No Movie has Ever made me feel Nerdier

Rating: 8/10 (4 April 2018)

If there's one thing that rivals the MCU in the Hollywood landscape of blockbusters today, it's movies that play on the audience's nostalgia. Reboots, remakes, and sequels to movies and franchises decades old have been dominating, from the revival of the Star Wars and Jurassic Park franchises to cult classics like Blade Runner getting long-awaited sequels. And each one goes out of it's way to include references to the original, include original characters aged and older, and plays on the audiences nostalgia through intertextuality (thank you Nerdwriter for that term). But none of them compare on the nostalgia scale to Ready Player One, a film almost entirely composed of pop culture easter eggs.
It's the future and humanity has pretty much given up on fixing the world. Poverty and corruption are rife, and people have stopped caring, instead opting to spend all their free time in the virtual world of the Oasis; an MMORPG so developed that its virtual currency and the real world currency are interchangeable, and that people go there to learn and to work, as well as escape the brutal reality of the American slums. The creator of the Oasis passed away, and left the keys to his inheritance to any player who can solve a series of impossible tasks. So impossible in fact that no-one's managed to solve the first challenge in five years. Enter Wade Watts, or Parzival as he goes by in the Oasis, who kickstarts an avalanche of quests, clues, celebrity, and corporate intrigue when careful puzzlework helps him figure out how to beat the first challenge.
The plot is fairly simple, and in fact feels like an easter egg in itself, resembling the action adventure movies of the 80s like The Goonies, Labyrinth, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. We have our protagonist, a misfit group of friends, a love interest, an over-the-top antagonist, a quest, and a series of puzzles and mysteries to figure out along the way. In the narrative department, Ready Player One is not breaking any new ground, but it's deliberately not trying to be. In my opinion this is the most subtle and foundational easter egg of the whole movie; that it feels - at its core - like a movie from the 80s/90s, and follows all the same beats you would expect from those kinds of movies.
As a result, Ready Player One's first and foremost priority is in pure entertainment. It's a movie of spectacle that strings the audience along for two and a half hours, and rarely flirts with anything deeper. Of course there is subtext, but it's never focussed on. The whole idea of an MMORPG taking over the lives of millions across the globe as they seek to escape the harsh truths of reality are as relevant today as they've ever been. It also flirts with the identity crisis such a dual-life would result in as well, and the blurring of lines between virtual and reality, but again it's only ever subtext and a big thing is never made of any of it. I could see the source material as being ripe for a full-on satirical interpretation, but Spielberg's movie is not it.
Instead, Ready Player One's depth comes from it's celebration of nerd culture (and boy did I feel nerdy watching this movie). Every frame is painstakingly filled with references to something somewhere that you would consider nerdy. Sometimes it's obvious like King Kong interrupting a race, or Iron Giant and a Gundam fighting Mechagodzilla, sometimes it's lain out in the dialogue like the offer of a Millenium Falcon, figuring out which Atari game fits the puzzle, or chanting a spell from Excalibur, sometimes it's an avatar or NPC like Harley Quinn and Joker in the virtual club, Duke Nukem being beaten in PvP, or Tracer from Overwatch in the final battle, sometimes it's an item like a weapon or a vehicle like Akira's bike (not a Light Cycle, I promise), the Battlestar Galactica, Monty Python's Holy Hand Grenade, or a coffin shaped like a Photon Torpedo in Star Trek, sometimes it's a setting like Planet Doom, Minecraft World, or the Overlook Hotel, sometimes it's something in the background like Dungeons and Dragons graffiti, a Donkey Kong Jr poster, or someone wearing a Joy Division T-shirt, or sometimes it's even an action like the T-800s thumbs up, a hadouken from Street Fighter, or a dance-off to Bee Gees Stayin' Alive.
And what I've mentioned is just scratching the surface. To list everything out would take up the entire review and then some, and then I'd probably have still missed out a whole bunch. And even with my own proliferation with pop culture, I still missed over half of the references when I was there, either due a lack of knowledge or familiarity, or simply because I went in deciding to just enjoy whatever I saw, and not to spend the entire time dissecting every scene. Because you could easily go into this movie and spend the entire time picking out every morsel of reference, homage, and easter egg, and end up missing the grander tapestry, at which point you have to wonder why you bothered watching it in the first place.
Ultimately Ready Player One could've fallen at the first hurdle. It could've skirted the easter egg rich universe entirely, or conversely made each reference feel forced and shoehorned in. Instead Spielberg toes the careful balance and makes sure that every little thing either has meaning or importance to the plot, or is so far in the background, surrounded by like-minded homages, that it doesn't even matter. Above all, everything feels natural and like it fits. There's nothing to do with sports or politics or history, it's entirely composed of pop culture spanning from the 40s and 50s all the way up to the modern day, and doesn't appear to favour any type or era of reference over another. Movies, Games, TV shows, even Music and Food are covered so long as they fit the geek requirement.
Of course being set in a virtual reality, about two thirds of the movie is entirely computer generated. But this is not a criticism. The visual effects are fantastic. I went in expecting some rough edges borne of entirely CGI characters, but there wasn't really much of an uncanny valley to cross as each character is so wonderfully unreal. Even for a video game, the effects are so good. It kicks it up at various points, blending CGI and live-action together really well, like with Halliday's library of memories. And of course every reference and homage is recreated to perfection as well. The Gundam appearing in the sky looked like a live-action version of the anime, and the Overlook Hotel is exactly as it was in The Shining (although a little crisper, of course). If nothing else, this attention to detail makes Ready Player One incredibly immersive. It didn't take me long to get dragged into the world so completely that I forgot I was sat in a cinema.
The only criticism I feel I can muster that feels fair is a bit of rushed pacing between the second and third acts. We spend so long establishing the world and getting to know our characters, and suddenly we need to have the big finale and wrap everything up, so it opts to skip out a massive key detail entirely and cover it in dialogue. Also the whole quest to find all three keys should take weeks if not months, but instead it feels like it takes place over a few days at most, and the transition between the second and third acts is so quick it literally feels like a snap of the fingers. The sense of timing is completely lost.
Ready Player One is just pure entertainment and spectacle. There's nothing deep going on here, there's nothing particularly groundbreaking in the more technical aspects, the characters are interesting enough to get you emotionally involved but little more. Spielberg used to be the king of Blockbusters, and while he's focussed more on period and dramatic pieces recently, Ready Player One shows that he hasn't lost his touch. I lost myself in this movie as it strung me along from one plot point to the next. If nothing else, it showed me not only how deep my nerdiness goes, but also shows how comparatively shallow it is compared to others. I give Ready Player One a high 8/10.