If you are a gamer, you are going to absolutely love Ready Player One movie. Even if you are not, don’t worry, it is a spectacle for sore eyes. Will still leave you wonderstruck. The flick is a pageant of allure carefully crafted to make you feel exhilarated at every juncture. Built on a gaming spindle, it’s a wild joyride that should not be missed for the world.
Steven Spielberg weaves a deserving film to an extraordinary story written by Ernest Kline. Who doesn’t dream of living under a different skin, of being someone else? Ready Player One movie channels that fantasy in the form of OASIS, a place where you get to be someone else. How cool is that!
Theme and Direction
Built on the concept of VR, that teleports you into a different world (the one that doesn’t suck), you can be whatever you want to be. Just imagine yourself as a creature from your favorite flick, or a character from a game or movie you loved, or simply create your very own avatar and start living it. It is as simple as that.
People come to the OASIS for all the things they can do, but they stay for all the things they can be.
Camera movements are simply next level, and you can’t help but think how much of incomprehensible work it might have undergone to ace a rad scene. The action in Ready Player One is fast-paced so much that you want to stop the whole thing for a second to go back and watch it all slowly. It’s just downright orgasmic. You feel the same amount of, or maybe more, adrenaline rush just as you do when you are playing one of your favorite games. It’s simply overwhelming and intensely satisfying.
The Plot of Ready Player One Movie (Spoilers)
Ten minutes into the movie and it is already spilling visually striking juices that are too hot to handle. You are hit by a conglomeration of characters that are out of the world, each having their own unique and specific characteristics. And such beautifully have they been put together in a single frame that you can’t help but appreciate the effort of the VFX team. How meticulously every frame has been painted!
There’s a race in the very beginning that will simply leave you in awe. It is just mind-numbing, one of those high tides that will prepare you for what’s to come. It also quickly fills you in on the story of Ready Player One Movie. James ‘Anorak’ Halliday played by Mark Rylance (Spielberg’s favorite), has placed an Easter egg in the OASIS, to be opened with three keys that are hidden. The finder is to inherit ownership and full control of OASIS.
In the form of my avatar, Anorak the all knowing. I created three keys. Three hidden challenges test worthy traits, revealing three hidden keys to three magic gates. And those with the skill to survive these strengths will reach the end, where the prize awaits.
Gunters (Egg Hunters) have completely dedicated themselves to finding the key. There is also a fully dedicated organization called IOI, headed by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who has hired researchers, top gamers, and Sixers to get the job done.
First Key
So far everyone has been unsuccessful until the protagonist Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a 17-year-old lad, understands the first clue to figure out the whereabouts of the first key that was hidden at the very beginning of the race. It’s like a cheat code that delivers you directly to the exit. It is brilliantly thought of and pulled of.
His avatar Parzival befriends Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) when he saves her life from getting “zeroed” (a surefire death in OASIS that takes away all your avatar progress in reality) by the hands of a King Kong.
Parzival: Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it’s a simple adventure story…
Art3mis: Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe.
He has Aech (Lena Waithe) for a companion, whom he has never met in person but has built up an online bond with. Players Daito and Sho are also kind of like his clan. So he tells them all the clue to finding the first key as they follow suit. Together they top the scoreboard and become famous as the “High Five”.
i-R0k (T. J. Miller) is a mercenary hired by Sorrento to find out the true identity of Parzival. In an OASIS dance club, Parzival makes that task easy as he tells Art3mis his real name, in an attempt to tell her how he felt. Parzival is identified as Wade Watts by Sorrento who then tries to convince him to join IOI. When Wade refuses, Sorrento bombs his ‘stack’ with the help of F’Nale Zandor (Hannah John-Kamen) believing him to be there. In that process, Wade’s aunt dies.
Second Key
Waking up he meets Art3mis in the real world – Samantha. Together they hunt for the second key figuring out the fact that Halliday was in love with Kira, who later went on to marry Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg), his best friend.
She wanted to go dancing, so we watched a movie.
They end up in a horrific recreation of The Shining movie where the second key is hidden. That part is absolutely stunning, almost puts you back in time and ravishes it with a twist of course. Art3mis is the one to retrieve the key.
A creator who hates his own creation. A hidden key: a leap not taken. Retrace your steps, escape your past. And the key of Jade will be yours at last.
Meanwhile, Zandor tracks Wade to the hideout but Samantha lets Wade escape allowing herself to be captured. She is turned into a Sixer for exceeding her family debt.
Wade meets all the real world avatars of Aech, Daito, and Sho and is surprised to find them all different than imagined.
