Ready Player One is a 2018 American science fiction adventure film produced and directed by Steven Spielberg, and written by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline, based on Cline's 2011 novel of the same name. The film stars Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg, and Mark Rylance.
The film takes place in 2045, when much of humanity uses the virtual reality software OASIS to escape the desolation of the real world. Orphaned teenager Wade Watts (Sheridan) discovers clues to a hidden game within the program that promises the winner full ownership of the OASIS, and joins several allies to try to complete the game before a large company run by businessman Nolan Sorrento (Mendelsohn) can do so.
Ready Player One premiered at South by Southwest on March 11, 2018, was theatrically released by Warner Bros. Pictures in the United States on March 29, 2018, in 2D, Real D 3D, IMAX and IMAX 3D. It has grossed $581 million worldwide, making it the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2018. The film received generally positive reviews, with critics praising its visuals, brisk pacing, and Rylance's performance. The film was noted to have significant differences from the book, with some critics calling the film's plot an improvement over the source material.
Video Ready Player One (film)
Plot
In 2045, due to various geopolitical events, many of Earth's cities have become slums; its inhabitants regularly escape into the virtual reality universe called OASIS. Its co-founder, the late James "Anorak" Halliday, announces a contest in which players must find an Easter egg inside a gate that requires three keys hidden in OASIS; the winner to receive full ownership and control of OASIS. This attracts huge numbers of "Gunters" (egg hunters) as well as the video game conglomerate Innovative Online Industries (IOI), headed by Nolan Sorrento, who employs a large number of researchers, top gamers and indentured servants called "Sixers".
In Columbus, Ohio, Wade Watts, an orphaned 17-year-old Gunter, lives with his aunt Alice in the "stacks", makeshift towers of trailer homes, and logs onto the OASIS from a nearby cargo van. His avatar Parzival, and his online friend Aech, a male first-person shooter expert and virtual mechanic, participate in the first quest: a vehicle race across ever-shifting roadways in Manhattan. Parzival befriends a well-known Gunter named Art3mis by saving her from being "zeroed out" by King Kong, which would have wiped her character progression. At Anorak's virtual archives containing video clips reconstructing Halliday's life, Parzival gets an insight from a comment that Halliday made to his former business partner Ogden Morrow, and on the next race, uncovers an underground shortcut to the finish line to acquire the first key. Aech and Art3mis, as well as players Daito and Sho, soon follow; they appear atop the global scoreboard as the "High Five".
At an OASIS dance club, i-R0k, Sorrento's mercenary, overhears Parzival tell Art3mis his real name. Sorrento requests Wade to join IOI. Wade refuses, which prompts Sorrento and his aide F'Nale Zandor to bomb Wade's stack, killing Alice. Wade is taken to a Gunter hideout where he meets Art3mis' controller: Samantha Cook. They discover that Halliday had regretted something during a movie date with his love interest Kira. After Parzival wins a coin on a small bet with the archive's curator, the High Five enter a re-creation of The Shining where they traverse a series of frightening events to eventually reach Kira and acquire the second key.
When Zandor discovers the hideout, Samantha helps Wade escape, but is captured and made into a Sixer for defaulting on her family's debt. Wade is extracted by the other High Five players--Aech / Helen Harris, Daito / Toshiro, and Sho / Zhou--who have been secretly running their avatars from Helen's postal truck. i-R0k activates a force field around the location of the third key - a fortress on Planet Doom. After tricking Sorrento into revealing Samantha's location, Wade helps her escape. She hacks Sorrento's station, allowing Wade to recruit OASIS players to join an all-out assault against Sorrento and the Sixers at the fortress. Hiding among the active Sixers, Samantha shuts down the force field. During the battle, the rebels, led by Aech on his Iron Giant mod, defeat Sorrento's Mechagodzilla and i-R0k; Parzival zeroes out Samantha's avatar to let her escape IOI in reality.
Parzival and Sho find Sixers lining up to play on an Atari 2600 console, but failing on each game after time expires, even when one of them beats Adventure. Sorrento activates the Cataclyst, which zeroes out everyone on Planet Doom (including himself). However, the curator's coin spares Parzival as an extra life. Parzival deduces that the goal is not to win Adventure but to simply find its own Easter egg, which Parzival completes to reveal the third key. Inside the gate, Anorak presents Parzival a contract; however, Wade declines as it is similar to the one Morrow had signed that dissolved his partnership with Halliday. Anorak transforms into Halliday and affirms Wade's decision to be correct. After showing Parzival a Big Red Button that would shut down the OASIS permanently, Halliday officially awards him the Golden Egg as the winner of the contest.
