You got it!
No, this isn't one of the countless King Kong rehashes.
It's a scene from Ready Player One,
and it, along with several other odd moments ham-fisted
into the movie, are a perfect example of how Ready Player
One misused its premise.
It killed the art of homage, soured our nostalgia,
and ultimately ruined any chance the movie had at relevancy.
But before we don our VR headsets
and jump into the OASIS, make sure
you subscribe to the channel for more content just like this.
2018's Ready Player One is an odd beast.
Adapted from the best selling novel of the same name
by Ernest Cline and directed by Steven Spielberg,
the movie had a respectable amount of money
at the box office and was generally
well received by its audience.
On the surface, Ready Player One is just a fun romp through
nerd culture, a love letter to video games,
movies, and the entire decade of the '80s, made
by the man responsible for a lot of things being referenced
in the first place.
Yet somehow, it totally disappeared
from public consciousness after its release
only four years ago.
How could that be?
Well, there's a lot about Ready Player One that is often,
ironically, overlooked.
At its core, the Ready Player One movie
is about a contest for which the prize is
half a trillion dollars and full ownership of the OASIS,
the virtual reality game most people adopted
as a sort of replacement for their real lives.
The only way to win this contest is
by obsessing over the recently deceased creator of the OASIS,
James Halliday, and memorizing everything you possibly
can about him-- particularly his favorite movies, TV shows,
and games.
Our protagonist, teenage orphan Wade Watts,
is a proper Halliday historian.
He's fighting against a corporation called IOI
which doesn't care at all about Halliday
or what the OASIS means to its many users.
IOI is just trying to win the contest
because owning the OASIS is roughly
equivalent to owning the world.
So essentially, Ready Player One is the story
of a battle between a nerd who loves and reveres
pop culture and a company who does not.
Where Wade sees the deeper meaning and value
in these cultural classics, IOI sees only a tool
to be used in the quest for money and power.
When you take that into consideration,
there are some aspects of Ready Player One that
start to feel a little strange.
By design, Ready Player One is chock full of references.
We can't quite call them homages,
but we'll get to that in a bit.
The point is that almost every inch of the screen,
every second of time, and every bit of dialogue
is in service to some other well known IP.
H, are you seeing this?
Yeah, I see it.
That's Kaneda's bike from Akira.
Remember that Steven Spielberg directed this thing.
The King of Hollywood blockbuster events
and the brilliant mind behind half our collective childhoods
obviously knows a thing or two about restraint and reverence.
Yet it's severely lacking here.
But to give credit where it's due,
Spielberg was just working with what he had.
Ernest Cline's novel is arguably even more
jam-packed with significant names and places
than its movie adaptation.
And the overabundance of these references is its own problem.
At some point, maybe around the second time
Overwatch's tracer shows up on screen,
your eyes kind of glaze over from the constant barrage
of iconography.
The movie ends up becoming a meaningless pop culture
shaped blob.
It's bizarre because if you don't think about Ready Player
One for too long, it can be easy to see it
as a sort of less cartoony version of The LEGO Movie.
All our favorite characters are here, coexisting,
and we get to enjoy seeing them interact with one another.
Both movies look beautiful, and the action is enjoyable
but that line of thinking can only get you so far.
Because while The LEGO Movie presents itself as silly
and not to be taken seriously--
Honey, where are my pants?
[LAUGHTER]
--it does a much better job of examining the properties it's
referencing.
LEGO's Batman is fun to watch because they
deconstruct the character and turned him into something else
entirely.
Bruce Wayne?
Who's that?
Sounds like a cool guy.
You can only do that if you really understand
the character to begin with.
On the other hand, Ready Player One's Batman reference
is literally just saying the character's name
and showing him to us on screen.
Because the movie demands to be taken seriously,
it can't play with its references
the way The LEGO Movie does.
Some of the references in Ready Player One are just simple
nods.
Others are hugely important to the plot.
But none of them are used for anything
more than a play to the audience's nostalgia
for decades past.
Take The Shining sequence, for example.
The excuse to have such a beloved movie in Ready Player
One is that Halliday took his date to see it,
even though she wanted to go dancing.
He apparently always regretted this,
so he memorialized his mistake in the OASIS.
But other than the vague connection
of Halliday's backstory, this iconography from The Shining
is virtually pointless, unless you're
trying to earn nostalgia points from your audience.
We as viewers get to relive all the best moments from the film
through the perspective of Wade's friend H.
And it's really fun on a visual level.
But from a thematic standpoint, there's
no reason for this extended reference
to The Shining, which, for the record,
was a war game sequence in the book that tied a little bit
better into the plot.
But apparently, such a dramatic difference
in genre, tone, and theme of the movie you're
trying to pay homage to doesn't matter as much
as a cool shot of the blood elevator.
And while that is very obviously just
a shameless mostly harmless hit of nostalgia for the audience,
there are other references in Ready Player
One that are actively harmful to the source material.
The first key challenge in the movie
is an admittedly awesome action sequence
wherein Wade has to race against a bunch of other hopeful
winners and escape various obstacles along the way.
One of those obstacles is King Kong.
After striking a familiar pose, he
leaps from the top of the Empire State Building
and causes some deadly destruction
around the racetrack in the city, while Wade and the others
try to avoid him.
This is where things get a little dicey.
The original 1933 King Kong film and most of the revisits
since have been about humankind's exploitation
of nature and have made some attempts to characterize Kong
as a kind of gentle giant--
a monster of man's own making.
Ready Player One's Kong is certainly a monster,
and that's about as far as the reference goes.
The movie reduces him to a physically recognizable shell
that not only ignores but directly contradicts
the intent of the original creators.
And that's far from the only time the movie does this.
The most glaringly obvious example of the issue
is Ready Player One's use of the Iron Giant.
Where'd you find an Iron Giant?
Find it?
I'm building it.
Brad Bird's 1999 animated movie debut
was created after the tragic death of his sister.
The Iron Giant himself was intended
to be an anti-gun and anti-war symbol.
Knowing that, it's a little jarring
to see the Iron Giant in Ready Player One used
as a glorified power up in an all
out war against Mechagodzilla.
These references aren't just clumsy, they're thoughtless,
which is why it's hard to call any
of these over 100 references in Ready Player One an homage.
To be an homage, a reference needs
to be done with respect and a thorough understanding
of the source material.
Ready Player One doesn't seem to get
that, possibly because half the time,
Spielberg is just homaging himself.
So for a movie and franchise that
claims to be on the side of the pop culture loving nerd
at the center of its story, it sure
does seem to have a lot more in common
with its corporate villain.
Like IOI, Ready Player One engages
with the nostalgic properties it references
only as far as it takes to get what they want out of them.
In the case of IOI, that's the possession of the OASIS.
But for Ready Player One, it's the adoration
of fans and enough profit to make a sequel.
In their quest for money and power,
Warner Bros and Amblin Entertainment
cheapen the properties they purported to love.
In some cases, they cheapen properties they even
had a direct hand in creating.
And that's not to say that the entire movie is terrible.
We mentioned how great the visuals were
and how intensely awesome the action is.
Spielberg has always known how to make huge event movies,
and Ready Player One is no different on that front.
Even watching a clip out of context
can't diminish how polished and fun the movie is to watch,
and that deserves to be commended.
But in the end, with such a massive emphasis
on the recognizable media that surrounds the movie,
Ready Player One consequently has no identity for itself.
The shallow inclusion of memorable franchises
and the strip mining of them to bleed nostalgic dollars out
of a movie going public has paradoxically
actually made the finished film much more forgettable.
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