Ready Player One
Entry updated 26 October 2026. Tagged: Film.
US film (2018). Warner Brothers Pictures/Amblin Entertainment. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Ernest Cline and Zak Penn, based on Cline's novel Ready Player One (2011). Cast includes Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, T J Miller, Win Morisaki, Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance, Tye Sheridan, Lena Waithe, and Philip Zhao. 140 minutes. Colour.
James Halliday (Rylance) and Odgen Morrow (Pegg) have created a vast and complex virtual world called OASIS (see Virtual Reality) which millions of people regularly enter for long periods of time to enjoy its many involving worlds and experiences. When Halliday dies, he wills the ownership of OASIS to any player who can solve a series of puzzles within OASIS. Many individual participants set out to win this contest, including Wade Watts (Sheridan) and his two friends Aech (Waithe) and Art3mis (Cooke), while a rich entrepreneur, Nolan Sorrento (Mendelsohn) is using an army of coerced workers to do the same so that he can own and harmfully monetize OASIS. The three friends, along with two other allies, Dalto (Morisaki) and Sho (Zhao), gradually achieve some progress in solving the puzzles while Sorrento alternately tries to enlist the skilful Wade and assassinate Wade as a dangerous rival. The youths are secretly assisted by Morrow, who wishes to honour Halliday's intent by ensuring that OASIS is given to a player, not a corporation. Finally, Wade wins the contest, takes control of OASIS with his colleagues, and decides to close OASIS two days a week in order to encourage people to have more real experiences instead of virtual experiences,
While following the basic plot of Cline's popular novel, the film alters several aspects of the story in a predictable fashion. In the novel, Halliday's challenges are complicated and require an encyclopedic knowledge of the films and Videogames of the 1980s that contemporary audiences will not share; so the film's puzzles are simpler and usually involve some colourful action, like a car race and a dance in zero Gravity. And in an era of increasing personal debt, it was surely deemed advisable to deemphasize one problem in the novel's future world: the fact that its debtors are essentially forced into Slavery. Also noteworthy are the film's conflicting messages about the benefits and drawbacks of inhabiting a virtual world. On one hand, the film conveys that OASIS is a delightful world that contrasts sharply with the bleakness of Wade's real life, explaining why many people prefer to stay within OASIS, and it is even argued that visiting OASIS enables players to make friends that they can interact with in the real world. On the other hand, the film concludes with Wade taking steps to force people to stop spending so much time in OASIS and instead engage in real-world activities with the friends that they are unable to make by staying away from OASIS. (Clearly, the logic of this point was not well thought out.) But the film can be praised as a celebration of nerds, as its young protagonists triumph largely by means of their brains, not their fists, reflecting the emergence of such people in the 1980s as heroic figures and occasional billionaires; and its special effects are outstanding, a typical hallmark of Spielberg films.
Cline wrote a sequel to his novel, Ready Player Two (2020), which was less acclaimed than his first novel. Despite the success of this film, plans for a film adaptation of Ready Player Two surprisingly have so far not advanced beyond the stage of preliminary discussions. [GW]
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