@amandarichards and I once again took advantage of recent sunny weather to go out and enjoy life. It just so happened while we were out that besides the sunny weather, many other things came together nicely. For example, we came upon a Ben n' Jerry's that was handing out free ice cream cones.
We then discovered that a McMenamins bar/theater (where you can drink and order food for delivery to your seat) was showing Ready Player One...starting like five minutes from when we inquired about it and bought tickets. Nice when shit just works out like that, isn't it?
@amandarichards liked it even more than I did, I think because she went in with zero expectations, knowing nothing about it in advance. I was hopeful but also biased towards liking it because of the heavy focus on VR. If 'The Lawnmower Man' was the film that conveyed VR to the public in the 1990s, 'Ready Player One' will represent VR to today's public.
It ticks all the same boxes Spielberg movies often do. But it's greater than the sum of its parts well, exceeding the confines of that formula. It made me legitimately laugh in several places. Only the romance fell flat because of how quick and forced it was.
The love interest felt certain he would be disappointed by how she looked in real life. It turns out she's supermodel hot, but has a mild discoloration on her face, a birth mark she is inexplicably insecure about. It was a missed opportunity in my book for the protag to instead fall for his best friend, a manly cybernetic brute who it turns out is a woman.
She was not conventionally attractive though. Gotta have the hero fall for the conventionally attractive chick I guess. What a boringly safe decision. Oh well. The plot was otherwise entertaining and interesting, if a little bit silly in some parts.
It gets away with some of that because much of the film takes place in The Oasis, a VR world similar to today's VR Chat but with better graphics, animation and so on. The protagonist lives with his aunt and her abusive boyfriend in one trailer of hundreds stacked vertically in towers.
His knack for uncovering the hidden secrets, or "easter eggs" of the Oasis soon nets him the cash reserves he needs to buy better VR gear, competing more effectively to find the remaining secrets before other players do.
Also competing with him are thousands of paid egg hunters, or "gunters" in the employ of IOI corporation. They seek to take over the Oasis and make it into an advertising platform with tiered memberships, similar to what's going to happen to the internet now that Net Neutrality has been overturned.
The pop culture references are thick in this film. Not a second goes by in the Oasis where you don't spot characters from familiar movies and games. It's impressive they got the rights to all of them, but I imagine the owners of all those IPs were also eager for the free product placement, so to speak.
The challenges faced by the protagonist and his friends were imaginative, such as the hotel from The Shining. The friends kind of came out of nowhere after he said for the first half of the film that he works alone. I get the sense that this is a byproduct of cramming the plot of the book into the time constraints of a major motion picture.
Perhaps a director's cut will alleviate some of these small problems with pacing, and flesh out the story more. As-is, it's a visual treat, a thought provoking and rousing spectacle which will no doubt make everybody who sees it feel strongly tempted to run out and buy an Oculus or Vive.
That's the real purpose of it from my perspective, besides the political commentary on what sort of place shared VR worlds ought to be versus what Facebook is trying to turn them into. This may be a film future generations look back on from within a heavily stratified, advertisement saturated VR world, laughing at how naive it was to believe there was ever any chance of preventing that outcome.
That's what we go to the movies for though, isn't it? To peer voyeuristically into a dazzling alternate reality where, unlike our own world, the good guys usually win. I give Ready Player One an 8/10, docking points because there were aspects of the plot that could have been more daring.
Specifically who wound up being his love interest, and who didn't. But also not making the hot girl he falls for in the Oasis turn out to be some gross hairy fat guy irl, like his friend warned him about. That would have been more "narratively correct" and his long time friend becoming his lover would've pried a tear or two from my jaded eyes.
Stay Cozy!
