Photo: Jaap Buitendijk/Jaap Buitendijk
Spoilers below for Ready Player One.
Ready Player One is the apotheosis of a rising trend in film that we might refer to as “recognition cinema” — the phenomenon of trying to please an audience by including brief references to other pieces of fiction. It’s common in — though by no means restricted to — superhero movies, which will commonly drop hints or include cameos that demonstrate a connection to elements the viewers might remember from comic-book source material or separate movies in the same shared universe.
Typically, such references are given some room to breathe so the crowd can go wild at the excitement of recognizing what the filmmakers are implying. Not so in Ready Player One. In Steven Spielberg’s latest picture, there are dozens upon dozens of pop-culture references in dialogue and mise-en-scène; so many that a single pair of human eyes is incapable of catching them all. Here, we’ve attempted to list as many of them as we could notice and scribble down in the darkened theater. Let us know in the comments if you find ones we missed, of which there are surely more than a few.
Minecraft: The popular video game is one the many worlds gamers in the film can visit as part of the OASIS virtual-reality system.
Batman: The protagonist, Wade Watts, tells us one can hang out with a virtual Batman inside OASIS, and we see him climbing Mount Everest. The Batmobile from the 1960s Batman TV show is seen in a virtual race.
The Joker: Wade’s virtual avatar is briefly modded to look like the Batman villain. Someone else in a Joker avatar hangs out in a virtual nightclub.
Harley Quinn: Seen in the virtual nightclub.
A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy Krueger seen as an avatar in a battle royale.
Friday the 13th: Jason Voorhees seen as an avatar in a battle royale.
Star Trek: OASIS creator James Halliday has a Star Trek–themed funeral. Later, we see a Klingon bat’leth weapon on a windowsill.
Street Fighter: Logo seen in a marketplace for gamers. Characters Ryu and Chun-Li make appearances as player avatars in fights. A character uses Ryu’s famed “hadouken” fireball to attack someone.
Speed Racer: Speed’s car, the Mach 5, is seen in a virtual race.
Bigfoot: The famous monster truck is seen in a virtual race.
Back to the Future: Wade drives a virtual DeLorean. A modified Rubik’s Cube called a Zemeckis Cube (named after Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis) allows a character to travel back in time.
Tron: A light-cycle is seen in a virtual race.
Akira: A motorcycle modeled after Kaneda’s is seen in a virtual race.
Jurassic Park: The T. rex is seen as an obstacle in a virtual race.
King Kong: Seen in as an obstacle in a virtual race.
Last Action Hero: Characters race past a marquee advertising a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character.
The Iron Giant: The titular robot is a weapon built by Wade’s friend Aech.
Battlestar Galactica: The 1970s version of the Galactica ship is seen as a virtual toy.
Alien: A chestburster is used by Wade’s love interest, Artemis.
Aliens: Space-marine spaceship the Sulaco is seen as a virtual toy.
Silent Running: Spaceship Valley Forge is seen as a virtual toy.
Dune: The planet Arrakis is mentioned as a virtual destination.
Goldeneye: The video game is mentioned as Halliday’s favorite. (He prefers the “slappers only” mode.)
Superman: Wade’s avatar is briefly modded to look like Clark Kent.
Spider-Man: Wade mentions that he was given an alliterative name to sound like Spidey’s alter ego Peter Parker or …
The Incredible Hulk: … the Hulk’s, Bruce Banner.
Looney Tunes: Young Halliday is seen near a Marvin the Martian toy.
Space Invaders: Halliday is repeatedly seen wearing a shirt advertising the game.
Asteroids: Mentioned by Halliday’s business partner, Ogden Morrow.
Galaga: Poster for the game seen in Halliday and Morrow’s offices.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure: Halliday mentions the film.
Star Wars: Stormtroopers briefly seen as avatars in a battle royale. R2-D2 toy seen on a floor.
