Ready Player Won

Popular Culture is a daily part of my life, so I was rather interested in a movie built entirely around pop culture. In my opinion, Ready Player One was a pretty good and very fun, albeit cliché, movie.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW

Ready Player One follows the adventure of Wade Watts, known as Parzival in the virtual reality world of the OASIS, as he tries to solve an Easter Egg put in by the creator to determine who would inherit the OASIS after his death. In order to solve the Easter Egg, Parzival works with his friends Art3mis, Aech, Sho, and Daito to pass the three trials and obtain the three keys. All the while they’re trying to stop the villainous IOI corporation, which is trying to solve the Easter Egg so that they can monopolize the OASIS with ads and memberships and stuff like that.

As should be expected, the heroes start to win, but the villains soon catch up and gain the upper hand, only for the heroes to ultimately come out on top.

SPOILERS END

I’m not saying that Ready Player One was a bad movie. In fact, I really enjoyed it. It’s a fun movie, and the premise itself is really interesting and original, but the conflict isn’t. The idea of a dystopian world where humans accept that life is terrible, but they try to avoid it by escaping to virtual reality is an interesting concept in my opinion. I find this kind of virtual reality to be really cool and I hope that we eventually have this kind of technology. I really enjoyed the world of the OASIS, but at the same time I wish that it could have been explored a bit more. The movie shows us some really cool places, but not all of them are explored to the fullest extent. I hope that if there is a sequel, the OASIS can be expanded and explored even more.

However, the basic conflict, a group of rebellious teenagers fighting to take down an evil corporation, is not very original. And even at that, the villains’ means do not match up with the goals. IOI has killed people who have gotten in their way of winning a contest to control a video game. I get it that corporations can fight dirty and use underhanded tactics but this is kind of ridiculous. In that sense it’s pretty easy to hate the bad guys, but where’s the motivation? If only the top people in the corporation benefit then why is everyone else helping them? And if it’s known how bad these guys are (which it is, because the final battle of the movie attests to this knowledge), then why have they not been shut down by the authorities? Even though the concept of Ready Player One is really strong, the conflict really isn’t.

But, the main saving grace, and gimmick, of the movie is the constant bombardment of pop culture references. These references range from video games like Halo to books like Dune to movies like Back to the Future. I think that the reason that I enjoyed the movie so much was because I knew every or almost every reference made in the movie. I may not have known everything about each and every reference, but I was able to understand most of them.

In all honesty, Ready Player One was a rather average movie plot-wise, but it was a pretty good movie due to all the references in my opinion. Therefore, I give Ready Player One a 7.5/10, because even though the plot is a bit cliché and the romance is somewhat forced (but I don’t feel like delving into that), the countless references and Easter Eggs more than make up for it.