Ready Player One

This is part of the series of posts I'm calling "Films wot I watched on the plane" and it's not going to be very long because I can sum up my feelings on Ready Player One in two words.

Complete abomination

Now if you didn't close your browser right there allow me to elaborate. Spoiler free

Ready Player One follows the adventures of some kid in a slum called Wade Watts.  Set in the future, Wade along with millions of other people spend most of their days in a sort of weird super-future version of Second Life called The Oasis.  With this being a family movie the plot can't be "if you die in the game you die for real" so all dying in the Oasis means is that you reset back to level 1 and you lose all your shit.  The plot actually revolves around the guy who created the Oasis dying and leaving behind a sort of gamer will where he has hidden 3 keys around the game world and any player who finds them basically becomes the owner of his company and therefore, owns the Oasis.  This of course attracts the attention of a big evil company called IOI and if they find the keys that would be like EA becoming the one and only game developer and publisher in the real word.  So Wade enters the game with his avatar Parzival and teams up with a bunch of other misfits for a wacky adventure in the virtual world.

Now despite the fact I think this movie is a complete abomination I will have to concede that if you don't play video games and know nearly nothing about them, you'll probably quite like it.  It's competently made, the acting is fine (I guess) and it's full of special effects and bombastic sequences that if you're just looking for a stupid popcorn flick then you'll probably garner at least a little enjoyment from it.

The problem arises when you're a viewer who quite enjoys games, which is kind of ironic because you'd think that would be the movies main audience.  While the movie isn't terrible (it's definitely stupid though) it's just sort of insulting.  Not because it takes liberties with how VR works or the way games are sort of in general but because of all the fucking references.  It's a bit like your dirty uncle coming to a party and then trying to show off to all the young people because he used to play Atari and has seen pictures of characters from Overwatch.  The game shoves all these referential bullshit on screen and EXPECTS you to jump up and down like an excited child, point and be like "OH MY GOD THERE IT IS!" but all it makes me do is roll my eyes so hard that you could power a small country with the kinetic energy.  Yeah I get it guys, you know what FPS games are and you've seen that one episode of AVGN where he talks about the Atari game Swordquest.

That's about as much as I can say without spoilers so I'll end with this.  If you don't enjoy video games (and therefore probably aren't reading this post) you might like it.  If you DO enjoy video games then just stay away and instead of wasting your time with this go play an actual game for 140 minutes instead.