The film adaptation of Ready Player One bares its broken, disappointing nerd heart better than any negative review possibly could.

The telling moment takes place nearly halfway through the teen-adventure romp, when unlikely, awkward hero Wade Watts begins winning a major contest within the futuristic film’s virtual-reality universe (mirroring the same plot as its namesake book). An evil corporate overlord named Nolan Sorrento swoops in with designs on recruiting Wade, and to do this, he lays out tantalizing geek-iverse offers (like a Millennium Falcon to use in the film’s “Oasis” VR world) and trades blows in a nerd-trivia exchange about ’80s films. All the while, a lackey feeds nerdy factoids into Sorrento’s ear so that he sounds legit.

Wade calls BS on this rattling of nerd credentials and reminds Sorrento that a real fan of the Oasis wouldn’t try to win its control-swaying contest with trivia alone. Sorrento’s response, upon being called out, is to lash out with senseless violence.

At its best, Ready Player One‘s uneven, predictable, and hollow qualities can be written off in the service of “a perfectly fine kids’ movie.” But the film’s producers bog the whole thing down by pulling a Sorrento every step of the way: trying—and failing—to make up for a lack of heart with bombast and geeky cameos.

Unholy grail

RP1 follows its book inspirations in loose, recognizable fashion. Characters and the general plot arc remain the same, while the exact execution and events vary wildly. Meaning: we’re still following Wade (played by Tye Sheridan of X-Men: Apocalypse and The Tree of Life), whose virtual-world handle is Parzival, and he’s still joined by the same gang of both virtual- and real-world friends in trying to recover a “golden Easter egg” within the wildly popular Oasis VR service.

The hunt for this egg begins for the same reason, as well: because Oasis co-creator James Halliday (played here by Mark Rylance) passed away in real life, thus kicking off a nostalgia-fueled VR Wonka romp. The Oasis has become the world’s biggest source of entertainment in the year 2045, and Halliday’s death sets a millions-strong contest into motion. Complete ’80s-themed challenges in VR, while keeping cryptic clues in mind, and you can claim the egg, which will turn you into the Oasis’ next owner and operator. (The aforementioned villain, played by Ben Mendelsohn of Rogue One, sets out to brute-force his way into winning the contest and turning the Oasis into a Facebook-like barf of ads and intrusive content.)

Some of the differences between the prose and the pictures hinge on sheer licensing issues. Don’t expect to see some of the book’s biggest scenes, like a VR playthrough of Pac-Man or the “flicksync” moments where Wade and friends jump into VR versions of films like Wargames and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Instead, the Oasis’ insanity kicks off with a loud-and-fast car race, and the film’s only bonafide flicksync is a dive into Stephen King’s The Shining.

Before diving into why these content switches are problematic, there’s another, more damaging difference to account for: the film crew’s disinterest in creating empathetic characters. Unlike in the book, Wade doesn’t interact with real-life friends, have lengthy conversations with his VR pals, bumble disinterestedly through school, have significant family interactions, or show us anything in the way of interests or personality. The film’s Wade is the ultimate white-sheet of a protagonist, and he spends most of the film strapped into a VR headset.

The film’s manic pixie virtualgirl Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) has more personality by default, which isn’t saying much. She’s a member of a resistance force, fully aware of the evils that Nolan Sorrento’s company commits, and she wants revenge, but we learn this in a wide-eyed, two-sentence shout. Otherwise, Art3mis mostly exists to get Wade’s attention—she eventually falls in love with him, unconvincingly—and to revel in throwaway ’80s-fandom references. (They both like Buckaroo Banzai. That sort of thing.)

Director Steven Spielberg and company clearly love ’80s teen films, and it shows with the style and speed of its witty rejoinders. With that in mind, however, RP1 acts like Ferris Bueller‘s best scenes were the joyrides in Cameron’s Porsche and Ferris’ mad dash home at the end. Bonding and character development have been scrapped almost entirely to make room for action sequences.

A deep crevice in the uncanny valley

Worse, quite frankly, the action scenes suck.

