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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.