Ready Player One

READY PLAYER ONE   ***

Steven Spielberg

2018

IDEA:  In a squalid and overpopulated 2045, an enormous free-roaming virtual reality system called OASIS allows people to escape the drudgery of their lives. When the world learns of a hidden game the program's late creator designed into the system - one that would grant the winner ownership of OASIS - a young gamer sets out to beat it.

BLURB:  Ready Player One is in many ways the apogee of Steven Spielberg’s genre cinema, a nostalgia-baked fantasia of popular culture that giddily presents itself as a monument to commercial spectacle. Exercising his characteristic filmmaking vigor, here intensified by the possibilities of an infinitely malleable virtual environment, the director has taken material that can be only descriptive on the page and made it into the very embodiment of the all-consuming mass culture with which it is obsessed. Through its seamless synthetic form, Ready Player One potently extrapolates how this mass culture might continue to manifest in the digital era: as not merely a ceaseless stream of branded content, but as a full-bodied sensory integration with the media apparatus, a lived simulacral state where representation has swallowed reality. In figuring such a reality, a literally virtual one within the film’s diegesis, Spielberg, Kaminski, and an army of effects artists have crafted a virtuosic orchestration of movement within a space whose dematerialized status allows for the liberation of the physical camera gaze. One can feel Spielberg, the eternally wide-eyed wiz kid, exulting in this unbounded mode of image-making – everything from his exhilaratingly kinetic action sequences to the uncanny blending of iconic pop culture scenes and characters buzz with the enthusiasm of a creator given free reign in a limitless sandbox. And if Ready Player One’s trite storytelling and retrograde politics fail to match the scope of its aesthetic vision, they do little to mitigate the film as an exemplar of the media culture that produced it.