Post by Sysop3 on Mar 13, 2018 3:04:37 GMT -5
Ready Player One
Director:
Steven Spielberg
With:
Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Rylance, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg, Lena Waithe, Win Morisaki, Philip Zhao, Susan Lynch, Hannah John-Kamen, Ralph Ineson, McKenne Grace, Letitia Wright.
Release Date:
Mar 29, 2018
In “Ready Player One,” Steven Spielberg’s dizzyingly propulsive virtual-reality fanboy geek-out, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a teenager living in a dystopian trailer park in the year 2045, spends most of his time strapping on a headset and immersing himself in the OASIS, a techie surrealist theme park of the senses. Once inside, you never know what you’re going to see or imagine next — though it’s hard to go for more than 30 seconds without encountering some succulent tidbit of pop nostalgia, most of it from the 1980s.
Early on, there’s a shoot-the-works car chase in which Wade (Tye Sheridan) — 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.” (Blink and you’ll miss the Batmobile.)
A bit later, Parzival goes on a date with Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), who is also an avatar, with punk-red hair and the oversize eyes of an anime kewpie doll. He gets ready for the evening by morphing into assorted outfits — he tries on Prince, Michael Jackson, and a Duran Duran trench coat before settling on the shaggy suit and tie of Buckaroo Banzai. At a nightclub, Parzival and Art3mis boogie to “Staying Alive” on a floating disco floor and wind up literally dancing on air. All very trancy and romantic, though what good is virtual reality if you can’t wage an unholy battle in it?
Have no fear: In “Ready Player One,” there is plenty of vicarious fantasy combat, notably a war of the worlds that features the Iron Giant as well as the red-eyed, gleaming silver Mechagodzilla. Every time a creature like that shows up (at one point, even the monster fetus from “Alien” makes a kind of palm-buzzer cameo), it’s entrancingly cool. “Ready Player One” tells a breathless and relatively coherent story — essentially, the future of civilization is riding on the outcome of a video game — but the movie, first and foremost, is a coruscating explosion of pop-culture eye candy.
Never is that more spectacularly true than in the irresistible sequence 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.” The reason they’ve gone there is that they’re trying to track down the woman who James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the disconnected nerd-genius inventor of the OASIS, once had a date with and nearly kissed. It turns out that the two went out to the movies — they went to see “The Shining” — and as the characters in “Ready Player One” stroll around on the sets and images from Kubrick’s film, it’s ticklish, after an hour or so of slippery mutating synthetic digital imagery, to envision “virtual reality” as something that’s this iconic and analog and concrete.
Aech winds up next to the Overlook’s infamous Art Deco elevators, slipping and sliding around in the jellied blood that pours out of them, and that’s before he ventures up to Room 236. The black-and-white New Year’s Eve photograph that pictured a tuxedoed Jack Nicholson now features, in his place, James Halliday, and Art3mis is able to make contact with Halliday’s date, which results in our heroes getting one of the three keys they need to win the game. Yet when that victorious moment happens, it’s a bit of an anti-climax. In “Ready Player One,” everything you could call virtual is clever and spellbinding. Everything you might call reality is rather banal.
more
variety.com/2018/film/reviews/ready-player-one-review-steven-spielberg-1202723649/
Director:
Steven Spielberg
With:
Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Rylance, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg, Lena Waithe, Win Morisaki, Philip Zhao, Susan Lynch, Hannah John-Kamen, Ralph Ineson, McKenne Grace, Letitia Wright.
Release Date:
Mar 29, 2018
In “Ready Player One,” Steven Spielberg’s dizzyingly propulsive virtual-reality fanboy geek-out, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a teenager living in a dystopian trailer park in the year 2045, spends most of his time strapping on a headset and immersing himself in the OASIS, a techie surrealist theme park of the senses. Once inside, you never know what you’re going to see or imagine next — though it’s hard to go for more than 30 seconds without encountering some succulent tidbit of pop nostalgia, most of it from the 1980s.
Early on, there’s a shoot-the-works car chase in which Wade (Tye Sheridan) — 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.” (Blink and you’ll miss the Batmobile.)
A bit later, Parzival goes on a date with Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), who is also an avatar, with punk-red hair and the oversize eyes of an anime kewpie doll. He gets ready for the evening by morphing into assorted outfits — he tries on Prince, Michael Jackson, and a Duran Duran trench coat before settling on the shaggy suit and tie of Buckaroo Banzai. At a nightclub, Parzival and Art3mis boogie to “Staying Alive” on a floating disco floor and wind up literally dancing on air. All very trancy and romantic, though what good is virtual reality if you can’t wage an unholy battle in it?
Have no fear: In “Ready Player One,” there is plenty of vicarious fantasy combat, notably a war of the worlds that features the Iron Giant as well as the red-eyed, gleaming silver Mechagodzilla. Every time a creature like that shows up (at one point, even the monster fetus from “Alien” makes a kind of palm-buzzer cameo), it’s entrancingly cool. “Ready Player One” tells a breathless and relatively coherent story — essentially, the future of civilization is riding on the outcome of a video game — but the movie, first and foremost, is a coruscating explosion of pop-culture eye candy.
Never is that more spectacularly true than in the irresistible sequence 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.” The reason they’ve gone there is that they’re trying to track down the woman who James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the disconnected nerd-genius inventor of the OASIS, once had a date with and nearly kissed. It turns out that the two went out to the movies — they went to see “The Shining” — and as the characters in “Ready Player One” stroll around on the sets and images from Kubrick’s film, it’s ticklish, after an hour or so of slippery mutating synthetic digital imagery, to envision “virtual reality” as something that’s this iconic and analog and concrete.
Aech winds up next to the Overlook’s infamous Art Deco elevators, slipping and sliding around in the jellied blood that pours out of them, and that’s before he ventures up to Room 236. The black-and-white New Year’s Eve photograph that pictured a tuxedoed Jack Nicholson now features, in his place, James Halliday, and Art3mis is able to make contact with Halliday’s date, which results in our heroes getting one of the three keys they need to win the game. Yet when that victorious moment happens, it’s a bit of an anti-climax. In “Ready Player One,” everything you could call virtual is clever and spellbinding. Everything you might call reality is rather banal.
more
variety.com/2018/film/reviews/ready-player-one-review-steven-spielberg-1202723649/