Blaine: This is one of the few best movies Steven Spielberg has directed in a while.
Plot(Spoiler Alert)
People escape from reality into this virtual world created by James Halliday and Ogden Morrow. Before James Halliday died, he hid three keys that would unlock the ultimate prize, a golden egg that would allow anyone to take control of the OASIS. In order to get the keys, the players must find the challenges and figure out the clues. Wade has studied everything there is to know about James Halliday because the clues have something to do with his personal experiences and interests. Wade has friends in the OASIS that he has never met in the real world, Aech, Zhou and Toshiro. Wade meets a mysterious girl, who he develops a huge crush on. Wade spends a lot of time with this girl in the OASIS, even though he doesn’t know her real name. Nolan Sorrento, owner of the IOI company, has been obsessed with getting that egg for a while. He’s had people go through the challenges in the OASIS and other people trying to figure out the clues at the company. He will stop at nothing to get that egg, even if it means killing people who get in the way. Wade confesses that he has romantic feelings to the girl he has been spending time with. She doesn’t know what to think of it at first, but she has Wade brought to a secret quarters in the real world. Her name is Samantha and she is apart of a group trying to bring down the IOI. Wade, Samantha, Helen, Zhou and Toshiro work as a team to find all three keys so they can get to the egg before Nolan Sorrento.
Blaine: The idea for “Ready Player One” was inspired by a lot of things author Ernest Cline was experiencing during the 80s with new technology, video games with Easter eggs in them and movies that have inspired imaginations. Ernest was also a fan of Roald Dahl’s work like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and in 2001 he thought about Willy Wonka being a video game designer instead of a chocolate maker and his golden ticket contest being inside a popular video game. The deeper he got into this idea the more he thought about other things like this guy who created the video game adding his own personal interests into this challenge and adding references. The year before “Ready Player One” was published, Warner Bros. wanted to buy the rights to it. When Ernest was offered to write the screenplay he had ideas for what he could add to it that weren’t in the novel.
Ernest Cline was scared when Steven Spielberg was suggested to direct the movie because he’s huge and the thought of him turning down the project would be something Ernest would never get over. Warner Bros. gave Steven both the book and the script. Steven read them both and there were certain things he liked about them. He liked that it involved two worlds, virtual and real world. Steven also had a lot of ideas for what he would put in the movie. He loved the Easter eggs and that made him want to add Easter eggs from movies that he either directed or movies done by other directors that would never have been made if he didn’t produce them. Steven then thought about adding in references that felt suitable for this project. The third reason Steven did the movie was because it was also about friendship. After two weeks of waiting, Ernest was finally informed that Steven was going to do the movie and he couldn’t believe it. Ernest celebrated by watching a lot of Steven’s films.
The concept artists did a lot of great designs of what they thought the real world and the virtual world would look like after reading the script. ILM looked at the drawings of the OASIS and those drawings helped them bring that world to life digitally. However more was required in order to bring the OASIS to life. The OASIS was shot in a motion capture studio, which was this big white room with cameras everywhere so they could shoot whatever scenes that needed to be shot from a different angle. There were cameras attached to poles and there was also the cameramen. The actors had to wear grey suits. They also wore these helmets with a small camera attached to it to shoot their faces. They also had dots painted all over their faces for the facial expressions. Another thing the actors had to do was use their imaginations and pretend they were in the world of the OASIS. The young actors have been in movies before, but the motion capture thing was new for them and it was also challenging, but Steven was there to guide them. Steven had worked with motion capture before when he did “Tintin”, but “Ready Player One” required a bit more, so in a way this was new for him too. But Steven loves to challenge himself. It took more than a year for the visual effects department to work on the OASIS. When Steven and the others shot the stuff that takes place in the real world it was like shooting a completely different movie for everyone because there were these sets built and crafted by hand and tons of extras. In the real world it looks like there is hardly anything to do at all because it looks like a waste land, which is why people go into the OASIS.
