'Ready Player One' Review: The Consumption of Media

Ready Player One is based off of Ernest Cline’s highly praised novel of the same name and is tackled by legendary Hollywood director, Steven Spielberg. In Cline’s novel, he takes off into a relatively distant future where technology and reality clash like we see today. The book is chalked full of pages that list off characters, IPs, and pieces of media from the past that not only defined our childhood, but entertainment itself. In Spielberg’s Ready Player One, there was a quiet disturbance amongst members of the film community that was concerned the film would be a two hour long slugfest of nostalgia that felt like taking a brick to the face. To be fair, audiences had every right to worry due to a mediocre marketing campaign that plugged in these characters into infamous pop culture content. The trailers dazzled in promising lots of, “look, point at this cool reference with your friends” footage while listening to your dad’s favorite track that he had on his “hip” Walkman back in the Spring of '82. None of this looked or sounded appealing, except maybe to the average film-goer, but what may come to everyone’s surprise is how Spielberg’s Ready Player One is more than the nostalgia pandering we all thought it would be.

Ready Player One contains high octane thrills with movie memorabilia zooming across the screen, and the sound design and cinematography delivers in astronomical ways. Spielberg’s run of “dad movies” was stalled for this project and his sensibilities felt just as inspired now as they did in 1993. In many ways, this acts as a personal project for Spielberg and he utilizes many techniques we saw during the “prime Spielberg era” and implements them here with some of the creatures, characters, and worlds he created or assisted with during production. There probably isn’t anyone else in Hollywood that could have made this movie other than Steven Spielberg.

From the get go it does get a little exposition-heavy and the references come in at a fast and furious rate, but it only lasts for a brief amount of time and it’ll be forgotten when you’re instantly whisked away into The Oasis. Spielberg wasted no time in visiting this virtual reality where mostly everyone wants to live. It’s a transport into a world of escapism where virtual currency can be earned, people can be met, casinos can be gambled at, dances can be shared, and chaos can run amok while everyone searches for Jim Halliday’s dying gift to his creation, an Easter egg. An egg that grants the winner Halliday’s fortune left behind in his wake and the ability to rule The Oasis. The Egg is the film’s MacGuffin, and to get to that point it’s a wild adventure for Wade Watts and his virtual friends that he meets along the way. Once in The Oasis, all sense or worry about the real world is gone and it’s just the player and this immersive and expansive world with vast corners full of new places to visit. Yes, there’s references left and right, characters we’ve seen 1,000 times, but when you realize that all of these things are in the world, it makes sense why they would be there.

Halliday is like any other content creator. He has real life experiences that influence his creation. His attachments to pop-culture inspired the work he created and wants players/consumers to participate in the creator’s life and pivotal moments in his reality that helped create a virtual one. That’s the core of what the film is trying to say. Ready Player One isn’t a film that wants to give audiences a good time because of what they fell in love with before. It’s a film that wants us to realize why we consume media the way that we do. Why we feel like we belong in exciting new worlds alongside a multitude of different characters going on miraculous and larger than life adventures. How media has evolved over time from film projection to digital projection and how big time corporations want to industrialize media by essentially ripping out the magic that comes along with it.

Long story short, Ready Player One is simply magical. Boasting a wonderful cast, dynamite sound design and mixing, inspired direction, and one of the most habitable worlds in recent memory, it’s a film you don’t want to miss on the biggest screen possible. Take your friends and family to visit a world full of soul-crushing reality and imaginative virtual reality where memories are shared and new alliances are forged. Ready Player One is just as much a science-fiction film as it is a glorious high octane adventure that Hollywood hasn’t touched in years. It’s a harken back to the films and properties of old that inspired all of the media we consume today, and a look into the future of what technology can accomplish based on the media that inspired it. As humans, we’ve always had the desire to project ourselves into new worlds as heightened versions of ourselves and the projections we would like to create are inspired by the types of media we consume. Ready Player One is personal, honest, adventurous, thrilling, and full of reality that amplifies the virtual realm we desperately want to visit. When the credits begin to roll you’ll take a deep breath and realize that this movie sparks a thought that this is why we obsess over film in the first place and why we’ll never stop consuming media the way that we do. Ready up.

Ready Player One gets a 90/100