READY PLAYER ONE (film)

'''READY PLAYER ONE (film). Steven Spielberg, director.''' Zak Penn, Ernest Cline, script, from the novel by Ernest Cline. Adam Stockhausen, production design. USA: Amblin Entertainment et al. (production) / Warner Bros. (initial US and most of Earth distribution), 2018. See IMDb for other production companies and distributors..

SF film which we might call GamerPunk with Spielbergian touches (including an essential niceness and a running time of 140 minutes, for a story that could have been told more quickly); also a Grail-quest motif.

Warner Bros. gives the story line as In the year 2045, the real world is a harsh place. The only time Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) truly feels alive is when he escapes to the OASIS, an immersive virtual universe where most of humanity spends their days. In the OASIS, you can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone-the only limits are your own imagination. The OASIS was created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance), who left his immense fortune and total control of the Oasis to the winner of a three-part contest he designed to find a worthy heir. When Wade conquers the first challenge of the reality-bending treasure hunt, he and his friends […] are hurled into a fantastical universe of discovery and danger to save the OASIS.

Relevant here for the built-in cyberpunk contrasts between a grungy, Industrial, decaying, dystopian real world and a Virtual Reality gamespace of strange beauty and adventure. Note images of containment of players' bodies while in cyberspace connection, ranging from a luxurious couch for the villain to cube-shaped cells for penal labor — a visual pun on office-work cubicles — to being rigged like a marionette while inside a truck for the closest thing the film has to rebels.

If there's an Academy Award for Permissions Departments, READY PLAYER ONE is in contention so watch closely for the Oasis and the VR world around it as kind of dreamscapes or mindscapes stuffed with images and motifs from (US, 1980s) popular culture, including the Iron Giant and BACK TO THE FUTURE's De Lorean time-travel car.

For technical details on how THE SHINING was integrated into READY PLAYER ONE, see Carolyn Giardina's "How 'Ready Player One' VFX Supervisor Re-Created Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining'", Hollywood Reporter 11 Feb. 2019.[How 'Ready Player One' VFX Supervisor Re-Created Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining']

RDE, Initial Compiler, 3Ap18, with thanks to Spencer Cordell for the SHINING article