Review of Ready Player One (2018) by Eric B — 30 May 2018

Those who criticize Spielberg's Ready Player One don't appreciate or more likely don't understand Spielberg's objective. He never gets too bogged down with details to distract from story-telling and humanity. Child-like Innocence. Nostalgia. Hope for the future. Smart children striking out against the adult world, not accepting the norm. That is Spielberg.

Dryly focusing on the technical aspects of a fictional world is the bane of every nerd. It detracts from the magic of movie-going, of story-telling and your average person is not obsessed enough to want more than Wade's adequate narration of this futuristic backdrop. Wade's character in RPO is a healthy balance of pop-culture appreciation and the desire for normal life as well. While easily admitting to his friend that he IS "that guy" who would go on a date dressed like his favorite movie character, he also acknowledges the fundamental importance of reality, or as his hero Halliday puts it, the only place you can get a decent meal. I hope you didn't take Halliday too literally because he was talking about human mind and experience. He admits to Wade he hid in his creation out of fear but it deprived him of basic connections. Like asking a girl to dance. Or talking to his partner instead of running from him. This is also what Spielberg strives for in telling this story. A healthy balance. Never giving too much creedence to this movie's subject matter but instead gently reminding viewers at the end of the film as our hero and heroine are kissing on a chair, "the real world is the only thing that's real". Or in harsher, less attractive terms, the only thing that matters. Because as any philosopher, artist or critic will tell you, focusing too much on singular aspects deprives you of the simple joys of the overall experience. You can't see the forest through the trees. As Halliday naively considers his creation a simple game that has evolved into a phenomenon, he's unwilling to make changes to himself or his company to protect against exploitation or corruption from people like IOI.

Something lost in today's world or t.v. explosion, binge-watching, sequel-draining, couch potato-headed, masturbating society is the origin of single movies was to introduce us to something beautiful, not make us intimately acquainted with it. People who complain about the lack of details from the book, complicating the movie with focuses on games, futuristic societies and many other potential aspects see this movie as fulfilling their serious inquiries to virtual reality instead of a charming adventure film. What these people hate about these movies is it doesn't preach enough. It drops things in the viewers path along the way and allows you to draw your own conclusions but it doesn't spell things out for you. Fans, or in this case I'll use the more precise term, fanatics DON'T like things being left to the imagination. They want answers to questions. Spielberg, however, isn't a fanservice storyteller, he's a dreamer. And Ready Player One isn't a series.