Why is Steven Spielberg devoting so much of his time to making cartoons? Ready Player One, his mammoth new movie, is the third film he’s made since 2011 using motion-capture animation. The first two—The Adventures of Tintin and The BFG—were simultaneously hyperactive and dispirited. Spielberg is the most successful filmmaker who has ever lived and one of the most adventurous, so he’s earned the right to do whatever he wants. Spielberg wanted to play with the technical advances conceived by his protege and friend Bob Zemeckis in movies like The Polar Express and even more fully realized in James Cameron’s Avatar.
Tintin and The BFG were designed to be popular, crowd-pleasing hits. They weren’t; both flopped at the box office. Nor did they seem like passion projects for Spielberg. Yet here he is again, with a movie that’s probably 75 percent animated. Set in a dystopian 2045 where everybody spends as much time as possible inside a virtual-reality universe called the Oasis, Ready Player One can’t decide if it’s a satirical portrait of a world in dangerous thrall to computer simulations or a sparkling celebration of gamers and gaming. When the movie goes inside the Oasis, it’s a cartoon. When it’s outside, it’s live action. After about 20 minutes in the Oasis, how I longed for the real world—and so I didn’t really pick up on how wonderfully seductive the Oasis is supposed to be.
We’re supposed to care about whether a poor kid named Wade living in an American favela will get to own the entire Oasis by solving a series of riddles in a game set up by its deceased proprietor based on his own life—or whether the Oasis will end up in the hands of an evil corporate rich person who cheats. (Guess who wins.) The storyline is largely borrowed from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—only here Willy Wonka is dead and Charlie Bucket is a 17-year-old played by an astonishingly dull young actor named Tye Sheridan whose chief quality seems to be that he resembles the teenaged Steven Spielberg.
Ready Player One has a lot of plot. Boy, is there plot. It needs to go on a plot diet, because there’s so much of it that the plot becomes incomprehensible. I’m guessing there were a bunch of explanatory scenes about how people in 2045 assemble into “clans” while others find themselves indentured to an evil corporation that sticks a VR helmet on their heads and makes them walk perpetually on a treadmill—and that those scenes were cut to move the thing along. Probably wise from a marketing standpoint, but what’s left makes little sense.
Instead, we have a series of set pieces, and while they’re intended to dazzle, mostly they’re just odd. We’re told the dead Wonka is a techie named Halliday who was obsessed with 1980s pop culture and that the puzzle he leaves behind is all about the 1980s. That’s an amusing idea, and when Spielberg remembers it, he has good fun with it (there’s a hilarious bit involving Chucky, the murderous doll from Child’s Play).
But the highlight of the puzzle is when our boy Wade and his friends have to enter and interact inside Halliday’s favorite movie—Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Bzzzt. Game over. Yes, we know Spielberg loves Kubrick; he directed Kubrick’s dream project, AI: Artificial Intelligence, after the master’s death. But while The Shining was released in 1980, it has not a trace of the fizzy, exuberant 1980s pop that we’re told Halliday loved so much—John Hughes movies, or Back to the Future, or even Spielberg’s own pictures from those years. In the novel on which Ready Player One is based, the movie in question is WarGames. Spielberg decided to amuse himself here and mucked up the best part of the overall concept behind Ready Player One.
Because, really, what’s happened here is that Steven Spielberg has made a movie for the kid in everyone who cares passionately about a postmortem transfer of stock and assets. What do I know? Maybe if you’re worth a few billion nothing could be more interesting. But for the rest of us? On the other hand, this could explain why Spielberg, one of the richest of all moviemakers, is so satisfied making cartoons in his 70s. It might leave him more time for estate planning.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
