Could there be a more perfect big studio wet dream than Ready Player One? It’s a film directed by the guy responsible for E.T a nd Jaws … about references to the 80’s. It’s “I Recognize That!” the movie. From opening day until its last day, theatres projecting this film are going to be objectively the most unbearable places on planet Earth. The trailer alone reveled in its license, boasting Freddie Krueger and Duke Nuke Em’ in the same frame, scored by Rush’s Tom Sawyer, with a coat of Tron paint to boot.
The actual plot of the film? In a dystopian future, pop culture aficionado Wade Watts has to find an easter egg (Meta? Or annoying?) that’ll make him stupid wealthy. Say nerds, what if all the time you spent storing knowledge about shit that doesn’t matter made you rich? You know when you're at the movies, and you lean over to explain to your buddy what Alex Kurtzman was “homaging”? What if instead of your friend saying “Dude, stop doing this, I’m just trying to watch the movie. And you stink like old Tostinos,” he and everyone else in that theatre patted you on the back and called you a good boy?
This is perhaps sounding more cynical than I’d like; it's more amusing to me that it is anything else. I am absolutely this movie’s target demo, though I like to work a little harder for my nostalgia heroin. If this film is anything like the novel I didn’t finish, strap in kiddies, because every scene will be like that scene in Tarantino movies where two characters in a movie talk about two characters from a movie ... for two fully-licensed hours.
Look this thing is directed by Stephen Spielberg, and written by the guy who wrote my favorite so-bad-it's-good X-men movie , X-men: The Last Stand . Remember that one? It’s the one where Magneto throws a bridge at Kelsey Grammer. Yeah. Zak Penn wrote X-men: The Last Stand, which was an obvious misstep but he also wrote 2005’s Elektra. So who knows? This thing could go either way, I guess.
Ready Player One is being distributed by Warner Bros. a studio that shit out every movie you hated this year that didn't star Amazonian princess or sentient monkeys. I’m pumped! I’m gonna go to the premiere in my pre faded (fill in literally anything) T-shirt. What-What!?! That weird shot in Return of The Jedi where the camera lingers on Malakili after the Rancor dies. Remember it?