Steven always has his eye on the actors he knows he wants to work with in the future, but it'll depend on what project he feels they are suitable for. Other times he likes to see actors audition and test them out. The forth reason Steven wanted to do “Ready Player One” was because it was a chance for him to work with young actors again. Tye Sheridan was obsessed with virtual reality and when he learned that Steven Spielberg was going to make a movie about it he couldn’t wait to see it, but he never thought he would be apart of it until he got a call saying Steven would like him to audition for the lead character. Wade Watts had to be unsure of himself, be awkward at times, but he’s also smart enough to understand the guy who created the game and be positive that he is in love. He’s also a great leader and Tye is good at playing leaders, he did it in “Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”. Olivia Cooke didn’t know what the project was about except that it was about people who escape from reality and go into a virtual world. When Olivia went in to audition, she learned that Steven Spielberg was going to direct the movie which both excited her, but also made her nervous. To audition for a Steven Spielberg film was huge for Olivia because she loves his work. Olivia had to calm herself down during the audition. She felt that she wasn’t going to get the part, but she was freaking out when she was informed she got the job. Olivia was very useful while they were still trying to find the right actor to play Wade. Steven would test a lot of boys with Olivia to see who was her perfect match. Olivia’s character, Samantha, is someone who is trying to focus on her mission to take down the IOI after killing her father. She wasn’t expecting to fall in love with a boy. At first she believes Wade isn’t focussing on what is really important at the moment. She thinks he is living in this fantasy world. Then Wade confesses that he has romantic feelings for her and that really messes with her mind. Samantha has been too busy thinking about bringing down IOI that she never thought about having a romantic life. Samantha realizes that Wade might not be living in the real world, but he is her only hope to finding the keys and getting the golden egg because he knows James Halliday more than anyone. Samantha and Wade also make a good team and they have a lot in common. They get along great.
This was Mark Rylance’s third movie with Steven Spielberg and he plays James Halliday, the co-creator of the OASIS. Steven was impressed how Mark made James Halliday this shy guy through his performance. And Mark is always happy to have Steven as a guide especially with the technology these visuals effects movies require. The scene that really gets to me in “Ready Player One” is when Wade gets the Golden Egg and Halliday tells him that he and reality didn’t go well together and that he wasted his whole life by living in a fantasy. He realized that when his time was coming to an end. He tells Wade to not be like him. He wants Wade to have a life. Movies have always been my way from escaping reality, so I feel that is something personal. Steven had his eye on Ben Mendelsohn for sometime and he’s been involved with a lot of great movies like “The Dark Knight Rises”, “Slow West”, “Rogue One”, “Mississippi Grind” and “Una”. When I saw “Ready Player One” with my friend, James, we were always pointing out the Easter eggs. There’s Freddy Kruger from “A Nightmare on Elm Street", Jason Voorhees from “Friday the 13th", Batgirl, The Joker, Harley Quinn, the DeLorean time machine from “Back to the Future”, Chucky from “Child’s Play”. And then when The Iron Giant is destroyed and sinking into the lava, he does the famous thumbs up the Terminator did in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”. In the book it mentions a lot of Stanley Kubrick’s work, but never “The Shinning”. That was one of the things Ernest Cline wanted to add into the screenplay because he’s both a Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick fan and he thought it would be cool if that could be a clue in Halliday’s game. It was a lot of fun for everyone to recreate “The Shinning”. It was all digital, but some of the objects in the motion capture room were real. They rebuilt the elevator where the blood comes out and the bathtub the naked woman is in. They also had two girls play the twins from the movie. They dressed them up, styled their hair and painted dots on their faces just for one take showing them from a distance. The most important thing for that sequence was to make everyone feel like they are in “The Shinning” as they are watching it. John Williams has done the music score for just about every Steven Spielberg movie. John Williams was unavailable to do the score for “Ready Player One”, so Steven went to the next best composer in his book, Alan Silvestri. Steven had worked with Alan as an executive producer for movies like the “Back to the Future” franchise, but Alan had never worked with Steven under his direction, so this was a new experience for him.
My rating on “Ready Player One” is four and a half out of five stars
