Spielberg is going to be going away soon. No matter how much he tries to make it seem like he'll live forever, keep making us movies, keeping us entertained and enchanted, there is going to come a day where he'll be gone, and there will be no one like him to come afterwards.
There will be people attempting to homage or stay true to the spirit of his films, sure, but there will never really be someone like him again. This is a guy who has lived telling stories, lived taking us on adventures, lived capturing our emotions to their very cores, paving the way for hundreds of other talented artists to flex their creative muscles behind the pen and camera.
But he isn't immortal, and "Ready Player One" feels like his means of telling us this and also showing us that, there's something he misses behind his legacy. Could it be the loss of his best friend? His former wife? Something else entirely? It's hard to pin point exactly what it could be, but it's definitely there, and only becomes more and more apparent with each viewing of this.
He's lived in his own sense of isolation throughout the last few years, making period pieces and smaller scale adventures (at least compared to his grandest epics), but this shows what might be his final jump into the genre he himself created and helped inspired hundreds of others who viewed it to become creators themselves, similar to how Wade, Samantha, Helen, and everyone else within the Oasis are inspired by their own favorite artists, characters, and fictional heroes to escape their lives. The difference between them and someone like Nolan Sorrento, is the fact that he only uses these things as a means of building profit; there's nothing genuine in his words, he's only trying to pander to get what he wants. Halliday created these things, references these movies, shows, comics, and whatever, because it's what he loved, what he used as an escape, because he was afraid of the world around him, and to cope, always went to escape it, rather than take the leap to fix them.
And Spielberg created this as a love letter to those who he's created, who he's shaped throughout his career, and also to those new, giving them one adventure for their own generation before he goes away. This is less of a story about an Egg Hunt or filling as much of the screen with as many easter eggs and characters, and more about the power of escapism and how art helps shape our entire being, the real, genuine love, vs the cynical and dismissive eye of those who only view the world with dollar signs and price tags.
Look, I still have my issues, I still wished some aspects were tighter, I still wished they brought some of my favorite moments from the book to life, but every time I watch this, my appreciation for it only grows, and all I think about as soon as it's over is "I want to go back and go through it all again". That's what makes Spielberg special; he creates stories that as soon as their over, you just wanna experience again and again, and when you do watch them, all you can think of is "I never want this to end".
But this is him telling us that these movies, these stories, these adventures, do have to come to an end, and we have to make our own if we love them this much. And he tells us this, not with a bitter slap, but a loving thank you, for being with him for most of his life, for listening to his stories, and more importantly, for always being there, ready for more....
Some random notes.
Alan Silvestri's score for this film is officially ranking among my favorites of all time and I cannot get enough of the way it syncs up perfectly with so many of the visual cues and beats of many scenes and action sequences.
Olivia Cooke is a treasure to us all and we need to give her all the roles in the world.
For as intimating as Ben Mendelsohn can be, I do love how they still play with him for some really funny character moments and lines (his delivery of the line "yeah but ya need THREE of them to win" will never not make me snicker like an idiot).
The second challenge will go down as one of Spielberg's best sequences ever. I will never not be in utter awe when it starts, and seeing it in an audience who don't see it coming and hearing their reactions only make it better.
As much as I ragged on the changes previously, I do like the one of them involving who ends up in IOI towards the third act, since it's established they have much more of a personal connection to them through their past than Wade did in the book.
I got this awesome shirt today! (plus i cut my hair so now i look like a true lesbian)
The race sequence seriously went from one of my least favorite parts of the film to easily one of my favorites.
I've seen this four times now and I still am not used to Simon Pegg with an American accent.
