by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the Blu-Ray disc of the 2018 film Ready
Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg
from a script by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline based on Cline’s novel of the same
title, which Charles and I had both read and enjoyed. The film was considerably
changed from the book — despite the presence of the original author as one of
the screenwriters — but the basic outline of the plot remains the same: in the
U.S. in 2045, conditions for most people have deteriorated so much that they
live in “stacks,” essentially giant columns of old trailers stacked on top of
each other. Real life has become so oppressive and dull that most people spend
most of their time online in an overarching virtual-reality simulator called
“OASIS,” invented 20 years previously by reclusive computer genius James
Halliday (Mark Rylance, dressed so baggily and unsexily it’s hard to remember
this guy has a very large and
blessedly uncut cock — I know that because I’ve seen him in the film Intimacy, a sort of Last Tango in Paris knockoff in which he got to go full-frontal quite a
lot) and his former business partner Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg). Cline has
admitted that the obvious parallel with Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve
Wozniak was intentional, though a lot of the material has the gloss of fiction
— it seems that at one point Halliday had a crush on a woman named Karen,
screen name Kira (just about everyone in this movie has an online OASIS avatar
as well as a real name), only he was too shy to get to first base with her and
she eventually married Morrow just before Halliday forced Morrow out of the
company. Early on in the film we see a video Halliday left to be shown after
his death (I suspect Cline was basing this at least partly on Timothy Leary and
his decision literally to
broadcast his death online) in which he declares that there will be a worldwide
contest in the OASIS to find three hidden keys and an Easter egg (computer
slang for a message or object hidden in a program), and the first person to
find all these items in the OASIS will inherit the entire system from him.
This, of course, has attracted the attention of the villain, CEO Nick Sorrento
(Ben Mendelsohn) of the sinister company IOI (which stands for Interactive
Online Industries), who have thousands of staff members toiling away at
Halliday trivia looking for clues to the keys and the egg, which are hidden and
accessible only to people with an extensive knowledge of 1980’s cultural
trivia. (As Ernest Cline readily admits in one of the bonus featurettes, he was
a teenager in the 1980’s and therefore remembers and experiences the culture of
that period with the sort of nostalgic glow I bring to anything from the
1960’s.)
Charles and I were both disappointed that one of the most powerful
sequences in the novel — a duel between hero and villain within the 1980’s
video game Joust — didn’t make it into the movie, though I suspect many of the
differences between book and film were based on what rights could or couldn’t
be cleared. Ready Player One
isn’t the film either Charles or I imagined when we read the book (for one
thing, I had wanted the real-world scenes outside the OASIS to be filmed in
black-and-white, with only the OASIS scenea in color, to reflect the drabness
of real-world existence in the film’s 2045), and a friend of mine who liked Blade
Runner: 2049 as much as I hated it said one
of the reasons he liked Blade Runner: 2049 is it undermined the convention of the “quest” narrative in which the
chosen individual finds the magic object or completes the task that redeems
all. Certainly Ready Player One
is a classic “quest” narrative in which the hero Parzival (on-line avatar of
Wade Wells, played engagingly if not brilliantly by Tye Sheridan) uses his
knowledge of video games, 1980’s culture and Hallidayiana to conquer the
villainous forces of IOI and win the prize. By picking the name of the hero of
the Holy Grail quest story in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s prose poem (a
fascinating work in its own right because it’s one of the few first-person
accounts from the Middle Ages of just what it was like to be a knight) and
Richard Wagner’s opera, Cline underscored the “quest” part of the narrative and
the extent to which his hero is the “Chosen One,” though for someone who at the
start of the film resolutely refuses to “clan” with anyone else he ends up with
a group of confederates with whom he sticks, including his girlfriend Art3mis
a.k.a. Samantha (Olivia Cooke) whom he meets and falls in love with in the
OASIS long before he’s met her in the real world, along with Aech, a young
Black woman who’s assumed the avatar of a Black male in the OASIS (Lena Waithe); and two Asian-American
kids, teenager Daito (Win Morisaki) and 11-year-old Sho (Philip Zhao) — though
Daito died midway through the novel, in its most tragic scene, all five of the
modern musketeers live to the end of the movie and they take over the OASIS as
a joint enterprise, turning it off two days a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) so
people will regain some
involvement with the real world and try to better it instead of just retreating
into the fantasies of the OASIS.
