We're not gonna need a bigger film

Rating: 9/10 (14 April 2018)

For Ernest Cline, the prospect of The Steven Spielberg even acknowledging Ready Player One, let alone directing its cinematic adaptation, must have felt as head-explodingly awesome but utterly impossible as a high-five from Indiana Jones. And yet, in the words of a certain Doctor Malcolm: life found a way. And, to those (not unfairly) worrying that the iconic Spielberg would lack the ironic distance to do justice to Cline's hyperactive, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mashup of 80s/90s pop culture nerd nostalgia: hold onto your butts.* It's been seven long years since Tintin, after which Fun Spielberg buried his head into the muted realm of historical biopics. But, like the Terminator, boy is he back, baby, and making up for lost time like nobody's business. In the thick of an entertainment industry currently ruled by the iron first of nerd chic, Spielberg's Ready Player One feels like a Donkey Kong-sized warm hug (with accompanying a-Ha soundtrack, natch) - an unironic love letter to loving things, told with consummate affection and plenty of gusto by a master storyteller. It's a visually dazzling, uninhibitedly indulgent kaleidoscope of nostalgia, old-fashioned in the best possible sense (mostly), and rambunctiously fun from Van Halen to Hall & Oates.
But, for those poor audiences who have never picked up a video game controller, fear not: there is more to Ready Player One than a 'Where's Waldo' of pop culture cameos (though it's hard to imagine a film that will ever benefit more from revisitation with freeze-frame capacity). It's a jubilantly jaunty grand ol' adventure romp - an action remix of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? meets Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory if you will, and easily as fun, albeit less groundbreaking, than both. The plot is a furious pinball of episodic adventures, which, necessarily, boils down and speeds up Cline's more expansive odyssey without losing its zippiness or stakes. Spielberg, to his credit, plays it straight with adorable old-school earnestness, even if some of the script's more overly convenient contrivances and antiquated gender roles that come along for the ride don't play nearly as well now as they would've in their heyday (Cline's novel unpacks toxic gamer masculinity a bit more deftly than Wade's more rudimentary heroism here).
Still, it's hard to nit-pick a transparently superfluous plot in the face of such a thrillingly dense virtual world. The film's visual effects are jaw-dropping, bringing each digital planet and avatar in engrossing game-world 'the Oasis' to life with such painstaking attention that we bypass the claustrophobic artifice exhaustion that would customarily come with such CGI overload. Even more laudable: anchoring the film with two plasticine-y Final Fantasy-esq avatars without them grating. Spielberg cleverly starts with a splashy racetrack blowout (far more exhilarating than the stale trailer footage would suggest), then ramps up the spectacle slowly, before letting it rip with a bonkers kitchen sink climax, almost deliriously fun in its crowd-pleasing excesses (The Iron Giant vs. Mechagodzilla? YES PLEASE). Alan Silvestri's joyfully thundering musical score (and a bevy of perfectly timed '80s tunes) triumphantly rounds out the fun, replete with its own collection of musical cameos. Great Scott, but there is fun to be had.
It helps immensely to see Spielberg reigniting his Minority Report flair for deliciously weird comedy beats. He finds such perverse glee in a room full of corporate stooges running menacingly on treadmills with VR headsets, like a call centre of gaming hamsters, or in tormenting audiences expecting a nonstop bubblegum fun-fest with a transparently indulgent second act foray into Kubrick's The Shining - a tonal shift so jarringly terrifying you can practically hear Spielberg cackling in the background. Still, even scarier is Spielberg turning his pop culture icon eye inwards, ever so lightly rapping the knuckles of those who deep dive a little too much into fantasy worlds, and gently reminding them to live in, and appreciate, the real world as well. It's a commentary that might rankle some of the film's key demographic, but essential to Ready Player One being more than blatant fan service: love what you love uninhibitedly, Spielberg and Cline urge us, but remember that pop culture is meant to accentuate the real world, not run away entirely from it. It's as profound as the film ever gets, but it resonates. No one wants to turn into a suited hamster-ball drone... right?
Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, and Lena Waithe are all perfectly pleasant as the lead gamers-turned-world saviours, appropriately fun and charismatic without ever rocking the boat of their cardboard cutout archetypes. Ben Mendelsohn adds an endearingly safe-effacing comedic undercurrent to what is otherwise a complete retread of his Rogue One sinister bureaucrat schtick, while T.J. Miller provides reliable comic relief as his caustically cantankerous muscle. Still, it's Mark Rylance who easily steals the show as Wonka-esq gaming maverick James Haliday. Adorably convincing as a ferociously antisocial tech geek, while conveying volumes of mischievous playfulness or voluminous regret with the slightly movement of his eyes or mouth, Rylance is as larger-than-life as he is profoundly human, and he elevates Spielberg's material immensely. Finally, though tragically restricted to an underserved cameo, Simon Pegg still blusters adorably like the best of them in his fleeting screentime.
Ready Player One is a distinctly niche film - enormously fun, but not always more than the sum of its parts, and those who can't tell their Space Invaders from their Galaga are, admittably ,likely to lose out on the full effect. But, if Lara Croft, Beetlejuice, Marvin the Martian, some Halo Spartans and World of Warcraft orcs racing down a freeway in a Delorean, 1960s Batmobile, A-Team battle van, Akira bike and more, dodging King Kong and a t-rex gets your blood pumping as much as mine is from writing that sentence, chances are you'll devour the film with a befitting bombastic, escapist gluttony. And that's a guilty pleasure worth dropping a quarter or two into.
-8.5/10
*Yep - two Jurassic Park nods in two sentences. Deal with it, n00bz.