Ready Player One (2018)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
When the creator of a popular video game system dies, a virtual contest is created to compete for his fortune.
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26 films that influenced Ready Player One
What critics say influenced Ready Player One
The most telling sequence in “Ready Player One” is the one in which Parzival, Art3mis, and Parzival’s best friend and protector, an avatar named Aech (pronounced H ), who resembles a metalloid cross between Vin Diesel and Shrek, enter the Overlook Hotel from “The Shining.”
Plus, fans of The Shining – you’ll be treated to an *entire* challenge set in a reconstructed Overlook Hotel.
Sometimes, this referencing of the past is delightful: a video-game re-enactment around the sets of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is both funny and thrilling.
The movie’s greatest sequence is a prolonged homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” too rich with details to spoil here, but needless to say, this is not a brainless blockbuster so much as an attempt to elevate the blockbuster form in its own language.
Best of all is a sequence that takes place in the famous Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick‘s “The Shining,” which has our main characters scrambling around its eerie hallways looking for one of the three keys.
Early on, there’s a shoot-the-works car chase in which Wade — or, rather, his avatar, Parzival, who resembles a frosted-blond, plane-cheeked Keanu Reeves in a jean vest — climbs into the wing-doored DeLorean DMC-12 from “Back to the Future” and races through a cityscape at pedal-to-the-metal speed to the tune of Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” even as he’s pursued by King Kong and the T. Rex from “Jurassic Park.”
Desde Iron Giant hasta el vehículo, DeLorean, de Back to the Future, la película es un manjar de detalles icónicos que fluyen desde la década de los 80 hasta hoy día.
For example, Wade Watts using a Delorean from Back to the Future as his go-to car makes sense and feels natural for the world.
Back to the Future, Beetlejuice and John Hughes movies are the touchstones in the Oasis, we quickly discover, solely because…
If Wade/Parzival competes in a breakneck car race through the city, you’d best believe he’s going to driving the DeLorean from Back to the Future while hotly pursued not only by a red cycle from Akira and the ‘60s TV Batmobile, but also by the one and only King Kong and the Jurassic Park T-Rex, with Joan Jett wailing on the soundtrack.
(A conversation with Halliday’s online avatar closely recalls a similar scene with Professor Falken in WarGames , and carries the same sense of melancholy.)
As a book, RPO is rooted in iconography without seemingly understanding the meaning behind any of it; a fanboy’s silly wet dream, harnessed around the thinnest of plots and silliest of set pieces (a whole sequence set inside the Matthew Broderick movie WarGames ?
If the hero crushes on a worthy, kickass avatar competitor named Art3mis (the terrific Olivia Cooke, so good in Thoroughbreds), you have to know that he’ll spend his pre-date hours trying on looks that emulate Michael Jackson, Prince, Duran Duran and Buckaroo Banzai and that soon after, he and Art3mis will burn down the disco with a dancing-on-air showstopper that recalls John Travolta and Donna Pescow’s rug-cutting moves in Saturday Night Fever.
It’s still a visual festival of ‘80s culture that sometimes hinges significant jokes on the assumption that the audience knows the filmography of Robert Zemeckis, or will chortle over a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail .
It’s unsurprising that many players choose to use Street Fighter or Halo characters as their in-world avatars, or that the in-game items reference ’70s and ’80s mainstays like Child’s Play and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
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In reality Wade lives on the highest level of a leaning tower of trailer parks piled atop one another—in a ghettoized neighborhood called “the Stacks”—but in the OASIS he goes by the username “Parzival,” a play on Percival, the King Arthur knight who found the Holy Grail (and focal point of 1981 cult classic Excalibur).
It’s eXistenz for those who grew up playing Warcraft instead of watching David Cronenberg movies.
Spielberg said during his introduction that the references, of which there are too many to list from the big (“The Iron Giant”) to the small (Chucky from “Child’s Play”), are what you see through the side windows of the vehicle and the story is what’s in front of you as you drive through the movie.
Early on, there’s a shoot-the-works car chase in which Wade — or, rather, his avatar, Parzival, who resembles a frosted-blond, plane-cheeked Keanu Reeves in a jean vest — climbs into the wing-doored DeLorean DMC-12 from “Back to the Future” and races through a cityscape at pedal-to-the-metal speed to the tune of Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” even as he’s pursued by King Kong and the T. Rex from “Jurassic Park.”
