Review: Ready Player One

“Ready Player One is a love letter to pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s. However, does letting loose an avalanche of pop culture images make a film great, or is it like tipping open a box full of Lego and watching it flood across your bedroom floor? Fun as you do it, but then you realise you’ll have to pick it all up eventually.”

Let me say this up front, I might not have been in the best frame of mind for a fun movie like this one when I saw it. Only a couple of hours earlier, a beloved pet passed away unexpectedly. But as the tickets were already bought, we still went along.

That said, I still gave the movie my full attention. And I’d been looking forward to it. And did it work? Kinda…. But to be honest, Wreck It Ralph did it better.

You see, what Wreck It Ralph did, was it referenced a whole lot of retro computer game characters, but mostly in one area of the story and the rest of the time, it was its own thing. But Ready Player One baths in pop culture references, uses them as plot points, and at times feels like it’s a weird internet fan made movie that cuts a whole lot of films together and inserts video game footage to fill in the gaps.

The story is fairly straight forward and we explore a variety of mini plots within the overall structure, as our heroes complete each level. However, none of these mini plots have any great resonance and they use other films and games to make them work. So in one, we have the DeLorean from Back to the Future going all Super Mario Kart whilst Kong and the T-Rex from Jurassic Park try to prevent it from reaching the finish line. It’s cool to see some of these things, but I just watched Back to the Future, and that’s a much better film.

The next world borrows even more, by having the characters literally in the world of Stephen King’s The Shinning. Again, it’s cool to see some recreation of a classic film, but I could also just watch the classic film and enjoy that one more. See this takes famous elements, but then just uses them in uninspired ways, as our just characters run away.

As we spend most of the film in a computer simulation, for me it was quite uninspiring to watch. The film very much takes the look of an actual current computer game, which makes sense, but unless you’re a gamer, you might find yourself wondering why you’ve spent money to sit and watch Steven Spielberg make a ‘let’s play’ video… The visual style removes a lot of the cinematic element of the film too, and as a result I felt I could have just watched it on my laptop.

I did laugh at times and I did enjoy some aspects of the film, but not in a way that would send me back for another look. The acting is fairly flat from the actual human characters, and it seems that Ben Mendelsohn is starting to become the go to man of villainous roles, which sadly don’t give him enough to do.

Gamers will love it, and on a different day, maybe I would have too. But the plot is too buried in a sea of ‘ooh look, a Gremlin’ ‘oh look, the Iron Giant’ ‘hey, there’s Batman’. It’s not Spielberg at his best in my opinion. I expected that classic Spielberg feeling that he has created in so many films of this genre, but it wasn’t quite that way and I was left thinking I’d rather be watching the classics of the 80s and 90s that this film uses so frequently.

The five bearded questions:

1. Was it worth a cinema trip? Kinda

2. Would I See It Again at the Cinema? No

3. Would I buy it on Blu-ray: (only films I really love get bought these days) No 4. Do I Recommend people see it? Only if you’re a gamer, otherwise wait for blu-ray/ Netflix.

5. Any cheese/ Disney style bullshit?: (such as jokes wedged in at serious moments, because fun!). It’s jokey, but it’s supposed to be.