Ready Player One

I don’t come to this movie with an ax to grind. The book is ridiculous, but I confess that I enjoyed Wil Wheaton’s performance of the audiobook and fully expected Spielberg to elevate the book’s charms while smoothing out its deficiencies. Unfortunately, a lousy script underserves the already paper thin characters and makes changes to the book’s storyline that actually manage to make things worse. Quite apart from the deluge of pointless, numbing pop culture references is the absurd conceit at the heart of this movie: that fanboys and fangirls can save the world by interpreting and obsessing over mundane details in the life of James Halliday, the Jobs-esque creator of the movie’s virtual gameworld The Oasis. There are multiple scenes where our heroes, having followed a clue to a pop-culture-inspired challenge, second guess the seemingly obvious solution because of some quirk of Halliday’s that they happen to have studied earlier that day in a museum dedicated to recreating every moment of his life. If only the script had offered up some quirks and mundane moments relating to our main characters. Despite a glossy and fun presentation (and great performances from Mark Rylance, Ben Mendelssohn, and Lena Waithe), this movie sucks even more than I though it would.