(Tye Sheridan in Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” / Courtesy Warner Bros.)
In our latest Tomato Slam, Wade and Mark do a deep dive into Steven Spielberg’s new blockbuster film, asking where it falls on the spectrum of Spielberg classics and what it says both about Spielberg the filmmaker and us as an ever-evolving moviegoing public.
WADE MAJOR: There’s a relatively clean breaking moment in Spielberg’s career — it begins in 1991 when he made “Hook” and effectively came out of his Peter Pan closet, and culminated two years alter when he made “Jurassic Park” and “Schindler’s List” in the same year — one became the year’s box office champ, the other swept the Oscars — the only time that has ever happened to any director. After that, he appears to have lost his way and the “boy who didn’t want to grow up” became the “man who wished he’d never grown up.”
His adult films, like “Lincoln,” “War Horse,” “The Post,” all feel like they’re yearning to be from another decade whereas his “popular” films — “War of the Worlds,” “Tin Tin,” “A.I.” and particularly “Ready Player One” — all feel like he’s grasping at something he’s lost.
I like “Ready Player One,” I enjoyed it for the most part, but it’s missing something — and what it’s missing is the old Spielberg. Who’s not coming back. The pop culture references are all a teary-eyed look back to an era he helped create, and whereas we’re meant to identify with the kid, it’s clear Spielberg is identifying with the Mark Rylance character.
So enjoyable — yet sad at the same time. I fear Spielberg is still looking in his rear view mirror and trying to be what he can no longer be, rather than looking forward and trying to simply own what he has become.
MARK KEIZER: The problem is that the times, to some extent, have passed him by. Pop cultural anticipation of the new Steven Spielberg adventure has now become pop cultural anticipation of the superhero epic du jour. And Spielberg, to his credit, has refused to direct a superhero tentpole nor has he directed a Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean or James Bond film (although years ago, Spielberg twice offered up his services to Bond producer Cubby Broccoli and was turned down).
So with nowhere else to go when it comes to capturing the attention of the content-bombarded American moviegoer, Ready Player One was probably the best available option for him. Which is why the film, while often thrilling on the surface, is a bit sad below deck. We can’t escape the nagging feeling that instead of Spielberg being energized into telling the story of a boy (Ty Sheridan) meeting a girl (Olivia Cooke) in a unique and visually remarkable way, he’s energized to remind us that every reference in the film is six degrees away from something Spielberg himself inspired.
That kind of motivation results in a sugar rush of nostalgia that satisfies moment to moment but fails in its overarching mission: to remind us that Steven Spielberg has still got it. Yes, Steven Spielberg has still got it. He just doesn’t know where to put it. Back in the day, I loved accompanying Indiana Jones on his globe trotting adventures (well, not the last one). I marveled at Spielberg’s three dimensional portraits of Abraham Lincoln and Oscar Schindler. I watched in awe as the mothership rose over Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters or as Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern, jaws dropped, feasted their eyes upon living, breathing and increasingly ravenous dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. His motivations for doing those films seemed more pure, more borne of the joy of moviemaking and storytelling. With Ready Player One, I rarely sensed Spielberg’s authorship of the material. In fact, while Spielberg is perfectly “cast”, as it were, in this film, from a creative standpoint, didn’t even need him, did it?
WADE MAJOR: Well said. Especially that he’s still got it, but doesn’t know where to put it. I recall him saying something, around the time of either “Schindler” or “Pvt. Ryan,” that he’d accomplished everything he’d ever wanted to accomplish in his career, and that going forward the great challenge was to simply keep himself interested. Filmmakers, when they lose their hunger, when they’re no longer driven by some overarching passion, tend to then lose the spark that made their films so resonant. Spielberg has faced this problem in microcosm before — none of his sequels ever feel like they’re doing anything but trying to live up to the original. As much as I can enjoy the second “Jurassic Park” or even “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” there’s an inescapable feeling that he’s really overthinking it — he’s too self-aware, too consumed with the need to “measure up” to what audiences are expecting. Spielberg is typically at his best when he’s not trying to do anything but make himself happy. You feel it in “Close Encounters,” in “Raiders,” in “E.T.,” and even in things like “Catch Me While You Can.” When he starts worrying what people will think, what he may be compared to, whether or not the movies will measure up to — Marvel or James Cameron or J.J. Abrams’ reverence for him, or the hundred-and-fifty other movies that pay tribute to his influence — he loses his way.
So yes. He has still got it, but the reason he doesn’t know where to put it is because he’s standing in his own way — and the only person who can remedy that is Spielberg himself. He just has to get out of his own way. But to bring it back to my previous point, I think the thing that desperately terrifies him is the thought that if he gets out of his own way, the person he’s going to see in the mirror… is an old man. Other directors have had trouble aging into a new phase of their careers and leaving their younger selves behind — so this is by no means a unique phenomenon. But Spielberg, more than anyone, should be able to make that transition. The trick will be whether he wants to — and I’m just not yet sure that he’s reached that place.