Sorrento and Zandor are arrested after Aech had sent the police a recording of Sorrento's conversation with Wade that resulted in the bombing. IOI's indentured players are freed from their debts, heavily restructuring the company. The High Five share control of the OASIS, with Wade hiring Morrow, who is revealed to be the archive curator, as a consultant. The OASIS resumes operations, but is shut down on Tuesdays and Thursdays to force people to spend more time in the real world, including Wade and Samantha who have formed a relationship and bought an apartment together.
Maps Ready Player One (film)
Cast
- Tye Sheridan as Parzival / Wade Watts, a Gunter and one of the "High Five", who wishes to win the Quest so he can leave the stacks.
- Olivia Cooke as Art3mis / Samantha Cook, a famous Gunter and one of the "High Five", who works with various allies to ensure the OASIS is kept free and out of the hands of IOI.
- Ben Mendelsohn as Nolan Sorrento, the recently appointed CEO of Innovative Online Industries, who seeks full control over the OASIS. He leads the Sixers, an army of indentured servants in the OASIS.
- Lena Waithe as Aech / Helen Harris, a Gunter and one of the "High Five", who is male in the OASIS and longtime friend of Wade's. Aech runs a virtual garage in her free time to create and fix various vehicles and items.
- T.J. Miller as i-R0k, a freelance weapons and magic item dealer and bounty hunter, who is often employed by IOI.
- Simon Pegg as Curator / Ogden Morrow, a co-creator of the OASIS, who eventually left the company due to personal reasons. He harbors a concern about how many people have developed an unhealthy dependency on the game.
- Mark Rylance as Anorak / James Halliday, the deceased co-creator of the OASIS, who includes an Easter Egg hidden in the OASIS after his passing that grants control over the OASIS to its winner.
- Philip Zhao as Sho / Zhou, a Gunter and one of the "High Five", an 11-year-old in reality.
- Win Morisaki as Daito / Toshiro, a Gunter and one of the "High Five".
- Hannah John-Kamen as F'Nale Zandor, the head of IOI's operations in the physical world, as well as their indentured servitude programs.
Additionally, Susan Lynch portrays Alice, Wade's aunt; Ralph Ineson portrays Rick, Alice's abusive boyfriend; Perdita Weeks portrays Karen "Kira" Underwood, Morrow's wife; Clare Higgins portrays Mrs. Gilmore, Wade's neighbor; and Letitia Wright portrays a rebel who can briefly be seen at the safe house. McKenna Grace and Lulu Wilson appear as elementary school children who use the OASIS.
Production
Development
Warner Bros. and De Line Pictures won an auction for the rights to Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One in 2010, before it had been published. Cline was set to write the script for the film, which Donald De Line and Dan Farah would produce. Eric Eason rewrote Cline's script, and Zak Penn was hired to rewrite the previous drafts by Cline and Eason. Village Roadshow Pictures came aboard to co-finance and co-produce the film with Warner Bros. Steven Spielberg signed on to direct and produce the film, which Kristie Macosko Krieger also produced, along with De Line and Farah. Ready Player One is Spielberg's first action-fantasy film since The Adventures of Tintin in late 2011. Cline and Penn made several revisions while adapting the novel to film. Most of these changes were to eliminate scenes that would be uninteresting in a visual format, such as when Wade beats a high score in Pac-Man, or recites all the lines from the film WarGames.
Casting
Three actresses were top-runners for the role of Art3mis: Elle Fanning, Olivia Cooke, and Lola Kirke; In September 2015, Cooke was announced as having been cast in the coveted female lead role. In January 2016, Ben Mendelsohn joined the cast. In February 2016, Tye Sheridan was confirmed as playing the lead role of Wade, after a lengthy nationwide casting call failed to produce an unknown for the part. In March 2016, Simon Pegg joined the cast. In April 2016, Mark Rylance joined the cast, and in June 2016, T.J. Miller, Hannah John-Kamen and Win Morisaki also joined. In July 2016, Philip Zhao joined the cast, and Lena Waithe, Ralph Ineson, McKenna Grace, and Letitia Wright were later also announced to have been cast.
Filming
Production was set to begin in July 2016. Screenwriter Zak Penn tweeted on July 1, 2016 that the first week of filming had been completed. In August and September 2016, filming took place in Birmingham, England; this included Livery Street in the Jewellery Quarter area of the city, which was extensively used, including the van chase that takes place towards the film's end. The chase was edited to make the street appear longer than it actually is. The backpackers' hostel Hatters, also on Livery Street, was used for internal filming for a basement scene. Also utilized was the Ludgate Hill Car Park lot on Lionel Street, in which caravan homes were partially built; a planned explosion caused some local business and homes to call emergency services, as no prior notification were given by the production. Other locations in the city included the former industrial area of Digbeth, with a rooftop scene that overlooks the Birmingham City Centre skyline, with some of the city's landmark buildings being erased and replaced with CGI buildings in order to create a dystopian Ohio in the year 2045. Principal photography ended on September 27, 2016.
