Ready Player one is exactly what a cinema going experience is meant to be and captures the magic of the media. Despite some criticism, it is far more than a simple trip down nostalgia lane (So much yes when a gundam straight up made an orbital leap off of the cargo bay of serenity. The only thing missing was Super Saiyan Goku and The green ranger, affectionately known as Tommy, going back to back against a horde of sixers.). While jam packed with pop culture references from the greatest eras of media and spanning film, television, gaming, and beyond, the film does much more with drawing lines between society as it is today and a not too distant future.
Wade Watts is an impoverished orphan living under the good graces of his, less than classy, aunt and her boyfriend in there single-wide domicile hoisted high above the streets on a makeshift scaffolding. This is known as the stacks and they prop up the projects and trailer parks of the future. With his real world life, and the lives of most inhabitants of this future, being less than stellar, he retreats into the Oasis for salvation from his dull, uninspired existence. Within this space, Wade is able to form himself into anything he wishes, but with similar restrictions found in the real world as every upgrade and aesthetic piece bears a real world cost due to the fact Oasis “credits” function as the monetary system for their society. Thus, we meet Parzival, the coin scavenging avatar of our hero. In this way, we are provided with our connection to this character and his struggle as our own bank accounts dwindle each month as we scavenge our own coin day in and day out.
I love this setting because it has some resemblance of current gaming, and societal, environments. We are all working more, getting paid less, and escape in our own little ways from the punishing reality that is life. We grind and we grind and we are always just a few coins shy of our hopes and dreams, much as most people populating the Oasis. But, with the Oasis, there is a retreat that is better than real.
We enter this world with everything in a state of content masses shuffling toward oblivion while going about their daily lives, which are much like ours. Everything changes when Parzival discovers the first key to an easter egg hunt more elusive than the Halo 3 title screen egg we didn’t even know was there until an eagle eyed gamer spotted it several years after its release. He is a gunter (hunter for the most challenging easter egg in the Oasis, which affords ultimate control to its finder). This idea speaks volumes to the nerd culture built of troves of fan boys duking it out for ultimate knowledge of pop culture. However, the entire world is now within the ranks of fandom.
Here enters the universe baddie, IOI industries. IOI pulls no punches in drawing lines right up to EA’s doorstep (Thanks for forcing Dice to ruin Battlefront and everything else you touch). They are like a King Midas who, instead of turning things to gold with his touch, turns things into steaming piles of crap. Anyhow, they own almost everything and are ruthless in their desire to monetize every nook and cranny of the Oasis through brute force. This dynamic is for too familiar. Massive media companies ruin our most beloved franchises by perverting them into shameless side shows for cash grabs (COD, Star Wars Battlefront 2), sending out purposely bugged garbage (ME: Andromeda), propping up the corpse of a once great franchise (cough, Halo), or cancelling them all together in their prime (Still mad about Firefly). The film goes as far as to show the main villain discussing how much screen space can be dedicated to advertising before players begin to have seizures.
Through the struggle, IOI challenges the rage of the fan boy army through their ruthless actions, both in the real world and the Oasis (Think of the threat on net neutrally a few years ago and the massive petition that smashed that legislation into a fine dust in the USA, then times that by ten.). They even have their own turn of the century mining camp designed to indebt and imprison everyday citizens for their virtual “debts”. This speaks to me as such things have existed in the past with mining companies as well as with newly freed slaves who were subjected to unfair costs and low wages, which made indentured servants of them even after emancipation, and many other historical examples of such a dynamic. Somebody dun read some of dem der historical books… Me likey.
The main villain, Nolan Sorrento, also speaks volumes for the mindset of those who have everything and yet crave more. He fights so hard to control the Oasis, yet through countless unspoken examples of his ignorance of the content that makes the Oasis great, he also admits he’d just as soon never enter the Oasis again than relinquish control. You see, for our friend Nolan, he has everything he could ever want in the real world. He needs no retreat from the bleak reality that plagues the masses. The Oasis does mean nothing to him (Much like gaming means nothing to EA leaders). Admitting this to Wade shows his (and that of real world game devs and network programmers) disconnect from the people who make his company and the entire industry worth anything. This must come as a wicked slap in the face to those media heads who haven’t a clue why people abhor micro-transactions and pay to win schemes.
In the end, this film was a high octane thrill ride highlighting real problems through a fantastical lens. We are treated to a world where corporate power and greed outweighs most balances, virtual distractions keep the masses from taking notice, as well as the importance of those distractions for most of us and the necessity of balance in life between what is virtual and real.
I absolutely recommend watching this film. Even if you take nothing of the social struggle away from watching, it is a fantastic moving going experience.