The fantasy homage “Ready Player One” would not have had to have the greatest similarity with “ET”, “Jurassic Park”, “Batman” or “Back to the Future”. But with Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” from 2010. In it, two thought architects (played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard) build a dream world. The illusion cannot be maintained. The new sphere of life becomes a trabant city abandoned by all ghosts in which buildings collapse and no one can be seen. But the architect considers the dream to be real life. She kills herself because it considers reality to be unreality. From which she believes to have to awaken violently.
The treacherous problem with Steven Spielberg’s film (also with Ernest Cline’s novel template) is the greatness of the virtual world, the “Oasis”. Anyone who does not want to live in it, whether poor or rich, seems to be to blame. This is the conclusion that you draw from book and film adaptation. In the “Oasis” you can slip into any conceivable role. Be every creature. Have every gender or skin color. Anyone who is not considered a person in our society can finally be a hero there. A home for everyone who feels in the wrong body. Or, to describe it with the word that grew up in the much-cited 1980s: the dream life is horny than the real one. If you can get lost in music and film, you no longer have fun without VR glasses.
“Inception” was a plea for real life. “Ready Player One” only works to a limited extent as a plea for, for example, the freedom of identity as anchored in the LGBT movement. The freedom of self -determination does not exist in the “Oasis”, in Spielberg’s future vision.
“Ready Player One” does not work as a criticism of virtual reality. Although this is emphasized in the end. The hero kisses the heroine, of course in the true world. Because physicality is not so beautiful in the artificial world. A little thin as a take-home message (and a logic hole, because blows and gentle touch in the “Oasis” had left traces).
Kubrick’s bloodbath
The greatest performance of Spielberg is probably less directed, not even in quoting from the treasures of the cinema, but in the licensing of the foreign content and figures that he was allowed to use for his two and a half hour adventure. What he has installed can be researched on the geek sites on the net (it should be hundreds of elements). Unthinkable what difficult negotiations the legal departments suffered before the start of the shoot.
However, as soon as Spielberg builds a setting in peace – which unfortunately occurs too rarely in “Ready Player One” – the result is spectacular. The avatars immerse themselves in Stanley Kubricks Overlook Hotel, from the 1980 film adaptation of the Stephen-King novel “The Shining”. At first glance, it cannot be seen whether he was allowed to use original recordings (the writing room with Torrance ‘notes or room 237), or whether he has recreated it.
A wink to the trips from “Back to the Future”
What the artificial figures are doing in it, hunted by the ax-swinging Jack or Mrs. Massey, is the most worth seeing that the 70-year-old has created for ages. “At the I BING Punked?”, The Ries calls Aech (Lena Waithe) when he is hugged by the witch in the bathroom; He also slips in the hotel hall in the bloodstream, it is a variation of that scene in slow motion that is part of Kubrick’s best known because the flow of river was so difficult to calculate. It looks like an original recording in which the avatars have been perfectly inserted (maybe it is a reconstruction, but you don’t want to know that exactly). Spielberg, to his Spielberg-Art, pays homage to the late friend Stanley Kubrick for a second time, according to “Ai-Artificial Intelligence” from 2001.
The homage to your own pupil, Robert Zemeckis, also works. Spielberg had to incorporate it, because even if he himself was the king of the 80s – the most beloved film of the decade, “back to the future”, the protege shot. Here the “Zemeckis Cube”, a rubic cube, the hero Parzifal (Tye Sheridan) helps. With it, the time can be turned back for 60 seconds – a journey into the past is made possible, a wink to the trips from “back to the future”.
Wikipedia is taken
The dialogues usually work, they are also aimed at people who could understand “Ready Player One” as an anthem on psychedelic drugs (“She doesn’t know what planet she’s on”). Every film has such fans. They are also aimed at nerds who cannot do anything with women, but are lovable guys (“She Wanted to go dancing, so we watched a movie”). And that you can hear Merlin’s spell from John Boorman’s “Excalibur” (1981), one of the most beautiful in cinemas, here again is a gift for all fan boys (he goes like this: Anál Nathrach, Orth ‘Bháis’s Bethad, do Chél Dénmha. Wikipedia is taken. Listening to them is impossible, it sounds different).
Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, as an Avatar a Don Draper crucial), the CEO is owned by a virtual reality monopoly. In a decision rare for Spielberg, however, the villain does not ultimately get death, but he recognizes the beauty of the “oasis”, lowers the weapon and is dissolved. The man is old school, even if he would deny it. He writes his passwords on a cheat sheet by hand.
Greetings from Marvel
There are other action scenes, all outside the overlook hotel where Steven Spielberg dismantled himself. The persecution hunts on the highways in which all laws of physics are overridden are “transformers”, are “Avengers”, they are “Valerian” and “Lego Movie”. Spielberg is a master of the threat from room to room (“hunter of the lost treasure”), but too much per picture happens here. He only creates Marvel moments.
The missed possibilities become even clearer than he makes his own Tyrannosaurus Rex from “Jurassic Park”. The 1993 dino is still one of the most impressive cinema stars because it was created as a perfect mix of real model and computer animation. It was to touch. Maybe what virtual reality should really be. The T-Rex from “Ready Player One” is just a soft animal like from every horror film that plays on an island.
The special thing about the action strips of the 1980s was self-confidence with which the filmmakers told their original stories. The regard to how later generations could find their ideas. The absence of fear of being old -fashioned again soon. Steven Spielberg is trying to take a tribute to his own past, but only uses almost only new means.
Torchborn of the fantasy cinema
Perhaps he should look for new, forward-looking goals in the genre if he does not want to stage a real retro action. Spielberg describes this film as the most third -handed, which he ever realized, after “the white shark” (mechanics that are prone to interference in the water) and “The soldier James Ryan” (subsequent sensation of the Second World War). Both were revolutionary, in average, camera or special effects. You could see that immediately. At least as a layperson, you cannot find out what could have been so difficult about “Ready Player One”. The tricks look just like those in the superhero blockbusters, the avatars as three-dimensional as in James Cameron’s “Avatar”, and it was almost ten years ago.
Spielberg is still considered a torchbore of the fantasy cinema, although in the past 20 years he has only shot two (!) Works that were clearly more popcorn than drama. “Indiana Jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull” and “The adventures of Tim and Struppi: the secret of the unicorn”.
Both had a few great moments, but neither of them was completely successful. “Ready Player One” fits into this list.