Visual effects and post-production
Spielberg worked with Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) to oversee the film's visual effects, meeting with ILM for 3 hours three times a week. He has stated that "[t]his is the most difficult movie I've done since Saving Private Ryan."
A significant part of the film takes place in a virtual space based on the Overlook Hotel in the film The Shining. This was mostly a digital recreation of the film using high-quality telecine of the original film, giving them some freedom of new camera angles and shots that could be generated from this recreation. The final film includes a combination of the original footage from The Shining and ILM's additional work. Only a few scenes in this sequence which involved real actors, such as the appearance of the Grady twins, required them to construct a faithful reproduction of The Shining's set for the actors to interact with. Finally, the sequence was post-processed to introduce film grain and other aging effects to make the new footage indistinguishable from the original film.
Cultural references
Ready Player One pays homage to the popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s as in the book, but also extends to the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s; several reviewers have identified well over one hundred references to films, television shows, music, toys, video games, anime and comics of these eras. Cline did not have any issues with these copyrighted elements when he published the book, but was aware that securing all necessary rights would be a major obstacle for a film adaptation, a task made easier by Spielberg's reputation. Spielberg and producer Kristie Macosko Krieger spent several years securing the rights for the copyrighted elements used in the film, starting before filming began, since some scenes would not be possible without certain copyrighted elements. Spielberg estimated that they had gotten about 80% of the copyrighted elements they wanted. Spielberg noted that in some cases, the filmmakers were able to secure rights for some but not all the characters they wanted; in negotiating with Warner Bros., they could not secure Close Encounters of the Third Kind from Columbia Pictures, despite the latter being one of Spielberg's first films as director.
Blade Runner, which was integral to the plot of the book, was off limits to the film adaptation because Blade Runner 2049 was in production at the same time as Ready Player One. As a replacement, they conceived of players having to play out the events of The Shining, which Spielberg was able to secure the rights to as an homage to his friend Stanley Kubrick. While Cline's original work heavily used the character of Ultraman, the rights over the character were still under legal dispute, requiring them to replace Ultraman with the titular robot from The Iron Giant. Spielberg recognized that his past films were a significant part of the 1980s popular culture cited in the book, and to avoid being accused of "vanity", he opted to remove many of the references to his own work. Cline stated that he believed Spielberg wanted to avoid self-references to films he directed, due to the criticism he received for his film 1941, which lampooned his own previous works Jaws and Duel. Cline said he had to convince Spielberg to include some iconic elements, such as the Back to the Future DeLorean time machine, which Spielberg conceded as the film was one he produced rather than directed. Cline also asked ILM to include a reference to Last Action Hero, one of Penn's first screenplays, without Penn's knowledge.
Music
On June 9, 2016, Variety stated that Spielberg's regular collaborator John Williams was planning to compose the film's score. However, in July 2017, it was reported that Williams had left the project to work on Spielberg's The Post instead, with Alan Silvestri hired to take over scoring duties for Ready Player One. The official score was released by WaterTower Music as a two-CD set on March 30, 2018, with vinyl and cassette releases projected for the summer. At Spielberg's request, Silvestri references his own music from Back to the Future within the film's score, as well as quoting the music from The Shining for the film's sequence at the Overlook Hotel.
The film also includes licensed music from the 1970s and 1980s, which appears on the digital-only album Ready Player One: Songs From The Motion Picture.
Release
Ready Player One was initially scheduled to be released on December 15, 2017, but was pushed back to March 30, 2018, to avoid competition with Star Wars: The Last Jedi. In January 2018, it was announced the film's release date had been moved up one day to March 29, 2018. The film had its world premiere at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas on March 11, 2018 (as part of the South by Southwest Film Festival).
Warner Bros. distributes the film worldwide, with Village Roadshow Pictures distributing in several overseas territories.
Home media
Ready Player One is scheduled to be released on digital retailers on July 3, 2018, and will be out on Ultra HD Blu-ray, Blu-Ray, and DVD on July 24, 2018.
Reception
Box office
As of June 28, 2018, Ready Player One has grossed $136.9 million in the United States and Canada, and $445 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $581.9 million. Made on a production budget of $175 million, with about $150 million more spent on global marketing costs, the film needed to gross at least $440 million in order to break-even.
North America
In the United States and Canada, Ready Player One was released alongside God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness and Acrimony, and was projected to gross $40-50 million from 4,100 theaters over its first four days. It made $12.1 million on its first day, including $3.75 million from Wednesday night previews. It ended up grossing $41.8 million in its opening weekend (for a four-day total of $53.7 million), marking Spielberg's biggest debut since 2008's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In its second weekend it grossed $25.1 million (a drop of 40%), finishing second behind newcomer A Quiet Place ($50 million). In its third weekend the film made $11.2 million, coming in fourth behind Rampage, A Quiet Place and Truth or Dare. In its fourth weekend the film made $7.4 million, finishing sixth at the box office In its fifth weekend it grossed $2.4 million, a drop of 67% from previous weekend and finishing ninth.
