All Style, No Substance
Spielberg needs to watch more Black Mirror.
Technology has made the world unrecognisable in the past decade, and our modern anxieties — from Russian hackers to child grooming — almost all revolve around the consequences of networks and digital media.
Despite its premise, Ready Player One totally fails to examine these anxieties.
My immediate thought on walking out the cinema was: why Spielberg? Yes, this is a big dumb action film romp, but that’s no excuse. In the best examples of that genre, including Spielberg’s own Jurassic Park, the action carries enough weight to highlight the seriousness of the threat. Jurassic Park highlighted fears around bioengineering and ‘playing god’ using advanced science, and Spielberg could have taken the anxieties of the digital era and created as landmark a blockbuster as Jurassic Park. Instead what we get is a simplistic kids-vs-corporation affair, with only Ben Mendelsohn’s great performance as the main villain hinting at more complexity.
The inability of the film to follow through isn’t completely Spielberg’s fault. The book by Ernest Cline, who served as an executive producer, also felt superficial. But in the book Cline does gesture toward deeper anxieties and characterisation, while Spielberg glosses over all the key moments which gave me a reason to care about the plot. Ironically, a movie whose moral is about how to cope with reality becomes little more than escapism.
Spielberg’s worst sin by far is robbing his characters of any kind of development or depth. The three protagonists of the movie all go on their own journeys in the book. Parcival grows from an unfit, cynical nerd who relies on the OASIS for escapism to a media darling who’s able to enjoy life in meatspace. Aech reveals that she takes on the persona of a white man to avoid the discrimination she felt she’d face as a black woman online. And Art3mis grows from hiding her identity due to a lack of confidence over a facial birthmark and her overall build to realising that her outward appearance isn’t important. Although the female protagonists’ development is lacking in the book, it’s non-existent in the film — and Parcival’s lack of development destroys any human interest the film might have.
In all the protagonists’ original character arcs, the themes of escapism and self-making are evident. As Parcival develops, he becomes more able to handle the real world, and learns that he can control his personal appearance and actions in reality just as well as he can in the OASIS. For Aech, her ability to let down her guard and let others see her real identity is what finally allows her to save Parcival at one of the biggest moments of peril in the book. Art3mis’s character is very weak in the book — and it’s perhaps this that encouraged Spielberg to swap her in for Wade in the film’s final action sequence — but she also uses the OASIS to escape what she perceives as major flaws with her appearance.
This character development and the way it ties into key themes is what allows the final revelation of the book, from OASIS creator James Haliday, to have an emotional impact. I found myself bored with the film from about a third of the way through, because I’m given no reason to care about any of the key characters and no clue why any of this contorted plot might be relevant to me.
Someone more in touch with issues around digital technology, like Charlie Brooker, could have enriched Ready Player One by bringing out its key themes and characterisation, while retaining the otherworldly action sequences and pastiched visuals. This is a missed opportunity to make a film which could capture modern anxieties and hopes around the internet. I suspect this is because Spielberg doesn’t really understand those anxieties and hopes beyond a superficial level. For all the film’s multimedia pastiche, the best reference in the film is to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which Spielberg nails by borrowing Kubrick’s cinematographic tricks: fixed cameras, slow zooms, and the judicious use of silence. One gets the feeling Spielberg isn’t quite au fait enough with digital media to integrate its tropes with his cinematic work.
This is telling of the film as a whole, which never seems confident enough to take its own key themes on board or follow through with them, and instead relies on the same cyberpunk tropes we’ve seen since the 80s. In a media landscape where Netflix is taking over much of TV’s market share and Black Mirror is one of the biggest series in the world, Ready Player One feels — dare I say it? — a little old-fashioned.
Overall, a 2 out of 5. While Spielberg’s direction in the Shining scene and action sequences is impressive, it doesn’t save the film from a weak script, poor characterisation, and thematic incoherence.
All images are the copyright of Warner Brothers.
