Review: Ready Player One And The Cinema Of Excess
- Mar 30, 2018
- 2 min read
Some of our favourite film experiences here at The Last Reviewer are going to see films that trade substance for style, if "style" means "ridiculousness". Films like Pacific Rim: Uprising, Power Rangers, and Baywatch are films that we'd generally describe as bad films, but we love watching them because they're brilliantly excessive and hilariously stupid. But while Ready Player One has moments that are brilliant or hilarious, it usually opts for plain excessive and stupid.
When James Halliday (Mark Rylance) dies, he leaves behind a competition for ownership of his online VR universe, the Oasis, and his riches. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) lives in the slums with his aunt and spends seemingly every waking minute researching Halliday and his favourite shows, movies, and games in hopes of finding the Easter egg hidden in the Oasis and winning the competition. Cue pop culture references, evil corporations, and online romance.
Underneath all of the countless cliches, visual nonsense, fanservice, and disregard for realism (why do the slums have internet connections capable of supporting potentially hundreds of people connecting to a modern VR MMO?), RP1 has a lot of heart. And that's a terrible thing. This is a movie that can't decide between romantic scenes or shootouts; life lessons and morals or Iron Giant and Gundam fighting Mechagodzilla. PacRim and Baywatch work because they're brilliantly excessive and hilariously stupid from start to finish. This movie was trying to be a typical heroic underdog love story, but undercutting any serious side with villainous CEOs having secret meetings with skull-themed TJ Miller on planet Doom (not kidding). It has way too much of this ridiculous action, caricatured good vs evil, and unapologetic overdone tropes to be taken seriously.
Ready Player One may be one of the greatest video game movies, in that it is similar to a typical video game: the graphics look great except when it comes to faces, there's often a lot of visual nonsense and annoying camera work, and the story could have potential but is more often just cliched and typical. It can't decide if it wants to tell a story about an underdog winning the game, beating the bad guy, and winning the girl, or Mechagodzilla, Planet Doom, and TJ Miller's character. If it's dumb fun you're looking for, Ready Player One is a pretty great movie for it. But if you want anything more, or pure fun without the mixed tone, Ready Player One isn't quite there.
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