Steven Spielberg is inarguably one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, but, being human (as far as we know), he is fallible. He’s made one thoroughly lousy movie (“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”), a strangely inert one (“The BFG”), and must answer for the bizarre backlot debacle that is “Hook.”
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These misfires are rare for a director like Spielberg, who doesn’t have to move forward on a project until he’s good and ready. He’s known for shooting quickly and confidently, intuitively placing the camera exactly where it needs to be (on the occasions when he doesn’t storyboard, like “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “Schindler’s List”), and delivering a finished film that is narratively concise and thematically rich. The only thing better than watching a Steven Spielberg movie for the first time is knowing that it’s going to open up in new and surprising ways on subsequent viewings. There isn’t a single filmmaker working today who can top Spielberg as a visual storyteller (though I’m rooting for the GOAT, Brian De Palma, to get himself insured to make one more movie).
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Every time a new Steven Spielberg film is announced, it immediately becomes one of my most anticipated movies of whatever year it’s eventually released. The sole exception was the day I learned he was directing an adaptation of Ernie Cline’s novel “Ready Player One.” An aggressive pastiche of Generation X video game nostalgia, Cline’s book was literary cotton candy. It was pure sugar overload from page one. If you were able to power through the litany of pop cultural references to the underwhelming conclusion (seriously, it reads like “American Psycho” written by a Cheetos-inhaling slob who’s never tucked in his shirt), you certainly weren’t thinking, “Gee, I really wish the guy who directed ‘Jaws’ would blow a year of his life making a movie out of this nonsense.”
Spielberg, however, saw something here, and, seven years after its theatrical release, Max subscribers are eating it up.
Ready Player One is a fascinating subversion of its source material
According to FlixPatrol, “Ready Player One” is currently the fourth-most-viewed movie on Max — which makes sense on a distracted viewing level because you can play this movie in the background and see something visually stimulating every time you look up. But is this movie any good?
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“Ready Player One” tells the tale of Wade Watts, a jaded kid who, while escaping the dreariness of post-apocalyptic Columbus, Ohio (circa 2045) by plugging into a virtual reality gaming-verse, finds himself in a race to locate a golden Easter egg that will confer ownership of this ones-and-zeroes world on the lucky discoverer. The book had nary an interesting idea on its mind, but Spielberg, a longtime gamer himself (dating back to the age of “Pong”), locked into something subversive regarding the inherently empty pursuit of victory inside a virtual environment. Spielberg has always been a dreamer, but he’s realized these flights of fantasy by putting boots on the ground and making them in piecemeal fashion with loads of crew members running to and fro. Escapism is hard work.
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Again, I think “Ready Player One” is mostly being digested in random chunks by people who’ve already seen the movie. I doubt that they’re panning for metaphor and deeper meaning in this stream. But if you can get past your aversion to the source material and its gaudy surface, Spielberg’s film isn’t a warm, nostalgic embrace, nor is it pro-corporate. It’s a much darker, far more cynical movie than people think (though /Film’s Chris Evangelista begs to differ).