Borderlands: Unspecified game accoutrements available in a virtual marketplace.
Overwatch: Unspecified game accoutrements available in a virtual marketplace.
War of the Worlds: A crashed Martian ship is the site of a virtual meeting.
Tootsie Pop: A character mentions the candy as a metaphor.
Knight Rider: The car, KITT, is briefly seen.
Beetlejuice: Title character seen as someone’s avatar.
Mortal Kombat: Goro seen as someone’s avatar.
The Dark Crystal: Mentioned by Halliday.
Citizen Kane: Multiple references to Rosebud.
Purple Rain: Wade briefly dresses as Prince’s character.
Mad Max: Mentioned.
Gremlins: Graffiti related to the film briefly seen.
Christine: The titular car from the 1983 Stephen King adaptation is seen in a virtual race.
“Thriller” music video: Wade briefly dresses as Michael Jackson’s character.
Duran Duran: Wade briefly dresses as a band member.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension: Wade dresses as the title character for an extended period of time.
Battletoads: Titular toads seen as avatars.
Saturday Night Fever: An extended dance sequence is based on the film, complete with Bee Gees soundtrack.
The Breakfast Club: Mentioned by the villain, Nolan Sorrento.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: Mentioned by Sorrento.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High: Mentioned by Wade.
Animal House: Mentioned by Wade.
Robotron: Mentioned by Sorrento.
Joy Division: Band T-shirt seen on Art3mis’s real-life body.
Dungeons and Dragons: A virtual space is named after the role-playing game’s creator, Gary Gygax. A 20-sided die is briefly seen.
The Fly: The 1986 remake is mentioned as a film Halliday once saw.
Say Anything: Mentioned as a film Halliday once saw.
Simon: The classic toy is seen as a possession of Halliday’s.
Thundercats: Wade wears a belt referencing the show.
Hello Kitty: A sticker for the brand is seen on a motorcycle.
The Shining: An extended sequence is set in a replica of the Overlook Hotel.
Punk’d: Aech mentions “being punk’d.”
Nancy Drew: Mentioned by a character.
Atari 2600: Becomes a crucial plot point when it’s revealed that Halliday has hidden a key to beating OASIS in a virtual version of one of the antiquated system’s games.
Centipede: An Atari 2600 game mentioned by Sorrento’s underlings.
Pitfall: An Atari 2600 game mentioned by Sorrento’s underlings.
Swordquest: An Atari 2600 game mentioned by Sorrento’s underlings.
Motorcross: An Atari 2600 game mentioned by Sorrento’s underlings.
Adventure: An Atari 2600 game that is crucial to the ending.
Spawn: Seen as an avatar in a battle royale.
Child’s Play: Chucky is used as a weapon during a battle royale.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The versions of the characters from the recent film reboot are seen as avatars during a battle royale.
Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla: Sorrento morphs into Mechagodzilla during a battle royale.
Gundam: Wade’s ally Daito morphs into a Gundam robot during a battle royale.
Madballs: A madball is used as a weapon in a battle royale.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day: While sinking into a pit of lava, the Iron Giant gives a thumbs up.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Wade uses the Holy Hand Grenade in a virtual fight.
Mario Kart: Aech jokingly mentions the game during a car chase.
Joust: Poster for the film seen in Halliday’s childhood bedroom.
Raiders of the Lost Ark: Poster for the film seen in Halliday’s childhood bedroom.
Forbidden Planet: Toy robot from the film seen in Halliday’s childhood bedroom.
Pac-Man: Poster for the game seen in Halliday’s childhood bedroom.
2112: Poster for the Rush album is seen in Halliday’s childhood bedroom.
The A-Team: Van seen in a virtual race.
Halo: Soldiers seen as a group’s avatars.
Sonic the Hedgehog: Title character seen as someone’s avatar.