MARK KEIZER: Taking his films since 2005 as our examples, you can break up Spielberg’s choices into smaller-scaled passion projects and the big budget spectaculars meant to maintain his status as “Steven Spielberg.” In the former category are Munich, War Horse, Bridge of Spies, Lincoln and The Post. In the latter are War of the Worlds, The Adventures of Tintin, The BFG and Ready Player One. Except for the corny, John Ford-throwback, War Horse, his smaller films are superior. His genuine interest in the material or the subject matter was palpable. The others are sci-fi or CGI-fests that might engage the boy in Spielberg but, lately, the adult Spielberg is making better movies. Tellingly, from this 1000-foot view, it seems Spielberg is only doing films based on people or properties that are decades old. The only exception is Ready Player One which was published in 2011 but is rife with references that are decades old. So really, Spielberg is living in the past.
Where Ready Player One (we’re suppose to be reviewing that, right?) is very of-the-moment is in its effects. They are often spectacular. The film takes place in 2045 where the inhabitants of our bleak and ugly future escape their worries by putting on a fancy pair of goggles and escaping into the Oasis, a virtual reality universe where players can assume whatever shape, form or personage they want and roam, run, dance, jump and fly in an infinite number of completely immersive, computer generated environments. Our hero is Wade Watts (Sheridan) who lives in The Stacks, a Jenga-like tower of dilapidated trailers in dystopian Columbus, Ohio (described as Earth’s fastest growing city, another reason to dread the future). When Wade puts on his goggles and becomes Parzival, a frosted-haired combination of Justin Bieber and a character from Final Fantasy, I was briefly haunted by memories of all those bad VR and internet-inspired thrillers like The Lawnmower Man, Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity and Hackers. Although Wade’s about to tell us he loved The Lawnmower Man, right, Wade?
WADE MAJOR: It’s unbelievable how much I hate The Lawnmower Man. But the analogy is spot on. There are two ways to view this film in a genre context — movies about “alternate realities,” which would include everything from the aforementioned VR films to stuff like “The Matrix” and even something like “Dreamscape” or the recent catastrophe of “Assassin’s Creed” (all where people experience a “world” inside their own mind without moving their physical body at all), and then movies about GAMING, which represent a kind of wish fulfillment fantasy for a very particular young male demographic. To this extent, the movie that still most resonates on that level is the first one to go there, which was the “Ready Player One” for my generation: “The Last Starfighter.” But we could also throw the “Jumanji” films in there, which I think is relevant here because what this film tries to do in that regard, the most recent “Jumanji” works far more effectively for me.
That said, I do still like the film. But I can’t deny that “Ready Player One” brings all kinds of baggage. The subject matter brings baggage, Spielberg brings baggage, the book brings baggage, the story brings baggage — all of which weighs down something that should feel light, breezy, carefree, escapist and enthralling. But for some reason it doesn’t. It feels heavy and belabored, busy and insecure, drunk with its own ambitions and yet terrified of them at the same time. When it ended, I was glad I’d seen it, I enjoyed it enough to feel as if I’d gotten a real theatrical experience out of it — but I also felt exhausted by the experience and a little bit sad for what it represented, namely the sense of loss that’s central to the storyline — loss of innocence, loss of connectedness, loss of reality. I’m not sure if Spielberg necessarily feels that loss, at least not consciously, but it’s a central part of what does not work in the film, and what has not worked in his body of work for the better part of the past twenty-five years.
MARK KEIZER: The loss I felt was actually for today’s generation. I kept asking myself, in the unlikely event of a Ready Player Two, what early 21st Century pop culture artifacts would the sequel dredge up? Would Wade’s avatar in Oasis be PewDiePie? Would the villain be a rampaging, bald Britney Spears wielding an umbrella during her 2007 meltdown? Whatever the answer, it can’t compete with, to name only one, the multiple references to the Robert Zemeckis classic, Back to the Future (1985). Ready Player One’s opening CGI-salvo is an intensely exciting road race that that features Wade driving a BTTF DeLorean. When he wins, he buys himself a doodad that can turn back time 60 seconds. It looks like a Rubik’s Cube, but it’s called, wait for it, a Zemeckis Cube.
There is no doubt that Warner Bros. expects fans to return to the theater multiple times and stream the film at home incessantly in order to count the wall-to-wall pop cultural references in this film. The web is already filling up with sites that enumerate all the Easter Eggs you missed. And in perusing some of those sites myself, the film really is a masterful achievement in pop culture archeology and cataloging. But Easter Eggs do not a film make. And all the visual nods to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, RoboCop, Spaceballs, Alien, Terminator 2, etc., ad infinitum, can’t compensate for the fact that we don’t care a whit about Wade and his love interest.
In Oasis, she is Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), with anime eyes and a penchant for driving the red motorcycle from Akira. Wade is smitten even though he has no idea what Art3mis looks like in real life, a notion that everyone who has ever dated online can appreciate. Art3mis, however, is way more interested in what turns out to be the film’s driving, central conflict: the creator of Oasis, James Halliday (Mark Rylance) has died and, in a nod to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, will bequeath his creation to the first person able to find three magic keys. (Spoiler alert if you’ve never seen a movie in your entire life) Wade and Art3mis wind up working together to find the keys and fall in love. But I never cared about them or whether they shared a kiss on the final fadeout. And while you might say, “who cares, I’m here for the in-jokes”, well that’s what keeps Ready Player One from really resonating. Ultimately, you have to care whether your characters live or die or fall in love or break up. That’s the beating heart of your movie. Everything else should be window dressing. Unfortunately, Ready Player One is all window dressing: gorgeous, prodigious, exciting, nostalgic amounts of window dressing. That’s why, when it’s over, you admit to being entertained, but it doesn’t stay with you.