Game Over

Rating: 7/10 (31 March 2018)

GRADE: B-
THIS FILM IS RECOMMENDED.
IN BRIEF: A well-made but ultimately empty exercise in virtuoso filmmaking.
JIM'S REVIEW: The DeLoren and Back to the Future. Chucky the Killer Doll from Child's Play. The Overlook Hotel in The Shining. T-Rex from Jurassic Park. The holy McGuffin from Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail...items and places worth mentioning and on view in Stephen Spielberg's lively sci-fi fantasy movie, Ready Player One.
We are taken into the world of virtual reality while worshiping any of the above pop culture reference from the 70's or 80's along the way. Ready Player One is pure escapist fun, but your level of satisfaction will depend entirely on your knowledge base of the trends and fads of the 70's / 80's era. (My level of expertise is in the middling range. All of the gaming references and arcade entertainment in this film were scored zero, but I do have strong creds with the many filmdom referrals with aided in my enjoyment of this film.) Apparently all of our world prior to those eras is non-existent, faded relics of days gone by (except for one word...Rosebud). But celebrating the whiz-bang escapades in an advanced Tron universe may be all one needs to hunker down to prepare for a rollicking good time. After all, we are in the hands and mind of a master director working overtime to impress us, and he sporadically does, if only on a purely visceral level.
Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One takes the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory premise and reboots that golden ticket to an escapist virtual reality game called OASIS where fantasy usurps a dark dystopian future. It is 2045 and as one character says, "Reality is a real bummer." People tune out their humdrum existence and tune in to the latest escape to an alternate world. It is there that a contest created by its crazed owner James Halliday (a winning Mark Rylance) entices them to own this Atari paradise. Unlimited wealth is the goal for whomever wins the most Easter Eggs and unlocks The Mystery of the Three Keys. Enter teen hero Wade (Tye Sheridan), a.k.a Parzival, his avatar counterpart, and his soon-to-be Scooby Doo gang: Aech, Daito, and Sho, plus Wade's love interest, Samantha (Olivia Cooke), a.k.a. Art3mis. It is they vs. CEO baddie Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), all eager for ownership of that coveted prize.
Plot-wise, the film is only continuous chase loop after the next, with very little character development in between. The screenplay by Zak Penn and the author himself try to dole out the exposition and somewhat explain the perimeters of the game for those moviegoers that may be lost in virtual space, but it is very rough around the edges and the story goes increasingly off track. While there is no emotional connection, the movie has much eye-popping effects in its visual look.
Director Spielberg certainly knows his craft, how to set up a scene, establish the high adrenaline pace, and deliver the thrills. Credit him and his editing team, Michael Kahn and Sarah Broshar, the ever-reliable cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and that music score veteran, Alan Silvestri, for their massive contributions. (Highlights include an exciting race car scene and a wonderful sequence into Kubrick territory, a neon-lit disco sequence less so.) This whole enterprise may be a trifle in Mr. Spielberg legacy of films, but it remains a well-made one.
Less successful is the merging of the unreal and real worlds. The human story dulls in comparison with the more exciting fantasy storyline and never registers on an equal par with the virtual reality universe. And even in that unreal world, not all is right. The CGI avatar characters lack definition in their characters and renderings. Everyone seems to have an off-putting cartoonish look about them. They are upstaged by all the visual intricacies of their stunning surroundings and dazzling backgrounds. These figures lack the human details to involve this reviewer. The constant feeling of "this is only a game" interfered with my full pleasure of this movie and the perils they faced just seemed too remote.
As the film reaches its anti-climactic conclusion and the narrative strains for continuity, the film goes top-heavy and into forced overdrive becoming all sound and fury, a distracting cacophony of explosions, noise, smoke, and mirrors...the end result being overdone and empty.
My involvement throughout this movie was diversionary, admiring Mr. Spielberg's sleigh of hand, even if the movie itself was hardly visionary. My overall reaction was always one of entertainment with a lackadaisical resigned feeling. But Ready Player One just may appeal to a younger generation of gamers and its mass targeted audience of teenagers looking for the next thrill to occupy their short attention spans. I just needed a bit more...or less.