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Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One, by all accounts, should have been a massive success. Adapted from the best selling book, Ready Player One feeds into the audiences nostalgia to deliver an action packed story. Though when Ready Player One finally hit movie screens, audiences felt the specifically forced nostalgia worked against the final film.
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You got it, you got it
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No, this isn't one of the countless King Kong rehashes. It's a scene from Ready Player One
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And it, along with several other odd moments ham-fisted into the movie, are a perfect example
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of how Ready Player One misused its premise. It killed the art of homage, soured our nostalgia
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and ultimately ruined any chance the movie had at relevancy. 2018's Ready Player One is an odd beast
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Adapted from the best-selling novel of the same name by Ernest Cline and directed by Steven Spielberg
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the movie had a respectable amount of money at the box office and was generally well-received by its audience
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On the surface, Ready Player One is just a fun romp through nerd culture
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a love letter to video games, movies, and the entire decade of the 80s
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made by the man responsible for a lot of things being referenced in the first place
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Yet, somehow, it totally disappeared from public consciousness after its release only four years ago
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How could that be? Well, there's a lot about Ready Player One that is often ironically overlooked
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At its core, the Ready Player One movie is about a contest for which the prize
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is half a trillion dollars and full ownership of the Oasis, a virtual reality game most people adopt
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as a sort of replacement for their real lives. The only way to win this contest
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is by obsessing over the recently deceased creator of the Oasis, James Halliday
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and memorizing everything you possibly can about him, particularly his favorite movies, TV shows, and games
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Our protagonist, teenage orphan Wade Watts, is a proper Holiday historian. He's fighting against a corporation called IOI
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which doesn't care at all about Holiday or what the Oasis means to its many users
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IOI is just trying to win the contest because owning the Oasis is roughly equivalent
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to owning the world. So essentially, Ready Player One is the story of a battle
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between a nerd who loves and reveres pop culture and a company who does not. Where Wade sees the
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deeper meaning and value in these cultural classics IOI sees only a tool to be used in the quest for money and power When you take that into consideration there are some aspects of Ready Player One
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that start to feel a little strange. By design, Ready Player One is chock full of references
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We can't quite call them homages, but we'll get to that in a bit. The point is that almost every inch of the screen
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every second of time, and every bit of dialogue is in service to some other well-known IP
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Are you seeing this? Yeah, I see it. That's Kaneda's bike from the Kira
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Remember that Steven Spielberg directed this thing. The king of Hollywood blockbuster events
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and the brilliant mind behind half our collective childhoods obviously knows a thing or two about restraint and reverence
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Yet, it's severely lacking here. But to give credit where it's due, Spielberg was just working with what he had
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Ernest Cline's novel is arguably even more jam-packed with significant names and places than its movie adaptation
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And the overabundance of these references is its own problem. At some point, maybe around the second time Overwatch's Tracer shows up on screen
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your eyes kind of glaze over from the constant barrage of iconography
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The movie ends up becoming a meaningless pop culture-shaped blob. It's bizarre because if you don't think about Ready Player One for too long
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it can be easy to see it as a sort of less cartoony version of the Lego movie
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All our favorite characters are here, coexisting, and we get to enjoy seeing them interact with one another
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Both movies look beautiful and the action is enjoyable. But that line of thinking can only get you so far
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Because while the Lego movie presents itself as silly and not to be taken seriously
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Honey, where are my pants? It does a much better job of examining the properties it's referencing
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Lego's Batman is fun to watch because they deconstruct the character and turn him into something else entirely
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Bruce Wayne? Uh, who's that? Sounds like a cool guy. You can only do that if you really understand the character to begin with
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On the other hand, Ready Player One's Batman reference is literally just saying the character's
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name and showing him to us on screen Because the movie demands to be taken seriously it can play with its references the way the Lego movie does Some of the references in Ready Player One are just simple nods Others are hugely important to
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the plot, but none of them are used for anything more than a play to the audience's nostalgia for
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decades past. Take The Shining sequence, for example. The excuse to have such a beloved movie
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in Ready Player One is that Halliday took his date to see it, even though she wanted to go
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dancing. He apparently always regretted this, so he memorialized his mistake in the Oasis
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But other than the vague connection of Halliday's backstory, this iconography from The Shining is
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virtually pointless, unless you're trying to earn nostalgia points from your audience
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We as viewers get to relive all the best moments from the film through the perspective of Wade's
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friend H, and it's really fun on a visual level. But from a thematic standpoint, there's no reason
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for this extended reference to The Shining, which for the record was a war game sequence in the book
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that tied a little bit better into the plot. But apparently, such a dramatic difference in genre
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tone, and theme of the movie you're trying to pay homage to doesn't matter as much as a cool shot of the blood elevator
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And while that is very obviously just a shameless, mostly harmless hit of nostalgia for the audience
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there are other references in Ready Player One that are actively harmful to the source material
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The first key challenge in the movie is an admittedly awesome action sequence
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wherein Wade has to race against a bunch of other hopeful winners and escape various obstacles along the way
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One of those obstacles is King Kong. After striking a familiar pose
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he leaps from the top of the Empire State Building and causes some deadly destruction around the racetrack in the city
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while Wade and the others try to avoid him. This is where things get a little dicey
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The original 1933 King Kong film and most of the revisits since
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have been about humankind's exploitation of nature and have made some attempts to characterize Kong as a kind of gentle giant
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a monster of man's own making. Ready Player One's Kong is certainly a monster
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and that's about as far as the reference goes. The movie reduces him to a physically recognizable shell
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that not only ignores but directly contradicts the intent of the original creators And that far from the only time the movie does this The most glaringly obvious example of the issue is Ready Player One use of the Iron Giant
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Where'd you find an Iron Giant? Find it? I'm building it. Brad Bird's 1999 animated movie debut was created after the tragic death of his sister
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The Iron Giant himself was intended to be an anti-gun and anti-war symbol. Knowing that
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it's a little jarring to see the Iron Giant in Ready Player One used as a glorified power-up
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in an all-out war against Mechagodzilla. These references aren't just clumsy, they're thoughtless
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which is why it's hard to call any of these over 100 references in Ready Player One an homage
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To be an homage, a reference needs to be done with respect and a thorough understanding of
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the source material. Ready Player One doesn't seem to get that, possibly because half the time
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Spielberg is just damaging himself. So for a movie and franchise that claims to be on the side of the pop culture-loving nerd
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at the center of its story, it sure does seem to have a lot more in common with its corporate villain
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Like IOI, Ready Player One engages with the nostalgic properties it references, only as
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far as it takes to get what they want out of them. In the case of IOI, that's the possession of the Oasis
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But for Ready Player One, it's the adoration of fans and enough profit to make a sequel
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In their quest for money and power, Warner Bros. and Amblin Entertainment cheapened the properties they purported to love
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In some cases, they cheapened properties they even had a direct hand in creating
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And that's not to say that the entire movie is terrible. We mentioned how great the visuals were and how intensely awesome the action is
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Spielberg has always known how to make huge event movies, and Ready Player One is no different on that front
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Even watching a clip out of context can't diminish how polished and fun the movie is to watch
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and that deserves to be commended. But in the end, with such a massive emphasis on the
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recognizable media that surrounds the movie, Ready Player One consequently has no identity for
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itself. The shallow inclusion of memorable franchises and the strip mining of them to
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bleed nostalgic dollars out of a movie going public has paradoxically actually made the
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finished film much more forgettable
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