Spielberg channels his inner kid to make ‘Ready Player One’

EUR: In your Vanity Fair article you said, ‘you’re exhausted of other people telling our stories, ‘ what’s the next door you going to tell for us? Tye Sheridan, who wowed us in 2012’s “Mud”, Olivia Cooke (TV’s “Bates Motel“) and Lena Waithe – an Emmy victor for a “Master of None” episode – play the three main characters.

An ’80s-obsessed programmer named James Halliday (Mark Rylance) offers a lucky hunter the keys to his virtual reality kingdom in Steven Spielberg’s Re. Whoever wins gets 100 trillion dollars. If they band together.maybe they may succeed. It’s that story of an unlikely friendship with someone who is an “alien” which I think is so relatable because a lot of us feel alienated and isolated in our own lives because we’re the only ones who can truly feel what we feel.

But when Parzival and his OASIS friends, including Aech (pronounced H) and Art3mis (pronounced Artemis), inch closer to the prize, Sorrento is determined to do everything in his power – in both worlds – to stop them in their tracks, and take the OASIS for himself. But given the importance of this particular video game to Cline’s dystopian future, passing it is more or less tantamount to saving the world. Also, when this book first came out, it was not as controversial or sociopolitical as people have made it out to be. I was just working with actors and setting up shots. I just really love the way he tells a story. One has to take into the consideration when this book was written (2011). before Gamer Gate occurred and before #Metoo and before Trump.

Cline and Penn managed to instantly eradicate Pegg’s concerns, though. It’s also not as narratively crisp as the typical Spielberg film, especially on first viewing, when the frenetic pace and sensory overload are palpable. Then, he began to collaborate with other gunters.

“I mean, I’ve seen a lot”.

Virtual reality is enticing to those suffering in a world of limited resources, plunged into longtime recession and with people living in poverty-stricken areas like the “stacks” that the protagonist, Wade Watts, lives in, as in stacked up mobile homes.

At the end of the film, Wade tells the audience via voiceover that he and his team of buddies introduced a new schedule for the OASIS after winning the challenges, decreeing that the whole thing shuts down on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

In a Facebook livestream in December, 2017, Cline said he got a chance to bounce some sequel ideas off Spielberg, so the duo are obviously keenly aware of the hype behind the film and the likelihood of fans and the studio wanting a Part 2. That is the real take on it.

I couldn’t help but think of such a device from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (with the heart of the original film) and embrace Wade and his online pals searching for a golden ticket. There is also more of a connection with his school and how he struggles to get the first key because he does not have enough units to buy to get to other planets.

References to the Atari 2600 gaming system, Batman, Buckaroo Banzai, “Back to the Future“, Chuckie from “Child’s Play”, King Kong, Jeeves of the search engine Ask.com, the robot from “The Iron Giant“, a Rubik’s Cube, “Stayin’ Alive” from “Saturday Night Fever” and Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” swirl in a soup teeming with forgotten trash and fondly remembered treasures. The results are astonishing and, combined with pure CGI, raise the bar on special effects. “I feel like they really captured the performances and the chemistry that Tye and I had on the day”, said Cooke.

But the universe of “Ready Player One” remains a loving, fanboy homage to the escapist entertainments Spielberg did more than anyone to create.

The critics have been mainly positive, yielding a 79 per cent “fresh” rating from more than 200 reviews collated by Rotten Tomatoes, which described it as “a sweetly nostalgic thrill ride” that played to Spielberg’s strengths.

But in spite of its moral criticisms, “Ready Player One” remains an unabashed love letter to the pop culture of the 1980s, from its John Hughes trivia dialogue to its time-rewinding Robert Zemeckis joke right down to its persistent soundtrack, which sweeps us from Van Halen to Tears for Fears to Hall and Oates.