He dreamed up his novel about a teenage games fanatic while working for internet companies in the 90s. Cline on his real-life geek-to-riches story – and what it was really like working with Steven Spielberg
It took Ernest Cline 10 years to write Ready Player One. There were times he thought he would never finish the manuscript, let alone publish it. But the novel, mostly set in a global online pleasure world called Oasis, went on to become a bestseller and was translated into more than 20 languages. Now a film adaptation by Steven Spielberg is in cinemas – a real-life geek-to-riches drama so reflective of the book’s plot it seems almost unfeasible.
The sci-fi story’s setup is simple. Teen protagonist Wade Watts is a games fanatic living in a slum town outside Oklahoma City, but spending most of his time in the virtual world. The death of James Halliday, the eccentric creator of Oasis, triggers a treasure hunt that revolves around Halliday’s main obsession: 1980s pop culture. Whoever solves a series of puzzles within the game becomes its new billionaire CEO. Wade enters the hunt, kicking into gear a breathless nerd empowerment fantasy.
“Wade is the embodiment of me as a teenager,” Cline admits. “The structure of Ready Player One was a fun way for me to take all of the useless movie and video-game trivia you amass if you’re a geek and somehow make it valuable – the key to a vast fortune, which it has proven to be for me.”
Cline had been working in IT since the mid-1990s, doing tech support at emerging internet firms like CompuServe, where he realised how the internet was about to change the world. In his spare time, he was playing video games – a lot of video games. As a teenager in Austin, Texas, in the early 80s, he had witnessed the dawn of the coin-op era, feeding quarters into Pac-Man, Joust and Robotron machines. As an adult, seeing his work colleagues ensconced in online multiplayer games such as Ultima Online and World of Warcraft, he began imagining what might happen when gaming, the internet and virtual reality converged.
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At first he dabbled in screenwriting. “The VCR landed in my teenage years, and opened up the whole world of film to me,” he says. “It turned me into an uber cinephile, and I watched all my favourite movies over and over again. I felt very much like Wade – my heroes were George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, John Milius, John Hughes. I would order copies of their screenplays and study them.”
In the early 2000s, Cline got a film script made, but the movie – Fanboys, about a bunch of kids trying to access Skywalker Ranch to see an early cut of The Phantom Menace – was disjointed and awkward. “It took years for the movie to get made, and my screenplay got heavily altered,” he says, recalling battles with producers about changing the plot and characters. “It was all very dispiriting. But it prompted me to finish the novel, because I wanted to see what would happen when I had total control over the end product, as opposed to movies where you have almost no control over anything.”
Ready Player One channels 80s geek obsessions into a text that reflects the language of emerging internet culture. The book has often been criticised for its lack of characterisation and dramatic tension: the three trials that make up the backbone of the plot are hastily reported, with constant pop culture references substituting for the character’s internal life. But this may be part of its appeal. The novel reads and functions like a video game walkthrough guide, or a forum post about someone’s favourite gaming moments; it is commentary rather than a narrative. It’s a novel for people who grew up parsing pop culture through the lens of news group fave lists and flame wars.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fanboy … Ernest Cline, right, with director Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles. Photograph: Eric Charbonneau/Rex/Shutterstock
But that slightly distanced approach was never going to work for a movie – and neither were the original puzzle tasks. In the book, the competitors for Halliday’s prize have to play specific video games to completion and re-enact vast tracts of cult films such as WarGames and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s fun on the page, but no one wants to watch Tye Sheridan spend six hours getting a high score on Pac-Man.
Cline worked with co-screenwriter Zak Penn and with Spielberg to create a modified set of trials for the film, including a new opener: an astonishingly vivid, high-speed car race through a virtual city. The second trial still involves Wade visiting an Oasis-based reproduction of a classic movie, but it’s not WarGames. Instead, he has to navigate through a terrifying virtual version of The Shining’s Overlook hotel, complete with spooky twins and an elevator full of blood. “WarGames didn’t seem quite right because, although it’s a great film, it’s not that visually arresting. We wanted a movie with a unique and familiar environment,” says Cline. “We made a list of possibilities, and when Steven saw The Shining [on it] he lit up. That was one of the most fun [things about] of working on the adaptation – cooking up this Shining funhouse tribute, and getting to see my hero geek out.”
