Butler's Cinema Scene

“READY PLAYER ONE” My rating: B
140 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

That most films based on video games suck mightily should come as no surprise…video games are all about dishing visceral thrills, not building dramatic momentum or developing characters.

This is why Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” is such a remarkable achievement. Instead of attempting to wrestle the video gaming experience into a standard dramatic format, this surprisingly entertaining entry is really just one long video game, albeit a game with so much pop-culture name dropping that geeks will spend countless hours documenting all the visual and aural references.

Think “Tron” to the nth degree.

Don’t go looking for the usual plot developments or relatable characters. The strength of  “Ready Player One” lies in its ability to create an totally plausible fantasy world that operates by its own rules.  At times the audience’s immersion in this universe is total and totally transporting.

The screenplay by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline (based on Cline’s novel) unfolds in the year 2045.  Economic and environmental disasters have left the working class chronically unemployed.  They live in “stacks,”  mini-high rises made of mobile homes resting on metal frameworks. In this world video games are the opiate of the masses — when they’re not eating, sleeping or taking bathroom breaks, the citizenry are experiencing virtual realities through 3-D goggles.

This is the world of Wade (Ty Sheridan of “Mud,” “Joe” and the X-Men franchise), a shy teen whose on-line avatar is the game-savvy Parzival.  Wade/Parzival is a devotee of The Oasis, a massive video game developed by the late programming guru Halliday (played by Mark Rylance in flashbacks) and so complex and challenging that in the years since its inception no player has come close to beating it. But millions log in daily in an attempt to find three hidden keys that will unlock Halliday’s fantasy world and grant the winner ownership of the unimaginably wealthy Oasis empire.

The challenge attracts not just individual gamers like Parzifal and on-line buddies like the hulking giant Aech or the samurai warrior Daito.  The IOI corporation and its Machiavellian director Sorrento (Ben Mendelssohn) has its own army of players who compete for the prize.   The person — or business — that solves the game’s many puzzles will in effect become one of Earth’s dominant forces.

Tye Sheridan

Probably 90 percent of “Ready Player One” unfolds in the computer-generated Oasis, and it is here that our hero meets and falls for Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), an avatar with punky red hair and the eyes of a Keane kid. Art3mis is a major player and sexy/cute…never mind that in the real world “she” might very well be a 300-pound loner living in his mom’s basement

The plot follows Parzival as he moves step by step closer to solving Oasis’ mystery…but plotting issn’t what this movie is selling.  Far more important is its overall  vision.

The late Halliday was a rabid consumer of pop culture and he crammed The Oasis with references from film, TV, music and of course video games.

The first challenge is a totally insane road race through a city in which drivers must dodge swinging wrecking balls, a rampaging Tyrannosaurus and a skyscraper-hopping King Kong.

From that point on virtually every frame has some sort of geeky Easter Egg. Characters strike the poses of figures in famous movie posters. One avatar is building a life-sized mechanical robot based on the 1999 animated film “The Iron Giant.”

There’s a Rubik’s Cube-like hand puzzle called the Zemeckis Cube that, when solved, allows its avatar user to turn back time (a reference, of course, to director Robert Zemeckis’ time-traveling “Back to the Future” films). The Holy Hand Grenade from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” shows up at one point, and an entire sequence unfolds in the Overlook Hotel, the setting of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”

It’s exhausting but exhilarating.

And along the way “Ready Player One” gets off a couple of warning shots about a dystopian future run by the one percent and the dangers of turning our backs on the real world for on-line escapism.

| Robert W. Butler