Nearly every scene in RP1 takes place within the Oasis, and these scenes, almost without fail, are rendered in distractingly floaty CGI. At the film’s outset, this almost seems intentional, as if to make clear to viewers that the Oasis is a fake, virtual place. But that’s little consolation for the visual impact. The opening sequence I mentioned, about a manic car race, ultimately feels hollow thanks to its goofy physics model. Wade auto-magically steers his way to near-success, and at no point does it ever look like the scene has stakes.

We also watch Parzival and Art3mis fall in love within VR, and their avatars, complete with off-set eyes and floaty animations, live in a pretty deep crevice of the uncanny valley. (The only thing worse than this is Spielberg’s decision to reshape a huge angle in the book: that Art3mis’ real-life counterpart is unbecoming, and that Wade overcomes that superficial issue thanks to their VR-world bonding. Cooke is nowhere near the “Rubenesque” person that Cline wrote into RP1, and Wade’s willingness to “overlook” Art3mis’ slight facial marking is obnoxious enough to make me dissuade attendance for any young women.)

There’s also that moment in which characters recreate The Shining within the Oasis, which sorely stands out for two reasons. First, it is the film’s rare moment of combining practical, real-world effects with VR avatars in satisfying fashion. As Wade and his VR friends run and dash and freak out within the real-life Stanley Hotel, the film comes to life—especially as the film’s best character, Aech (Lena Waithe), reveals a lot of humorous personality traits. It’s hard not to compare this to the rest of the CGI-filled Oasis scenes—or worse, the abysmally cheap-looking soundstage sets that RP1‘s actors occasionally stand, run, or drive through—and wonder how much more grounded this film might have felt if more of the budget were spent on locations.

The other issue with this scene is that it tonally makes no sense within character James Halliday’s nostalgia-dive of a VR world. Nowhere in either the book or film does he establish himself as a horror-film maven, and even if he were, he’s clearly more interested in stereotypically “geeky” fare. (I’d have expected, say, the corny one-liners and bloody Technicolor of Nightmare on Elm Street.)

I point this out not to say that I needed Freddy Krueger to enjoy the film but to complain about RP1‘s endless dump of pop-culture references… which have little connection to the specific nostalgia window that Cline opened up in the book. It doesn’t take long to connect the dots of which characters do (and don’t) appear and come to the conclusion that Spielberg and co. just don’t get it. A ton of modern franchises (Borderlands, Halo, Overwatch) commingle with the ’90s likes of Mortal Kombat, Hello Kitty, and Spawn, along with a serious stress on franchises that the film studio Warner Bros. has the licenses to (particularly DC Comics superheroes).

The most flagrant offender in this regard is RP1‘s loud use of The Iron Giant, a WB-produced film from 1999 whose central robotic character bonded seriously with its kid hero. Spielberg’s film lets one of its heroes jump into that Iron Giant mech suit, but the resulting scene is an explosion-filled action romp in which he slams headlong into other branded, super-sized creatures. The Iron Giant is reduced to a meaningless action figure—which runs contrary to the series’ central theme of tapping into the true intent of geek culture’s biggest creators.

One? More like None

RP1‘s final stretch is a particularly tiring slog where all logic and meaning exit stage left. Why do Wade and his VR friends have to meet in the same city for this sequence, where they’re eventually targeted by Sorrento’s henchmen? How come some inexplicable logic drives the good guys or bad guys into the lead position in this final battle every few minutes? Why does Spielberg show thousands of Wade’s fans stupidly kicking around in real life with headsets on, thus making this Google Glass-like future look particularly stupid and thus not worth investing in? And who actually buys the climactic moment in which the soulless Sorrento suddenly grows a Grinch-like heart?

It’s all a shame, because there’s totally a decent, watchable film buried in this pile of geek cameos and nerd-cred shoutouts. Every actor on offer is solid at executing on Spielberg’s direction (which, in a few characters’ cases, is excruciatingly hammy, but I get his ’80s reasons for going that route), and even though I was never a huge fan of the book, I’ve always believed it’s both a fine read for kids and a morally sound template for a geek-family film. I could see this action-heavy film being fine enough after a mix of editing and personality-building reshoots. Tidy up the bloated action scenes; let Wade and friends bond in Goonies– or Bueller-like fashion; offer one or two more scenes in which these teens actually play with older franchises in fun ways and thus connect the retro content to a little more humanity.

Instead, we’re stuck with something I prefer to call Ready Player None.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1284835