'Ready Player One' is shallow sci-fi with a nostalgic veneer

The world is bleak, racked by economic disparity. More and more Americans live in poverty while the wealthy continue to propagate the myth that hard work will pull the impoverished out of all their hardships. With an oppressive world weighing on everyone’s backs, Americans retreat into their technology, inhabiting virtual worlds where they can be whomever or whatever they want, whenever they want. This escapism has become obsession, as Americans from all walks of life become addicted to their online presence.

This is the premise for the dystopian adventure novel “Ready Player One,” written by Ernest Cline, but it’s also an accurate depiction of 2018. In fact, many of the elements of Cline’s original novel — shadowy social media organizations, virtual reality worlds where users can inhabit fictional pop culture figures, widely accepted digital currency, live nationwide contests — have only recently been unveiled to the world. Cline’s 2011 novel imagines that in 2045, we’ve not only succumbed to a VR-dominated culture but also openly embrace it, that Americans stand on street corners and sit in classrooms in droves, with uncomfortable, heavy VR visors strapped to our foreheads, all simultaneously plugged into the same digital realm. The film adaptation released this year, directed by Steven Spielberg, gives up when trying to make meaningful commentary on the real-virtual dichotomy, instead demonstrating that VR can be, like, totally cool, man.

Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), the protagonist in “Ready Player One,” is mostly a blank slate, aside from an obsession, to his benefit, with the virtual reality playground known as the OASIS. It’s odd to follow a non-character around for 140 minutes while being asked to care about his aunt (or, as he perplexingly calls her, “my mother’s sister”) and her jerk boyfriend, living together in the “stacks,” a vertical trailer park in Columbus, Ohio. Watts’s aunt and her boyfriend serve as unnecessary plot contrivances — as if we needed two more non-characters to help understand that the boy living in the literal tower of trailers has financial grievances. While the real world is rich for exploration, neither Cline (who co-wrote the screenplay) nor Spielberg seem particularly interested in exploring it. Every shot of dystopian Columbus feels like there’s a burning trash can just out of frame.

The OASIS, by contrast, gets a beautiful rendering and detailed depiction by Spielberg, who really seems to be able to bring the VR world to life. Forget “Tron”-like grids — the OASIS feels more like Asgard. It serves not only as a virtual world, but a fantastical hub for racing, battling, dancing and hang gliding. As Watts puts it, “You can climb Mount Everest … with Batman.” Wait, Batman? That’s right, “Ready Player One” pulls no punches when it comes to brand references. The 89 unique references to existing intellectual properties (that I recognized, at least) ranged from typical ‘80s nerd fare, like “Street Fighter” and “Back to the Future,” to decidedly more niche ‘80s nerd fare, like “Battletoads” and “Judge Dredd.” The references tend to be intensely clustered. Imagine, if you will, the nauseating nostalgia of a fight scene between Beetlejuice and Freddy Kreuger and Duke Nukem wielding the rifle from “Halo” before riding a Mach 5 from “Speed Racer” covered with Hello Kitty and Pizza Hut stickers. Between the mid 2000s and 2045, were there no other cultural milestones? Nothing in “Ready Player One” suggests that a pop-culture geek like Cline could imagine any pop culture from a time in the future.

The ‘80s geek-meets-mad scientist behind the OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), dies and leaves behind cryptic instructions in his will to find an “Easter egg” hidden somewhere in the virtual landscape. The first user to collect three keys, hidden through riddles and challenges, wins the the entirety of Halliday’s majority stock holdings in the OASIS. If you die in a challenge, you lose all your “coin,” the precious virtual currency with real-world value. Watts, under his virtual alias “Parzival,” teams up with four other non-characters to uncover the secrets behind all three keys. Meanwhile, an evil corporation with a stupid name, Innovative Online Industries, aims to monopolize the digital space by sending an actual army of slaves (kidnapped gamers working off debts) into the OASIS to find the egg. When they see Watts progressing rapidly, IOI gets a little murdery, as most evil corporations do.

Spielberg seems more at home with a movie like “Ready Player One” than his Oscar-bait biopics like “The Post.” The latter was so self-important that it lacked any sort of heart. “Ready Player One,” on the other hand, is too busy having fun to worry about self-importance. It relishes in the well-crafted action and unintentional cheesiness of Spielberg’s early filmography. Spielberg has effectively recreated the unfettered, expressive style he mastered with “E.T.,” “Jurassic Park” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Spielberg’s eye for action, in particular, pays off handsomely, especially in a virtual race through New York City in the midst of an attack by King Kong and a T-Rex.  It’s a shame the movie feels weighed down by its talk-heavy scenes. The romance subplot is profoundly embarrassing, but that seems to be Cline’s specialty. The one-dimensionality of IOI’s CEO, Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), makes him an easily forgettable villain. It isn’t clear whether Watts’s awkward dialogue is an intentional pastiche of dorkiness or an earnest attempt at profundity.

What’s the ideal audience for “Ready Player One,” a movie boasting a $170 million budget? The movie doesn’t stand strong enough without its references to engage pop culture-illiterate audience members. It isn’t for children too young to understand what’s happening, nor is it for those too old to recognize anything more recent than an Atari 2600. The references seem to be done in the name of fan service to adults who used to be nerdy teenagers in the ’80s and ’90s, and certainly, that cohort will take away the most from it. Homage and references to other works are powerful tools of language in nerd circles. While other media find interesting ways to portray the cultural foundation of one’s geekdom as a central storytelling element, stripping the references away from “Ready Player One” leaves nothing but a bland cyber-adventure story — like “Spy Kids 3D” carried around in a Justice League lunchbox.