Ready Player One (2018)

”Ninjas don't hug!"

 Well, that was certainly superb. Who'd have thought it; a film from Steven Spielberg with no didactic music, no real stars and a very fresh feel. This film is hugely entertaining and so very 2018.

Superficially, perhaps, you could say this film is a bit like Tron, being set mainly in cyberspace with a corporate baddie. But, in truth, the film goes so much deeper, and has so much more to say, than the cool visuals and the myriad, admittedly awesome, pop culture references. And that isn't just about today's gamer, streaming and Twitch culture (Mrs Llamastrangler knows much more about all this than I do) in spite of the many obvious references.

It's 2045, and what we see of the world (well, Ohio) is grim and poverty-stricken aside from a few corporate bigwigs. People live in "stacks", trailer parks stacked on top of each other, and escape their lives through ubiquitous VR and, in particular, through the Oasis, a VR oasis invented by the late James Halliday and his mate, played by the superb Mark Rylance along with the ever-splendid Simon Pegg, both bizarrely with American accents. Through this world we follow Wade, love interest Art3mis and the slightly undeveloped rest of the gang as they try to complete the online quest left by Halliday to gain control of his empire.

Put like that it seems almost pedestrian, a kind of cross between Tron and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but it’s so much more than that. The commentary on escapism into an online world, a kind of VR Second Life where capitalism continues to operate as avatars depend on “coin” for how they look and what they can do, is acutely clever. So is the hint that not only has pop culture become, well, culture, but that the immediate access to cheap music and films will mean the pop culture of the late twentieth century will remain relevant and new pop culture will fail to be supported. There’s IOI with its “loyalty centres”, or debtor’s prisons, a serious potential future problem if debt laws are not reformed. There’s a reminder that reality is what actually matters and that being online is but an extension of this. There’s s love story. There’s the Holy Hand Grenade. There’s MechaGodzilla. This is easily the best new film I’ve seen for a long time.