Author: Josh Spiegel / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
[This story contains spoilers for Ready Player One]
If you’re of a certain age, then the experience of Ready Player One will be akin to a full re-immersion in nostalgia from the 1980s and 1990s. The new Steven Spielberg film, an adaptation of Ernest Cline’s novel, is set in the year 2045 but is all about characters who have chosen to embrace all manner of films, TV shows, video games, music, and more from the ’80s and ’90s.
Spielberg, of course, is one of the authors of many of the nostalgic totems that appear in Ready Player One, but his choice to create a film about nostalgia only pays off slightly here.Ready Player One is not just about the nostalgia created by Spielberg. Though a few of the films he directed or produced show up here in some form or another — the lead character’s virtual-reality vehicle of choice is the DeLorean from Back to the Future, which Spielberg produced, and the T-Rex from Jurassic Park shows up in an early race sequence — many of the references and cultural cameos aren’t Spielberg-specific. One mid-film sequence is a recreation of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining; in the final battle sequence between goodhearted VR gamers and the minions of a cruel corporation, the good guys use all sorts of attack strategies, including a version of the Iron Giant and the killer doll Chucky from Child’s Play.
Ready Player One relies almost entirely on nostalgia, and the audience’s recollection of ’80s music, movies, and more. (When the section focusing on The Shining begins, the soundtrack begins to mirror the creepy synthesizer-heavy score of the Kubrick film, even before we see the inside of the Overlook Hotel, for example.
) You may not need to know every reference packed into each shot of the film — the basic struggle…The post ‘Ready Player One’ Forgot to Create Something New appeared first on FeedBox.