The movie also fleshes out the supplementary characters, especially Wade’s love interest, Art3mis, who is also embedded in Oasis and competing for the prize. In the book, she’s a paper-thin virtual idol, whom Wade stalks and harries for attention. Her role is a lonely geek’s dream girl: a beautiful woman who shares Wade’s pop culture obsessions and approvingly acknowledges his references. We meet the real woman behind the Art3mis avatar only at the end of the novel, at which point her function is to symbolise the book’s “real life is more important than games” moral swerve.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Olivia Cooke as Art3mis in Ready Player One. Photograph: Jaap Buitendijk/AP
In the movie, she leads a resistance group against the evil IOI Corporation, which wants to seize control of Oasis so it can be massively monetised. Actor Olivia Cooke, best known for her role in the horror TV drama Bates Motel, adds charm and depth to the character. She is given a life outside Wade’s yearning.
Cline acknowledges the book’s solipsistic focus, and puts it down to his inexperience as a novelist. “In retrospect, one of the ways I made it easier for myself to write the novel was by using a first-person narrative,” he says. “Because it was such a sprawling story, anchoring the point of view with one character made it easier for me to keep track of what was going on – I could show the whole world from his perspective, but this ended up limiting the other characters. One of the biggest advantages of retelling the story cinematically is to give them more to do. Instead of Wade doing everything, Art3mis has much more agency – she has a backstory and a personal investment in taking down IOI.”
Spielberg's Ready Player One – in 2045, virtual reality is everyone's saviour Read more
What also helps is having Spielberg in charge of the adaptation. The director famously started playing video games while making Jaws, inserting a brief glimpse of the Sega game Killer Shark into the movie, and he respected Cline’s novel. “Through the production he had a dog-eared copy of the paperback that was filled with Post-it notes and highlighted sections,” says Cline. “He gave copies of the book to other departments. So many things from the book that were never in the script made their way into the movie because he had everyone refer to the text for set design and even costumes. When you meet Aitch for the first time, she’s wearing the Rush 2112 T-shirt she’s wearing in the novel – that was something the costume designer took right from the page. It was everything you’d hope would happen as a novelist.”
What the movie confirms, with its luscious video game imagery and addition of fresher references (of everything from Chucky to Overwatch), is that there are more geeks around than ever before. Revelling in memories of favourite games, films and characters is now a mainstream pastime. In 2001, Cline never saw this coming. “I didn’t have any audience in mind when I wrote the book,” he says. “I thought maybe a few people who remembered the 1980s might enjoy it, and if I was lucky it might become a cult novel in certain circles. But it never occurred to me that it would have mass appeal, because how could it? It was so specific to me and my interests. It still blows my mind.”
Virtual reality is the air guitar solo of modern cinema: a frenetic imagined activity in a made-up world that exists one level below the already made-up world of the story. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, adapted from the 2011 YA novel by Ernest Cline, takes us on a freakily spectacular VR gaming ride through an infinitely malleable universe involving a frantic splurge of 70s and 80s pop culture references, including cheeky bits of Spielberg’s own creation. There’s loads of geekupmanship – though real geeks won’t be happy about the holy hand grenade of Antioch being deployed without counting to three.
Ready Player One: Ernest Cline on how his gamer fantasy became a Spielberg film Read more
But as with all VR on film, from Tron in 1982 to the new Jumanji of 2017, I found a weightless, frictionless quality to this inner zone of digitally rendered experience. It’s a close encounter of the pixelated kind. Where’s the beef? And the movie is left with the tricky and anticlimactic business of negotiating the relationship between virtual reality and the boring old actual sort.
