Den of the Cyphered Wolf

Sunday, January 13, 2019

There Has to Be A Better Version of Ready Player One



So I saw Ready Player One and it filled me with disappointment, not rage, not anger but disappointment.

I didn't hate the movie but the more I rolled it around in my head the more I realize within it's bowels it had the potential to be so much more than it was.

I think a lot of that maybe a result of going into the movie with expectations of emptiness.  I've only recently seen the movie but the internet is my playground. I was around when it was the big new thing to talk about and I didn't escape, "the dialogue" which centered around the book, which to be fair I have not read,  having not much more than an excuse plot to take the audience on a walking 80's nostalgia tour.

And to be fair the movie is an adaptation. Elevating it any further than Spielberg already did would probably lead to something completely unrecognizable as Ready Player One but still, as it exists there are some many plot threads, characters, and ideas that the story could have explored and chosen not to.

Welcome to The Bad Future

As I ruminate I think of all of the wasted opportunities the movie had to be better but the worst is it's ending which almost makes me want to beat up on Spielberg as an old man who doesn't get the internet and maybe shouldn't have put in charge of a movie fundamentally about how we use technology... and then I remember he directed  Jurrasic Park .and Minority Report, a movie that might as well be named "The Hubris of Silicon Valley"


If the man really wanted to create a polemic about the dangers of technology in the modern world even with his usual brand of humanistic optimism he could have.

Okay for those of you who haven't already seen the movie, the characters are about the future of and fighting in what is essentially a futuristic version of the internet.

And the movie has a golden opportunity to forge its creed about what the internet is, can be, and should be and its coda is... "the internet isn't the real world"

And that message seems so... 2002.



The movie goes through great lengths to signal to the audience that it's setting is a dystopia, that something has fundamentally broken down in society. It's not just that the characters we are following are poor the entire world is poor, the entire world is broken.

And what caused it.  The consolidation of economic and/or political power into too few hands? Nope. The loss of individual privacy?  Nope. Environmental devastation? Nope. Some sort of a pandemic? Nope.  A depletion of limited resources? Nope. A degradation of culture that leads to the mass loss of critical thinking skills? Nope.  The world becoming so automated that there is no-one left around who knows how to fix critical systems when they break. Nope. Rapid technological change creating economic and civil strife in a society unprepared for it? Nope. A societal prioritization of technological skill over emotional awareness. Nope. Fear of outside influence has caused the world to stagnate? Nope.

People spending too dang much time on the interwebs did us in.

To be certain there is a way to make the idea that the world ends when people spend too much time indulging in leisure activity without trying to solve critical problems compelling but this movie doesn't go there. Or maybe because my meat heart has been swapped with a cold dead machine.

Regardless that message as executed by this movie depends on believing that there is an online-offline binary I believe doesn't really exist anymore. The internet is nothing more than a highly advanced communications tool and most of it's problems are the same problems that exist in any communications tool.

Offline people act on the information they obtain online and vise versa.

Reference as Language


As mentioned I did not go into this movie blind and that caused me to lowere my expectations. I find the movie disappointing not because it's bad, but because as it went on I found myself becoming more and more invested in what could have been a pretty interesting commentary on how people use technology to communicate ideas in the modern world.

I am not the first or even the only person to point it out, but the movie doesn't really do anything with its references. My understanding is part of that was to fix the book where some members of the audience found the main character's narration explaining all the references obnoxious.

All the same, I would have enjoyed it if the references were used to communicate ideas the audience which is quite frankly how a lot of internet pop culture reference is used as a short to communicate complex thoughts and feelings via association with understood concepts.

Say Something, Anything!



I started the day I watched Ready Player One player one intending to binge Future Man and drifted off somewhere else. Don't ask. My life is complicated. But I couldn't help feel that Futureman does essentially what Ready Player One tries to do but better.

Future Man is essentially a series of extended plot references to 80's movies. But nearly every movie it references it also deconstructs and comments on the culture that birthed it.

P.S.
By the original purpose of this post was the to try to literally answer the question, is there a better version of this story which has so much potential", rather than writing a review.  The more I thought about it the more I realize that Anime has explored the thematic territory of Ready Player One for years. Watch Lain, .Hack//Sign, and Paranoia Agent, hell half Satoshi Kon's filmography really.

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