Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One was a novel quite literally about nerd gatekeeping. It wasn’t just about connecting with the reader over a flood of pop culture references; the actual storyline involved studying games, movies and television from a certain time period — mostly the 1980s, despite its futuristic setting — in order to solve a series of puzzles. The idea is that all that useless knowledge of stereotypically geeky pursuits has paid off, and validates both the novel’s protagonist and the reader’s hobbies.
The whole thing falls apart if you don’t speak the language of this background fluently; this wasn’t a book for normies.
By comparison, the movie had to adapt a book designed to appeal to the narrowest possible audience and sell it to the widest possible audience. You can’t balance those two goals with any kind of grace — which is why the movie is filled with pop culture references that are immediately pointed out by a character for the viewer to recognize. Your knowledge of this stuff is meaningless, because the movie is going to tell you what it is and why it’s important.
Ready Player One is full of references for references’ sake; the only reason they’re there is to give the target audience a thrill of recognition. In the book, that’s ... fine, if annoying. The pitch is clear. Cline’s authorial intent there isn’t subtle. It’s wish fulfillment, which, again, is fine.
The problem is that so much has changed since the book’s publication that it’s silly to think people aren’t already being rewarded for their knowledge of comic books and video games. Even Drake is streaming Fortnite. Marvel and Star Wars movies dominate the box office. There’s nothing comforting or inspiring about watching Ready Player One on a big screen, because we don’t need to be told that someone out there finally gets us. Everyone gets us.
Steven Spielberg had the impossible task of making popular things seem popular, while also supporting the idea that people who liked these things were special. What’s left is a forgettable action film that takes place in a world where pop culture seems to have stopped changing completely around 2017.
Ready Player One, in sum: It’s forgettable, and it’s messy, and it’s cloying. As someone who feels bonded to people because of shared interests, the film is a failure — because the diehard, nerdy niche that takes pleasure from pointing out Pac-Man posters and reminiscing over the old-ass Atari game Adventure is already on top. Even if it wasn’t, the movie spends so much time making sure that all viewers understand everything, that there’s nothing rewarding in being able to point things out.
The book was a nerdy fantasy that was published at the right time to ride the wave of comic books and video games bleeding into the mainstream. But then, there were fans who could still claim there was something unique about watching the nostalgic movies of their youth. But in 2018, Ready Player One film is a mainstream movie that, ironically, feels lost in a maze of other mainstream movies based on nerdy properties.
A movie that claims we’re going to be saved by getting dated references feels positively quaint and redundant in 2018. We’ve been ruling the OASIS for a decade already.