Ready Player One

Better than the original that is too broad and targeted both at young people as a genre movie and at nostalgic viewer in their thirties. The film adaptation addresses most of the shortcomings, adjusts the tasks for the screen, understands pop culture and commercial video games, withstands a deliberate and stylized digital mess, does not overuse allusions, but the final footage is to excessive. You never start to care for the characters, and it keeps being silly (especially the solutions of the first and third task, there is no need to dedicate your whole life to that, the racing "glitch" would discover even a troll during the first race and the solution of the last task would be obvious to most players 30+ at first glance). In any case, after a long time, Spielberg is back as an “adult with a soul of a child", so he plays with the format, pace of narration (OASIS versus the real world) and often even in a surprisingly imaginative way work with pop culture (especially setting of the second task, it will make you smile. Generally speaking, these horror allusion are one of the most successful ones ever). The resulting megamix of pop-cultural easter eggs, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matrix, traditionally filmed Amblin movies, Sucker Punch and The Last Action Hero is significantly better than what the trailers made us expect. It's even so good that these few annoying weak moments will be even more disappointing. (03/28/2018)

Why is everyone so astonished that Spielberg is a master of his craft? It’s no miracle that one of the best craftsmen and storytellers around is still able to do what he has always done. Ready Player One rather makes it clear how miserable other blockbusters in recent years have been. Even though RPO runs like clockwork, a rotten heart beats in its core. Behind the exalted adoration of 1980s pop culture, there is a tremendously depressing vision of the future. How else can we interpret a world that is unbelievably technologically advanced, yet culturally fixated on the artifacts of the eighties and nineties or, said more precisely, that voluntarily devours the pop culture of the 1980s and memorialises it in the smallest detail. Peculiarly, behind everything stands a forlorn, egocentric and megalomaniacal nerd who draws to himself and his favourite titles the absolute attention of the whole world with the siren song of mammon and power. The narrative of the film actually brings forth a terrifying vision of the futility of the lives of fans who hope that someone will remember them after they die, but then come to the horrifying realisation that the only thing that they have left behind is the large number of video games, movies and comics that they consumed. Though the author of the novel on which the film is based probably intended something different, Ready Player One shows an aging nerd’s wishful thinking that the titles he adores and that mean so much to him should have some sort of relevance in the mid-21st century. If we go even deeper, the whole film-adaptation project is a perverse myth which, when taking off the rose-coloured glasses, shows how pop culture devours itself while also shaping its followers and their idols thanks to the illusion that a fan can become a star. The film’s narrative only serves to reinforce the sad idea that obsessive knowledge of pop culture makes some sort of sense and could even be the key to success and wealth. Of course, there must also be the idealisation of pop culture as a work of inner creativity and not of industry, not to mention the illusion that its creations belong to fans and users rather than to corporations and license holders. Ready Player One combines all of these myths at the level of storytelling and in the project itself. It is impossible to view with anything other than amazement the ingenuity with which the corporate monster disseminates its gospel when it broadcasts to the world legends about how difficult it must have been to obtain licenses for individual cited artifacts and how the only one who could manage to pull it off is the universally adored Spielberg. But if we persist in our search, then one of us, the one who ties together all of the references in RPO, will be a star of the internet and, if it suits the corporate hydra, will shoot a film according to his or her own list. And the worst part of all of this is that it will actually be worth watching. (05/13/2018)

The trend of video-game CGI fests has also caught the great Steven Spielberg and the result is positive overall, though I can’t shake the feeling that Ready Player One is unnecessarily frantic and cluttered in places. In general, one does not suppose that Spielberg would want to shock anybody after so many years of A-list filmmaking in Hollywood with self-serving action or thrilling effects at any price, but there are quite a few situations that are a bit on the edge. Neither the instant romance nor the final battle avoid the typical clichés. The winks to movie classics, a couple of which are the work of the creator of this blockbuster himself, are fine, but those 140 minutes get pretty grinding towards the end and the comedy interludes were nothing to write home about. I enjoyed more the slower, more fateful and more audiovisually polished Tron Legacy by Kosinski, whose digital set design and sense of visuals are further away, as opposed to his directorial ability to grasp a decent script. (06/15/2018)

I'm not fifteen anymore, so I can’t bitch about the fact that someone can stretch a game intro to over two hours. Yes, Spielberg has his egg firmly in his hand and coddles it with the grace of a pimply nerd with a gamepad in his hand, but the exuberant visual treat sticks to your palate after just a few minutes because it can universally high-five Cline's book on the price/performance ratio. On the one hand, it wants to please everyone, but in key passages, it misses the proprieties of the mainstream, i.e., interesting characters and functional interactions. Here, the film loses out quite substantially to the (already rather futile) book, and my yawns were at times more theatrical than the actor's declamations present herein. Refined visuals and fancy special effects are a standard nowadays, but unfortunately, Ready Player One doesn't offer much more than that. (10/01/2018)

After a long time, I found myself in the cinema almost not breathing. Spielberg, on the other hand, ventilates like a young man. What could have ended up as a storehouse of nostalgia and a pile of fan references turns, in his hands, into a frenetic, yet completely clear and systematically arranged blockbuster, which does not lack steam, emotion, pop culture, but mainly something through and through the present. The way in which Spielberg is able to naturally wedge digital avatars into the monument to his filmmaking generation (The Shining bike ride) is the best evidence that he has not lost any of his relevance over the decades. He is able to look back whilst standing firmly in the present. RPO is not a whimsical dream about the golden age of Easter eggs - it is a radiant rocket which, through its penetration, leaves behind filmmakers who are a generation younger. Yeah, I'd maybe trim it a little bit, but otherwise it is a clean and crystal-fun ride. Reality may be the best, but I always like to be fed stuff like this. (04/03/2018)