Can Ready Player One make virtual reality work on film?

Ready Player One

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Ready Player One is not the penultimate video game movie we've been waiting for.

It seems like every movie about a video game has been a near disaster. Perhaps it's because video games have historically relied less on story and more on game mechanics; perhaps because in order to be faithful to the game experience the genre is too narrow; perhaps its just been bad luck.

When virtual reality was new in the 1990s, there was a spate of movies like, The Net, The Lawnmower Man, and Virtuosity, that attempted to capitalize on the craze, only to find that the idea sounds great on paper, but no one really wants to watch other people play video games on a big screen for two hours.

With both the video game movie trend and the virtual reality trend mostly in the rear view mirror at this point, along comes Ready Player One, the adaptation of the hit novel. And if anyone could be successful at bringing this story to life, surely it would be Steven Spielberg, whose name is virtually (see what I did there?) synonymous with big budget movie spectacle. Could he do for video games what he did for theme parks with Jurassic Park?

Well, sadly the answer is just: sort of. While Ready Player One isn't as bad as Spielberg's poorest movies, it seems to have more in common with Hook and The Adventures of Tintin, than it does with Raiders of the Lost Ark, or The Minority Report. In fact it kind of feels like a cross between Hook and Tintin, with the protagonists being the orphaned kids of the former in the real world, and the cartoony characters of the latter when in the game (where most of the action takes place).

There is so much reliance on emotionally flat motion capture CG characters that the film often feels like an extended cutscene from a video game than an actual adventure film. And to make matters worse, while the film is filled with pop culture references, they mostly come from Warner Bros. properties, and given the studio isn't as steeped in the gaming platform as its rivals at SONY (Playstation) or Vivendi (Activision), or Disney (Electronic Arts), there aren't nearly as many Easter eggs for gamers as there are for movie fans.

But ultimately all the digital pyrotechnics can't make up for the thin human story at the core, which is why a film like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, even with half the budget, succeeds where Ready Player One, just feels like two hours at a video arcade.

A Wrinkle in Time

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A Wrinkle in Time

It's a bit of a wrinkle in timing

Every once in a while someone decides to make a film about a classic of literature, one that has been so influential on so many subsequent writers that the resulting film is often a) so careful to respect its source material that it takes no chances, and b) seems incredibly derivative, given all the adaptations of subsequent material that were originally influenced by it. Such is the case with Disney's adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

In a day and age when bookstores have huge "young adult" sections dominated by series like Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and Twilight, it's easy to forget that back when A Wrinkle in Time first appeared there was no such thing as the "young adult" market. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, and their knock-offs, were the closest thing to any type of genre fiction aimed at tweens.

But oh, what the intervening decades have brought! So many authors have been influenced by A Wrinkle in Time that watching this latest Disney iteration (yes, Disney studios have even adapted it once before in the early 2000s) reminds you of so many other films that have done it better. The plot involves the daughter of a NASA astronaut who goes through a tesseract and has to be rescued - does that sound like Interstellar? It is, yet Interstellar did it better. The great danger is the all-corrupting "It". Does that sound like the film IT? It is, though IT did it better. But A Wrinkle in Time is a kids movie! Still there are other kids movies, such as The Never Ending Story, that also do it better - the flight on the back of the undulating flying dog/dragon predates a similar scene in this film where the kids fly on the back of an undulating Reese Witherspoon; The Never Ending Story's themes of family and the danger of the growing "Nothing" make it a similar, but far better film. Even other kids movies like Willy Wonka, and Disney's own Tomorrowland tread similar territory, without being quite so sappy, and would make time better spent.

Which is not to say that A Wrinkle in Time is irredeemably bad, it's just flat, and the timing here is about 50 years too late. Had the film been released in the 1960s, it would have been groundbreaking.

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