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.