An uninteresting and unexplored dystopia

Rating: 5/10 (22 April 2018)

If you are familiar with Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" or Huxley's "Brave New World" then you probably know what a dystopia is. You do not have to be familiar with the lives of the authors to understand that these individuals lived in a world where the present perceptions in the political spectrum led to the slaughter of millions and their works were more of a gaze into a possible future rather than a bad dream that will never happen. And this gaze is passed on to Winston Smith and Bernard Marx who view the nightmare future with their own interesting perspectives. But Wade "Parzival" Watts fails to do so in an interesting manner. My own personal golden rule is "If you want to be the main character in a dystopia, then that's it's not a dystopia."
The main character in a dystopia is not an excellent driver who avoids every obstacle in his path but rather an unsuspecting individual who is just seconds away from crashing his vehicle at full speed in a tree. Tragic, but prevention is an option for the reader and not for the doomed hero.
Parzival does not explore the complex layers that combine and decay a dystopian society(politics, family, war, relationships, economics, faith, individuality, vocabulary) but just behaves in a teenager way, wanting to play a video game the whole day, while fighting the evil adult corporation who does not understand his "culture" and might ruin his online experience. Thus, we are presented to the "Oasis" a virtual reality game that is seemingly played by almost every person on the planet(who occasionally pause it to eat and sleep). While their real world is filled with unattended slums and filled with poor conditions, most of them ignore these problems by escaping in a VR experience where they achieve success(wealth, physical beauty, friendship etc.)
Oddly enough, James Halliday, the designer of the "Oasis" is seen as a savior, worshipped by the new generation for allowing them to ignore rather than facing their problems.
The plot is "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" but instead of a factory of sweets, the prize is the ownership of the "Oasis" itself. It forms the base for an exterior conflict between the evil corporation "IOI" and Parzival, each racing to obtain the three keys and win the challenge. The tension is low because if the characters die in-game, they can just create another one. Interior conflict, an element essential to character development is non-existent. The story itself is black and white, moving fast paced through a nerd's ultimate dream: be the chosen one, find and save the hot chick and become the savior of the world. At least this could have been an interesting monomyth adventure movie but every solution to the conflict was a choice between Deus Ex Machinas(random hadouken) or an entire arsenal of Checkhov's guns(extra life coin). The Main Character had either a special crafted item ready or just pop one up. The romantic part is poorly written. Emotionally drained characters that end up together is an usual bad representation in fiction. For example, if you are chased by dragons while suffering from a disease and hiding while starving in a dark cavern and your loved ones just died(and yes, you have a couple of days to save the world), you will not declare your eternal love to the person aside you. But the death of the main character's loved ones and the danger of the corporation can be easily shrugged off for the hot chick that stands next to you.
Throughout the movie, the scenery is bombarded with hundreds of references to the 90s music, video games and movies, as if infusing it with foreign Easter eggs will somehow add quality to this piece of fiction.
I found some of the jokes to be cringy, but there were a couple of fun ones. And the action can get pretty entertaining, accompanied with some nice animation.
The rest of the characters are as shallow as the MC and are there to just assists the chosen one in fulfilling his quest. As a key advice when you're adding more characters to a piece of fiction, make sure that each and every one of them have their own reasons for doing what they're doing.
The lack of tension, no exploration of ideas, undeveloped characters who are basically kids that outsmart a multibillionaire company make me believe that "Ready Player One" is far from actually being ready. And why build fiction through interesting characters when we can just slowly crawl toward a mirage.