Ready Player One incluye de esa peculiar magia “Spielbergiana”, presente en otros de sus clásicos como E.T., Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark y Jaws.
The man behind Jurassic Park and Jaws exhibits a shocking ability to adapt and evolve with the progression of filmmaking technology that has taken place over the course of his lengthy career, and Ready Player One is no exception.
Then, Jurassic Park and E.T. director Steven Spielberg came on board to direct the adaptation.
Importance is stressed on aping Jurassic Park and King Kong as obstacles across a New York City Need For Speed style race, diluting characters with NPC personalities.
Instead of Cline’s self-congratulatory words, we have Spielberg taking all these images and transmuting them into a free-flowing amalgamation of dorky fluff, filtered through the bleary-eyed blue/grey haze we’ve come to know and love from the director’s sci-fi collaborations with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Minority Report).
Ready Player One is something different for Spielberg, now 71, who has dealt with future ‘reality’ before, in 2002’s Minority Report , but here targets the youth audience with a sci-fi family film which heavily references his own pop culture past.
And in the process, he has made his most enjoyable slice of escapism since the one-two punch of Minority Report and Catch Me if You Can.
Steven Spielberg revoluciona el quehacer cinematográfico como cuando nos presentó a los dinosaurios de Jurassic Park o a la interfaz gráfica de Minority Report .
Although brimming with the director’s best use of special effects since “Minority Report,” there’s a coldness to the surroundings that diminishes any of the emotional heft that could have made it more than just empty escapist fare.
Sin embargo, este filme también cuenta con la ambición de un director que quiere expandir el alcance de su talento (“The Color Purple”, “A.I”, “Catch Me If You Can”, “Minority Report”) y con la honestidad emocional que ha distinguido las veces que ha dramatizado eventos clave de nuestra historia (“Saving Private Ryan”, “Munich”, “Lincoln”, “The Post”).
For all the great films Spielberg has made since Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders and E.T., this is the one that's closest in spirit and rush to the four of them.
La nueva película de Spielberg cuenta con la devoción a la magia cinematográfica que lograron que filmes como “ET”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” y “Jurassic Park” dejaran una huella permanente en el séptimo arte.
“Ready Player One,” Steven Spielberg’s dizzying foray into ’80s pop culture fandom, is a return of sorts to the pure pop escapism that pervaded his filmography in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with such films as “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T.” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
There’s nothing particularly unique about Wade, but the movie’s throwbacks extend to its live-action scenes as well: He’s the typical white kid ready to rule the world, a Spielberg staple since “E.T.”, and through perseverance he finally cracks the code to get to the first key.
The man behind Jurassic Park and Jaws exhibits a shocking ability to adapt and evolve with the progression of filmmaking technology that has taken place over the course of his lengthy career, and Ready Player One is no exception.
For all the great films Spielberg has made since Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders and E.T., this is the one that's closest in spirit and rush to the four of them.
Before Ready Player One screened to a packed audience in The Paramount last night, Steven Spielberg took the stage and talked animatedly about how much he loves Ernie Cline’s book, and how he knew this was the right movie for him to make because, “I’ve been a gamer since 1974, when I played Pong on Martha’s Vineyard while filming Jaws .”
But like Spielberg’s adaptations of Jurassic Park and Jaws, the director uses a popular framework to make a precisely tuned cinematic delight.
“Ready Player One,” Steven Spielberg’s dizzying foray into ’80s pop culture fandom, is a return of sorts to the pure pop escapism that pervaded his filmography in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with such films as “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T.” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
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The C.G.I. visuals of the OASIS—especially in the film’s opening race—can be chaotically overwhelming at times, but they can also be elegant in a way neither Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin nor James Cameron’s Avatar—working with slightly clunkier motion-capture technology—managed to be.
But once we enter the OASIS, the film turns into The Sims version of Avatar.
In many ways Cline’s text is one that is perfectly suited to cinema and while the plot dizzyingly assaults the senses at times, it is hard to resist a film featuring – among other things - mountain climbing with Batman, The A-Team ’s GMC Vandura racing alongside a DeLorean and Christine ’s 1958 Plymouth Fury while avoiding a King Kong attack and (in a goosebumpy final fight reveal) a joyous remix of Akira Ifukube’s Godzilla theme.