The film is set in 2045, and though we may yet see a fashion for YA dramas about pre-apocalyptic utopias, Ready Player One isn’t one of them. The future world is pretty badly beaten up after a series of wittily imagined seismic catastrophes, including the “bandwidth riots”. Cities are massive scuzzy slums and virtual reality is the opium of the masses. Tye Sheridan is Wade Watts, a lonely teenager living in Columbus, Ohio, which is now a gruesome favela of trailers stacked on top of each other. His only interest isstrapping on the VR headset and entering the alternative universe of Oasis, as a mythic avatar named Parzifal. Here is a limitless fantasyscape of the mind where people can play games and have experiences. (The film hints subliminally at X-rated experiences in motels for those interested.) They can win digital money in various contests but possibly blow it all – “lose their shit”.
The game’s creator is the late James Halliday, played by Mark Rylance, an ubernerd genius who is a cross between Willy Wonka, Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee. Before he died, Halliday hid three clues in his world for an “Easter egg” that would allow the discoverer complete control of this fabulous spectral kingdom. So Wade is an egg hunter or “gunter” along with some friends, including supercool Samantha (avatar: Art3mis), played by Olivia Cooke, on whom he has a painful cybercrush. His best friend is Aech (Lena Waithe). But creepy corporate goon Sorrento, played by Ben Mendelsohn, wants to grab the egg, and crush all these creative individuals for whom the Oasis is a wonderful playground. There’s a funny performance from TJ Miller as Sorrento’s morose henchman i-R0k.
The Oasis sure is a weird setup. We are invited to believe in the dreamy almost Christ-like vision of Halliday and his Easter egg, but he has created what amounts to a horrible Matrix blue-pill of global addiction. Wade’s Aunt Alice (Susan Lynch) has had her life effectively ruined by a violent boyfriend Rick (Ralph Ineson) who is hooked on its gambling potential. It isn’t at all clear how or if Wade will reform this, on finding the egg. Then there are those 80s references, including a gobsmacking romp through the world of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. It’s 2045: how has Halliday conceived this obsession with that period? At one stage we see a simulacrum of his childhood bedroom, which looks like he grew up in the 70s and 80s. Did he grow up in some retro theme park? Or do future connoisseurs simply believe pop culture simply died with the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Facebook Twitter Pinterest We’re going on an egg hunt … Ready Player One. Photograph: Jaap Buitendijk
Well, the movie does sort of answer these worries with the first clue that Wade chases after. He spots the great man’s whimsical and subversive interest in “going backwards” and realises that it may be the key to the extraordinary drag race in a fabricated New York. That really is a sensational, gasp-inducing sequence with an uproarious, showstopping appearance from King Kong. The solution to this clue brings the curtain down on the first act, but the first act is where nearly all the juice is. From then on, the action gets clotted and muddled and somehow contrives to separate Samantha from Wade and his friends to create a narrative crisis.
It’s a film in which Spielberg’s traditional reverence for the wonder and idealism of youth has had to compromise with wised-up survivalist toughness of the new YA mode. But what extraordinary visuals this films conjures up, with images that appear and disappear like quicksilver memes.
That material has issues of its own. Mr. Cline’s book — readable and amusing without being exactly good — is a hodgepodge of cleverness and cliché. Less than a decade after publication, it already feels a bit dated, partly because its dystopian vision seems unduly optimistic and partly because its vision of male geek rebellion has turned stale and sour.
In the film, set in 2045, Wade Watts (a young man played by the agreeably bland, blandly agreeable Tye Sheridan) lives in “the stacks,” a vertical pile of trailers where the poorer residents of Columbus, Ohio (Oklahoma City in the book), cling to hope, dignity and their VR gloves. Humanity has been ravaged by the usual political and ecological disasters (among them “bandwidth riots” referred to in Wade’s introductory voice-over), and most people seek refuge in a digital paradise called the Oasis.