Other territories
Worldwide, the film was released day-in-date in 62 countries, including China, where it was expected to make $100-120 million in its opening weekend. It grossed $2.9 million on its first day from 11 countries, including $980,000 from Korea. In China the film made $14.75 million on its first day and earned a score of 9.2 from audiences on Douban (compared to the average 6-7 earned by Hollywood films). It grossed $61.7 million in China in its opening weekend which is the highest opening ever for Warner Bros in said territory. The film's other major opening weekend territories were South Korea ($8.1 million), United Kingdom ($7.3 million), Russia ($6.1 million) and France ($6 million). In its second weekend in China it grossed $42 million, and in third weekend grossed $13.9 million. The film grossed $81.7 million in its second weekend overseas, dropping only 35% and is ahead of other newcomers A Quiet Place and Blockers. In its third weekend it grossed $33.8 million overseas dropping 58.6%. On April 21, 2018, the film topped $200 million in China, becoming the tenth-biggest U.S. release ever in the country. In its fourth weekend in China, it grossed $8.24 million finishing third at the box office and has a total gross of $207 million. It grossed $23 million overseas from 67 territories in its fourth weekend. It opened in Japan, its final major market and grossed $4.4 million. In its fifth weekend overseas, it grossed $8.6 million from 63 territories. In China, the weekend was $2.4M to push it past Avatar as the no. 9 Hollywood title ever in the market with $213.8M (RMB 1.34B). Japan's third frame held well during Golden Week with just a 6% drop from the last session. The total there is currently at $17.5M. In its sixth weekend in China, it bumped up 10% from last session to lift the local cume to $220.2M. As of April 29, the film's largest markets after China are United Kingdom ($22.6 million), France ($20.3 million), Korea ($18.6 million), Japan ($17.5 million), and Russia-CIS ($12.7 million).
Critical response
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 73% based on 333 reviews, and an average rating of 6.9/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Ready Player One is a sweetly nostalgic thrill ride that neatly encapsulates Spielberg's strengths while adding another solidly engrossing adventure to his filmography." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 64 out of 100, based on 54 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A-" on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported filmgoers gave it an 82% overall positive score and a 65% "definite recommend".
In a review for RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico wrote that the film's "overwhelming" nature and non-stop action will likely thrill fans of pop culture; while he observed narrative weaknesses, such as a lack of depth among the supporting characters, he felt that they ultimately do not hinder the film from working "on the level of technical, blockbuster mastery that Spielberg helped define." Writing for Variety, Owen Gleiberman called the film a "coruscating explosion of pop-culture eye candy," and found The Shining sequence to be "irresistible". However, he also criticized Spielberg's dichotomization of fantasy and reality, as well as the film having "more activity than it does layers." IndieWire's Eric Kohn characterized the film as "an astonishing sci-fi spectacle and a relentless nostalgia trip at once" and praised both The Shining sequence as well as Penn's screenplay, particularly with respect to Mendelsohn's character. Nevertheless, he remarked that the film "drags a bunch in its final third".
Alissa Wilkinson, writing for Vox, praised both the quality and quantity of the world building. She also commented on just how dystopian the future portrayed is, where the main characters fight to save the OASIS and the escape from reality it represents, with arguably less concern for the problems of the real world.
Monica Castillo was more critical of the film in her review for The Guardian and drew attention to the absence of character arcs, the lack of resolution for plot holes in the novel, and the bloating of scenes in the film by trivia. Matt Bobkin scored the film a 6 out of 10 for Exclaim! saying the film "is not so much a groundbreaking recontextualizing, more doe-eyed affection with no critical commentary."
Film and television critic Matt Zoller Seitz praised Ready Player One and noted the undercurrent of sadness present in the film, stating that "I don't think Spielberg gets enough credit for making sad films that most people interpret as happy, and complex films that are immediately dismissed as simple or confused." Seitz concluded that the film "is a mess, but it is a fascinating and complex one..."
Possible sequel
Cline is working on a sequel to the novel. For a sequel to the film, he stated, "[...] I think there's a good chance that, if this one does well, Warner Bros. will want to make a sequel. I don't know if Steven [Spielberg] would want to dive back in, because he would know what he is getting into. He's said that it's the third-hardest film he's made, out of dozens and dozens of movies."
Notes
References
External links
- Official website
- Ready Player One on IMDb
- Ready Player One at AllMovie
- Ready Player One at Box Office Mojo
Source of article : Wikipedia
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