. So you can fuck the Predator or wrestle Eleanor Roosevelt on the deck of the Titanic. Gee, isn't that wild?

[Spinal]

Fun movie. It's interesting to me how the movie walkthrough was adapted from the book. Instead of having it be from the perspective of a character that knows every detail about the film in question, as in the book, they instead mostly follow a character who has never seen the movie. This has the effect of allowing the audience to feel smarter than the character and enjoy watching their discovery of the film's events. As opposed to the book, where Wade may as well be reciting a phone book from memory. (Sure, it's impressive on some level, but not exactly filled with drama.)

I also liked Rylance's riff on George McFly. Seemed very appropriate.

[Mal]

This movie made me SO SO sad. Especially Mendlesohn's veneers!

[Rico]

Does anybody in this movie ever talk about the value of a piece of work? What it meant to them? If it helped them through a terrible moment in their life or inspired them and altered their path?

I would say that is all unnecessary. The connection to the art is brought by the viewer. I don't need some kid telling me how great Back to the Future is, or how much they love Iron Giant. We all fanboi over something. So seeing these characters dress up as their favorite movie character is easily relatable. Heck, I know someone on this site that owns a full Indiana Jones outfit.

[Neclord]

This is a weird hollow candy shell of a movie. Like, an artisan candy shell, but coating nothing. Some of the references are fun I guess, but I'd rather see a proper Gundam movie or whatever. I did really like Rylance's performance though.

[Dukefrukem]

So where is the US government when all of this taking place?

[monolith94]

So where is the US government when all of this taking place?

Maybe the film is saying that this is the natural outcome of a libertarian political takeover? :shrug:

I skipped this film, mainly because I listened to the podcast 372 pages We'll Never Get Back, and that was plenty for me.

[Grouchy]

The first challenge is a point-to-point race that gamers have been stuck trying to finish for five years. Parzival has to be dragged through a bunch of plot and exposition to come up with the solution of driving backwards. Five years, and nobody hit reverse at the starting line? Here's what happens when people play racing games: Somebody will go in reverse. Now let's just say the odds of that happening is extremely low, or even basically zero. The moment the first race finishes without a winner, the odds increase to 100% on the second race. This is the fundamental rule of play. Ask any game developer what the biggest challenge is for a designer, and they'll all tell you the same thing: It's anticipating how a gamer will try to break what they spend years creating.

This film can point at Mario Kart and say what it is. But it does not understand how gamers interact with games. It does not understand the concept of "play" as a psychological or social activity, which is even more damning. That entire racing sequence, and really the film as a whole, as slick and entertaining as Spielberg can make it, is basically Steve Buscemi walking around with a skateboard asking, "How do you do, fellow kids?"
My friend and I agree whole-heartedly with this. The movie celebrates but also seriously underestimates gamer culture.

What D&MU says is also true to an extent. The pop culture fandom could have been used more profoundly in a way that related to the character arcs.

These two points aside I still gave this movie a Yay. Why? The visual spectacle and the choreography of incredible events is hard to beat. Any other director would have been drowned by the ambition of this movie, but Spielberg keeps both the action coherent and the storyline simple enough to be affecting at all the right moments.

[dreamdead]

I wish this film subverted more of its cliches, but perhaps its whole 80s/90s ethos is structurally designed to satisfy a quick surface-level arcade fix. It's absolutely acceptable, and there are a few instances that are legitimately interesting (the Shining restructure, which Sarah mentioned wasn't in the book in the same way), but so much of it plays at such a broad level that it never is able to transform into anything affecting. It doesn't help that the villain is so generic.

And it has at least 4 endings before it finally wraps up.

[StanleyK]

Man, if the novel is worse than the movie, I can't imagine how terrible it must be (actually I can imagine it very well from excerpts I've read online). Its worst crime is probably that the next time I watch The Shining I'll be reminded of this crap.