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That world — less a game than a Jorge Luis Borges cosmos populated by wizards, robots and racecar drivers — is the creation of James Halliday (Mark Rylance). After Halliday’s death, his avatar revealed the existence of a series of Easter eggs, or secret digital treasures, the discovery of which would win a lucky player control of the Oasis. Wade is a “gunter” — short for “egg hunter” — determined to pursue this quest even after most of the other gamers have tired of it. Among his rivals are a few fellow believers and Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the head of a company called IOI that wants to bring Halliday’s paradise under corporate control.
In the real world, IOI encourages Oasis fans to run up debts that it collects by forcing them into indentured servitude. Sorrento’s villainy sets up a battle on two fronts — clashes in the Oasis mirroring chases through the streets of Columbus — that inspires Mr. Spielberg to feats of crosscutting virtuosity. The action is so swift and engaging that some possibly literal-minded questions may be brushed aside. I, for one, didn’t quite understand why, given the global reach of the Oasis, all the relevant players were so conveniently clustered in Ohio. (If anyone wants to explain, please find me on Twitter so I can mute you.)
But, of course, Columbus and the Oasis do not represent actual or virtual realities, but rather two different modalities of fantasy. Wade’s avatar, Parzival, collects a posse of fighters: Sho, Daito, Aech and Art3mis, who is also his love interest. When the people attached to these identities meet up in Columbus, they are not exactly as they are in the game. Aech, large and male in the Oasis, is played by Lena Waithe. But the fluidity of online identity remains an underexploited possibility. In and out of the Oasis, Art3mis (also known as Samantha, and portrayed by Olivia Cooke) is a male fantasy of female badassery. Sho (Philip Zhao) and Daito (Win Morisaki) are relegated to sidekick duty. The multiplayer, self-inventing ethos of gaming might have offered a chance for a less conventional division of heroic labor, but the writers and filmmakers lacked the imagination to take advantage of it.
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The most fun part of “Ready Player One” is its exuberant and generous handing out of pop-cultural goodies. Tribute is paid to Mr. Spielberg’s departed colleagues John Hughes and Stanley Kubrick. The visual and musical allusions are eclectic enough that nobody is likely to feel left out, and everybody is likely to feel a little lost from time to time.
Nostalgia? Sure, but what really animates the movie is a sense of history. The Easter egg hunt takes Parzival and his crew back into Halliday’s biography — his ill-starred partnership with Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg), his thwarted attempts at romance — and also through the evolution of video games and related pursuits. The history is instructive and also sentimental in familiar ways, positing a struggle for control between idealistic, artistic entrepreneurs (and their legions of fans) and soulless corporate greedheads.
Halliday is a sweet, shaggy nerd with a guileless Northern California drawl and a deeply awkward manner, especially around women. Sorrento is an autocratic bean counter, a would-be master of the universe who doesn’t even like video games. These characters are clichés, but they are also allegorical figures.
In the movie, they represent opposing principles, but in our world, they are pretty much the same guy. A lot of the starry-eyed do-it-yourselfers tinkering in their garages and giving life to their boyish dreams back in the ’70s and ’80s turned out to be harboring superman fantasies of global domination all along. They shared their wondrous creations and played the rest of us for suckers, collecting our admiration, our attention and our data as profit and feudal tribute.
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Mr. Spielberg incarnates this duality as perfectly as any man alive. He is the peer of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and a Gandalf for the elves and hobbits who made Google, Facebook and the other components of our present-day Oasis. He has been man-child and mogul, wide-eyed artist and cold-eyed businessman, praised for making so many wonderful things and blamed for ruining everything. His career has been a splendid enactment of the cultural contradictions of capitalism, and at the same time a series of deeply personal meditations on love, loss and imagination. All of that is also true of Halliday’s Oasis. “Ready Player One” is far from a masterpiece, but as the fanboys say, it’s canon.
