BvBPL
Pour Decision Maker
I saw the movie Ready Player One this weekend. I didn’t like it.
The primary antagonist in the movie is a guy named Sorrento, played by Ben Mendelsohn who goes through much of the movie doing his best Paul Gleason impression. Sorrento runs a generic evil corporation that wants to take over the world by controlling a popular virtual reality World of Warcraft clone. I really mean generic. Nearly everyone in the corporation wears a limited pallet of gray. When they log into the virtual world in which much of the movie takes place, the employees all have a similar online persona, a robot-like full body suit emblazoned with the company’s initials, IOI, and their serial number.
This contrasts with the kaleidoscope of avatars other people put on in the virtual world. The Oasis, as the game is called, is described to us as a place where one’s imagination can run free. The villains of IOI want to win a video game contest to control the Oasis so they can advertise on this font of creativity.
Which is where the film hits a snag. While we are told repeatedly that the Oasis is a place where everyone can express themselves in whatever manner they wish, the means of expression largely amount to copying past creative works. We get, over the course of the movie, the doll from Child’s Play, Monty Python references, Halo space marines, the Iron Giant, Ninja Turtles, and way more pop culture effluvia. Apparently, the people of the 2040s are opposed with past popular culture to the point that, despite having an incredible magic canvas upon which to express themselves, they pretty much live in the fantasy worlds dreamed up thirty years prior.
(Although I guess this reflects the real world of the film, where a character puts on a pair of virtual reality googles branded with the Subway sandwich chain. Product placement is everywhere in this movie, not just in the licensed Batman references. If your friends drag you out to see the movie, you can pass the boredom by playing spot the Doritos bags in the movie.)
The references to contemporary and past popular culture are supposed to draw us towards the movie and make it use care about it. The problem is that too much of that and we get distracted from any actual emotional content. There’s a love story, I guess, where the characters are drawn together mainly by a love of the fantasy world and its creator and a hatred of the villains. Doesn’t sound like an appreciably stable basis for a long-term relationship to me, but, hey, the kids are young. Then there’s another “love” story about the video game’s creator who has a creepy and unhealthy obsession with this former business partner’s wife. It's all pretty unsatisfactory.
For all the references in the movie to other movies and video games (but, perhaps oddly, no books), there were some notable absences. The first being much of any overt reference to Spielberg’s own work. We do get the car from Back to the Future but no Indiana Jones, no Jaws, no E.T. Did Spielberg think it was too much to put his own work into something that was about the popular culture of others? Or was he just too embarrassed to overly associate himself with this vomitus mass of nonsense from other people?
The other missing reference is to Bruce Lee. Lee put much of his own philosophy into his masterpiece, Enter the Dragon, where he said
The primary antagonist in the movie is a guy named Sorrento, played by Ben Mendelsohn who goes through much of the movie doing his best Paul Gleason impression. Sorrento runs a generic evil corporation that wants to take over the world by controlling a popular virtual reality World of Warcraft clone. I really mean generic. Nearly everyone in the corporation wears a limited pallet of gray. When they log into the virtual world in which much of the movie takes place, the employees all have a similar online persona, a robot-like full body suit emblazoned with the company’s initials, IOI, and their serial number.
This contrasts with the kaleidoscope of avatars other people put on in the virtual world. The Oasis, as the game is called, is described to us as a place where one’s imagination can run free. The villains of IOI want to win a video game contest to control the Oasis so they can advertise on this font of creativity.
Which is where the film hits a snag. While we are told repeatedly that the Oasis is a place where everyone can express themselves in whatever manner they wish, the means of expression largely amount to copying past creative works. We get, over the course of the movie, the doll from Child’s Play, Monty Python references, Halo space marines, the Iron Giant, Ninja Turtles, and way more pop culture effluvia. Apparently, the people of the 2040s are opposed with past popular culture to the point that, despite having an incredible magic canvas upon which to express themselves, they pretty much live in the fantasy worlds dreamed up thirty years prior.
(Although I guess this reflects the real world of the film, where a character puts on a pair of virtual reality googles branded with the Subway sandwich chain. Product placement is everywhere in this movie, not just in the licensed Batman references. If your friends drag you out to see the movie, you can pass the boredom by playing spot the Doritos bags in the movie.)
The references to contemporary and past popular culture are supposed to draw us towards the movie and make it use care about it. The problem is that too much of that and we get distracted from any actual emotional content. There’s a love story, I guess, where the characters are drawn together mainly by a love of the fantasy world and its creator and a hatred of the villains. Doesn’t sound like an appreciably stable basis for a long-term relationship to me, but, hey, the kids are young. Then there’s another “love” story about the video game’s creator who has a creepy and unhealthy obsession with this former business partner’s wife. It's all pretty unsatisfactory.
For all the references in the movie to other movies and video games (but, perhaps oddly, no books), there were some notable absences. The first being much of any overt reference to Spielberg’s own work. We do get the car from Back to the Future but no Indiana Jones, no Jaws, no E.T. Did Spielberg think it was too much to put his own work into something that was about the popular culture of others? Or was he just too embarrassed to overly associate himself with this vomitus mass of nonsense from other people?
The other missing reference is to Bruce Lee. Lee put much of his own philosophy into his masterpiece, Enter the Dragon, where he said
Ready Player One gives us thousands and thousands of cartoon fingers from pop culture pointing at… something. Something we can’t see because all those fingers are blocking it out.Bruce Lee said:
