Ready or Not

Before we watched Ready Player One (2018), I had listened to several podcasts about it, including the Mike Nelson/Conor Lastowka “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back” podcast about the book. Now I haven’t read the book, nor do I intend to. But I was perfectly ready to hate the movie. Actually, it wasn’t that bad - I’ve enjoyed worse.

It is set in the Future - 2045, when everything has gone to pieces and people all live inside virtual reality, called OASIS. OASIS was invented by Mark Rylance, an uber-geek who has recently died. As his will, he set up a massive puzzle game in OASIS, with three Easter eggs. The person who solves the puzzles and finds the eggs will inherit control of the OASIS and a bazillion dollars.

Teen Tye Sheridan is Parzival, an egg hunter, or “gunter”. This neologism seems to annoy most people more than anything else about this story. He has a friend who he’s never met in person, Aetch. They are typical teens, doing typical teen things in virtual reality. Sheridan meets up with Art3mis, a cute and somewhat famous gunter, and they bond. Together they solve the first puzzle, a racing game. Then they visit the Archives, where a robot curator shows them everything known about Rylance. This lets them solve the second puzzle, set in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel.

This gives director Steven Spielberg a chance to do an extended riff on Stanley Kubrick, which is rather sweet.

Meanwhile, the evil IOI corporation headed by Ben Mendelssohn is trying to solve the puzzles too, by throwing armies of gunters at it. When they see Sheridan getting close, they try to buy him off, then threaten him, bombing the stack of trailers where he lives in real life - so big body count here. He survives, but Art3mis is captured and forced into virtual servitude. With the help of a pair of virtual ninjas, they break her out, and go on to win the game (oh, SPOILER).

When Sheridan meets Aetch in real life, it turns out that “he” is a large black woman, Lena Waithe, which is cool. But what if Art3mis isn’t hot in real life? As it turns out, she has a birthmark over her right eye, but is otherwise totally hot. Again, cool.

The hook to the book is that the puzzles are all based on Rylance’s obsession with the 1980s. So Sheridan drives a Delorean, flies the Millenium Falcon, and Aetch builds an Iron Giant, which, wait a minute, wasn’t really 80s at all. But there really wasn’t a lot of this. I figured Spielberg would stuff his frames to bursting with references. But it was all very restrained.

In fact, we enjoyed this quite a lot. There were some plot deficiencies, but nothing that took me out of it. It was fun, exciting, well made. I don’t think I’ll watch it again, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. Like Wagner.