In the Flesh: Ready Player One

I recently met my boyfriend’s four-year-old twins, which was very sweet and special. During the interminable runtime of Ready Player One I found myself continually drawn back to the memory of these adorable children excitedly showing me each and every one of their toys and favorite objects, the things through which they’ve begun to understand and form ideas about the world. Ready Player One presents a world in which the endless listing of objects and trivia is the only meaningful thing a person can do, and it made me sad in a deep and profound way. The joy of listening to children tell you about the things they love, no matter how disjointed and nonsensical and full of facts about cartoons you’ve never seen and don’t understand their explanations are, is that they’re growing. They’re learning to love things, to be curious, to be moved by art and aesthetics and ideas. Watching Spielberg’s film, all I could imagine was these two bright and vital little people growing up and never moving beyond listing things they recognized as the joy slowly drained out of it, replaced by covetous, defensive obsession. The worldview Ready Player One, a film which ends with its hero, Wade (Tye Sheridan), making out with his girlfriend, Samantha (Olivia Cooke), in a custom gamer chair, shows us is one of curdled, self-congratulatory referential nothingness, an infinity of lists and branded stickers.

There is, to Spielberg’s credit, some fun to be had in the film’s early racing sequence, a sort of deranged rendition of Mario Kart featuring King Kong, the tyrannosaurus from Jurassic Park, and enormous wrecking ball obstacle courses. There’s a feeling of real momentum and weight to it, a breathlessness to the jumps, an exhilarating quality to the crashes and bumps. It’s sadly missing from the rest of the film, which falls much closer to Marvel-league incoherent CGI sludge. Cooke is utterly wasted in the thankless role of “girl”, though she finds a tiny sliver of something to get her teeth into in her monologue about her father’s harrowing digital indentured servitude and debt. Sheridan is, as near as I can tell, a human teenager. Elsewhere, Ben Mendelsohn and Ralph Ineson are almost preposterously underutilized as, respectively, a stock corporate villain and Wade’s aunt’s shitty boyfriend who gets blown up in real life and then never mentioned again. It’s hard to feel anything for characters who barely seem to have feelings themselves.

None of this, though, is as damning or artistically offensive as the film’s use of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Watching Spielberg, an artist I respect and who shaped my childhood profoundly, pervert the work of one of his own idols and chief sources of inspiration in service to a man-child’s stunted fantasy is sick-making. It made me understand the word “desecrate” on an emotional level, not because Kubrick’s work is sacrosanct to me, but because it’s powerful and deserves respect. Ready Player One turns it into a video game level, digitally inserting repulsive JRPG avatars and CGI mecha-orcs into deeply chilling and culturally important shots. They make quips and blunder their way through vaguely The Shining-themed obstacles inside a shut-in’s maudlin shrine to his regret over never getting any. It sucks, man. Ready Player One is an insult to the very idea of loving art, too stupid and self-absorbed even to be particularly cynical. It shows us a stunted, unhappy man (Mark Rylance) who made an MMORPG where losers waste their lives jerking off to Ghostbusters merchandise, a hot girl to make out with, and there its imagination ends.