She could actually be a 300 pound dude who lives in his momma’s basement in suburban Detroit. And her name is Chuck.
i-R0k meanwhile creates a force field using the Orb of Osuvox around the final key which is located on Planet Doom. Wade tricks Sorrento into revealing Samantha’s location and helps her escape. With her help, Wade invites all the OASIS players for an all-out assault against the Sixers and Sorrento. Samantha deactivates the force field suited up as a Sixer, allowing OASIS players to carry on a fully fledged attack on Sorrento’s army.
It’s fucking Chucky!
Sorrento surprises everyone with his MechaGodzilla avatar but is attacked by Daito’s avatar of Gundam. The fight is just brilliant as Art3mis is the one who puts MechaGodzilla down allowing the rebels to win. Sorrento mad as hell searches for Samantha amongst his Sixers, but she narrowly escapes when Wade zeroes her Sixer avatar and asks her to meet the team in the real.
Third Key
Parzival and Sho discover that the last key revolves around a game from Atari 2600. They find out that no matter which game the Sixers try their luck on, time expires for them. Even when a Sixer beats the game of Adventure he still loses. Pressed in a dire situation, a fight ensues between Sorrento and Parzival as the Cataclyst (a kind of bomb) zeroes everyone on the Planet Doom.
Luckily Parzival is revived with an extra life that was given to him in the form of a coin by the curator of Halliday’s museum when Parzival had won a bet against him. Eventually, Parzival figures out that the clue is not to win the game of Adventure but to find its very own Easter egg. He finds out the easter egg hidden in the Adventure game and obtains the last key.
The Ending
Anorak gives Parzival a contract to be signed which he refuses believing it to be a test, since a similar chapter had happened in the life of Morrow when he had signed a contract that had dissolved his partnership with Halliday. Considering that decision to be the correct one, Anorak metamorphoses into Halliday providing him with the Golden Egg and declares him the winner.
I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I just didn’t know how to connect with people there. I was afraid for all my life, right up until the day I knew my life was ending. And that was when I realized that as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place that you can get a decent meal. Because, reality is real.
The police arrests Sorrento and Zandor after they receive Aech’s tape that has recorded Sorrento’s conversation with Wade that had resulted in the stacks attack. Wade shares his award with the High Five hiring Morrow as his consultant, who is revealed to be the curator who had given him the coin. OASIS once again begins its operations giving Tuesdays and Thursdays off to allow people to stay more in the real world.
All the Easter Eggs
Ready Player One movie builds up itself on nostalgia as it brings to forefront characters from the past. It is like a fully loaded movie having a bazillion Easter Eggs per se. You have got to have its Blu-ray or something just to literally stop each frame to find characters hidden inside the movie.
Here’s where you can order Ready Player One movie from:
Ready Player One movie milks them all aplenty with cameos from a T-Rex, King Kong, R2-D2, X-Wings, Harley Quinn and the Joker, Chucky, Tracer, Chun-Li, Ryu, Deathstroke, El Dragon, Blanka, Battletoads, Ninja Turtles, Halo, Freddy, Jason, Batman, Mach 5, Bigfoot, DeLorean, Banzai, The Iron Giant, Battlestar Galactica, Alien, Aliens, Clark Kent, Hulk, Marvin the Martian toy, Goro, Beetlejuice and what not.
What aces them all is the recreation of The Shining. It is gory and scary, probably the most entertaining and cherishable part of the entire movie. It literally puts you inside the movie with different camera angles that Stanley Kubrick hadn’t picked. What is wonderful is that it becomes something more, and something else entirely as even more formidable elements lurk in its climax.
Aech: I’ve never seen the Shining. Is it really scary?
Sho: I had to watch it through my fingers.
The Final Verdict
Ready Player One movie stands as an exemplary paragon of what technology can do. And if you hand over that technology to someone like Steven Spielberg, you get something entirely out of the box. If you wish to experience what gaming is all about and what it is to become in the long run, the cinema hall where this movie thrives is a perfect place to visit.
It is a movie that might not do as much justice to the book as we expect, but it does far more justice than you expect from an adaptation. Ready Player One movie gives you everything that you get when you play a really good game.
Check out our other Steven Spielberg movie reviews as well.
Check out the trailer of Ready Player One movie here:
Ready Player One
Pros
- Ripping Concept
- Fantastic Plot
- Masterly Direction
- Stunning Visual Effects
Cons
- Somewhere the screenplay front compromises
- That Book to Movie Curse
