Ready Player One: A Pop Culture Tribute

I have not read the novel, Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. It is on my shelf to read, just haven't got around to it yet. So, I have no idea how the movie and book compare. The Stephen Spielberg film is an action movie that is clearly his tribute to pop culture, especially to the movies and video games of the late 70's and 80's. I am sure that the nerd websites will be spending hours upon hours finding every tribute and reference in the movie from Saturday Night Fever to Back to the Future to The Shining to Godzilla and King Kong. The references and details were astonishing and at times a bit over-whelming. 

The premise of Ready Player One is pretty straight forward. We are taken to the dystopic world of 2045. The protagonist of the story is Parzival/Wade (Tye Sheridan) a player in the world of Oasis. Oasis is a virtual reality world created by Halliday (Mark Rylance) and his partner, Morrow (Simon Pegg). The real world has become such an over-crowded place that people live in the virtual world called Oasis. Halliday has died. Before his death, he hid three keys in the Oasis. The first player to get all three keys will own Oasis, becoming wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. Enter the bad guy, Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn). Sorrento is the CEO of the 2nd most successful game company, and he will do anything to find the three keys and take Oasis for his company. This includes killing in the real world. Parzival along with his gang and his virtual love, Art3mis/Samantha (Olivia Cooke) search for the keys to stop the evil Sorrento and his minions from taking Oasis. 

It's not just that Ready Player One is Spielberg's love letter to his past and all things in nerdom, it is also that it is a fun movie. I must admit the beginning of the movie which start largely in the virtual and computer animated world of Oasis, made me wonder what I had let myself in for. I was worried that we were going to spend most of our time in Oasis. Fortunately, we do get to also spend time in the dystopic world of Columbus, Ohio. Wade lives there and it is also where we get to eventually meet the members of his virtual world and the real-world people whose avatars we see in Oasis. Wade become Parzival which is if you know your legends a bastardization of the purist of knights from King Arthur, Percival. It is Percival who captures the Holy Grail that restores Arthur's soul. Wade/Parzival in his own way is on a quest for his holy grail that will keep the soul of Oasis for the players. 

Ready Player One is an exciting movie and is in the classic sense your standard hero movie. It has little in the way of surprise or twist as far as the plot goes. The only real unanswered question is one that come up at the end of the movie, which I am not going to discuss here. It is the story of a hero on a quest, his love, who in this case is as capable as he is, and his friends and fellow questers. They must over-come the evil bad guy who would steal all that is good. I liked the movie. Yes, it is simple and nothing really new. But it gives us a chance to see so much of the things we have come to care about in pop culture. In short, Ready Player One is a fun movie. I will buy the DVD.