Some of the changes between book and film seem
to have been dictated by rights issues, some by director Spielberg not wanting
to come off as a total egomaniac (he had the writers cut way down the number of references to films he directed
or produced), and some simply to bring the effects budget closer to something
resembling reason — though even so the movie’s post-production effects work
took so long that Spielberg was able to make a whole other movie, The
Post (the recent drama about the Washington
Post acquiring and publishing the Pentagon
Papers in 1971), while waiting for the various effects houses to finish all the
special-effects shots. There was potential for an even more interesting movie in
Ready Player One the book, but
the film as it stands is quite good, engagingly entertaining in the best
Spielberg manner. I did have one
quibble: the sequences in the OASIS looked just too video-gamey, with the actors taking on the
cartoonish appearance of game characters — real video games in 2018 have a
greater visual clarity than much of this movie and I had imagined the OASIS
delivering state-of-the-art resolution comparable to that of a digitally shot
movie. According to a “trivia” post on imdb.com, Spielberg and cinematographer
Janusz Kaminski shot the “real” parts of the movie on film and the OASIS scenes
in digital to establish the sort of visual contrast between the worlds I would
have wanted to do by having the real-world scenes in black-and-white — and in
one sequence in which the heroes fool the villain by hacking into his OASIS
feed and thereby presenting him a scenario he thinks is real, Spielberg
expected the fact that this sequence was shot in digital to give it away to the
audience. Ready Player One is
also an example of the anti-corporate tic that still runs through a lot of
popular entertainment; despite the takeover of virtually all our lives by giant
corporations, the popular artists of the world still take enormous amounts of
corporate money to produce these at least mildly anti-corporate entertainments.
Just as I was beginning to see the Frank Capra parallels in this plot, writers
Penn and Cline hammered them home by quoting the line from It’s a
Wonderful Life, “No man is a failure who
has friends.”
In some ways Ready Player One is a Libertarian fantasy of the heroic entrepreneur
who creates an alternative universe and his heroic-entrepreneur successor who
saves it from a corrupt bureaucracy — like The Hunger Games, Ready
Player One can sustain both a Libertarian
reading and a quasi-socialist one in which the capitalists are the bad guys and
the heroic radical the good guy (and one of the most chilling aspects of Ready
Player One is the off-handedness with which
Nick Sorrento orders and carries out the destruction of the “stacks” in which
Wade lives, just to eliminate him as a rival to the contest — he survives
because he’s somewhere else when the attack occurs, but the aunt who had raised
him and her asshole partner get blown up). It’s also ironic that Wade’s home
base is Columbus, Ohio, which also figures in Omar El Akkad’s American
War as the new capital of the United States
(this book is also set in the late 21st century and describes a
future in which climate change has eliminated much of the California coast,
including Los Angeles and San Diego, and all of Florida except for a few
scattered high bits that survive as islands; what’s left of the U.S. government
passes a law providing for the death penalty for anyone who still uses fossil
fuels; and as a result Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, along with South
Carolina and Texas, secede and form the “Free Southern State,” resulting in a
20-year civil war and a bioplague that kills millions since both sides in the war use bioweapons) and figured in the
recent special Congressional election in Ohio, in which Republican legislators
split Columbus between two Congressional districts to keep them both reliably
in Republican hands, only a Democratic challenger was able to mobilize enough
voters from Columbus and its suburbs to come heartbreakingly close to defeating
the Republican in a district that went for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by
11 percent. Who knew that Columbus would suddenly become a focal point for
American politics both in fiction and in real life?
