Ready Player One is set to become one of the most divisive movies of the year, and in 2018 that’s saying a lot.
Since the film’s teaser trailer first dropped at San Diego Comic-Con last summer, there have been a lot of eye rolls and guffaws directed at the Ernest Cline adaptation. The reason for this can be found in the first few pages of Cline’s novel.
There are times where the book is just a long list of notable songs, games, movies, shows, musicians, writers and directors. In the form of a novel, this can be a bit exhausting, as subtlety is not exactly the story’s strength. The book has been criticized for celebrating some of the worst parts of fandom and pop culture, mostly the idea that being a fan is just the ability to list obscure facts and names of characters and creators.
Some of the early negative reviews of the movie criticize it for leaning too heavily on the nostalgia factor. The fact that the movie is directed by Steven Spielberg, a man responsible for roughly 30% of the world’s nostalgia, brings a whole other level of weirdness to the experience.
These complaints about weaponized nostalgia have also been directed at Stranger Things, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and several reboots and remakes. In this case, however, the critics have been louder.
Much of this criticism was borne out of an article that called the film “Black Panther for nerds.” This was a pretty ridiculous take since countless movies have been made specifically for so-called nerds, but this sentiment inspired a truly exhausting number of think pieces.
In fact, the negative response to the movie has been so loud that it seems like there are more people complaining about those calling Ready Player One a defining moment in geek culture than people that are actually claiming that’s what it is.
So can the movie win over these skeptics and haters? Depending on what their expectations are, possibly. People worried that the movie is just going to be two hours and nineteen minutes of Tye Sheridan’s character screaming pop culture references at the audience will be relieved to know that’s not all this is.
There are times where the references are in your face, and there are far too many Easter eggs for a mere mortal to count. Every scene that takes place in the virtual world of the OASIS is filled with pop culture references, covering everything from well know properties to very obscure ones.
However, these references work a lot better on film than they do in the novel. Instead of having to read through what’s essentially a list of nerdy things, we instead get to see most of them in the background.
Beyond that, the movie has a surprisingly important message. There is, of course, the obvious idea that it’s important to actually live in the real world once in a while, but the movie also serves as a metaphor for net neutrality.
The film’s villain, Nolan Sorrento (played to perfection by Ben Mendelsohn) refers to the OASIS as the world’s most important economic resource, a term that could easily be applied to the internet. Since the bad guy is a corporate jerk who wants to make the OASIS as profitable as possible with no regard for the people who use it the most, the connections to the net neutrality debate are evident.
The first official trailer focused on the idea of the OASIS’s biggest fans coming together to save it from the people who could ruin it, and this ends up being a major theme in the film.
Ready Player One doesn’t try to be groundbreaking in the way it delivers this message, but people who are skeptical about the movie being nothing more than self-indulgent references and eye-roll inducing Easter eggs should know that there is actually some substance in this movie.
Of course, the net neutrality message isn’t the selling point behind the film, and probably won’t be enough to convince people who are dead set that this movie isn’t for them. But if you go into Ready Player One not expecting a game-changer but also not bringing in a holier-than-thou attitude, you might just have fun.
Ready Player One is just a movie, and really that’s all it needs to be.