Ready Player One

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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Video games often contain “Easter eggs,” secret messages left by programmers for the amusement of fans. The name evokes a traditional Easter egg hunt, but in this case players are searching for intentional insider jokes in a virtual environment.

The term was coined to describe a hidden message in the 1979 Atari video game, “Adventure.”

Having invented the summer blockbuster with “Jaws” and proven he can do serious stuff (“Schindler’s List,” “Lincoln”) uber-director Steven Spielberg occasionally has fun, returning to the sci-fi themes that fascinated him early in his career.

His first independent film was a science fiction adventure called “Firelight” (which would later inspire “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”). At 21 he directed a sci-fi episode of TV’s “Twilight Zone.” And at 24 he shot “Los Angeles: AD 2017.”
Throughout his career he has returned to futuristic themes — ranging from “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” to “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” to “Minority Report,” to name a few.

“I don’t have any kind of plan or long view about career strategy or about breaking up the genres consciously,” confesses Spielberg. “When something comes my way that grabs my imagination, I want to do it – even if I’ve made a very similar movie before.”

And thus, he has returned to his roots with “Ready Player One,” a science fiction adventure about virtual reality gaming.

You can plug in at Tropic Cinema.

Although based on a 2011 novel of the same name, Spielberg may have been influenced in choosing this film by the fact his father was an electrical engineer involved in the development of computers.

Also, Spielberg himself is known to be an ardent video gamer. He recalls playing Pong in 1974 with Richard Dreyfuss during the filming of “Jaws.” Years later, when he was making “E.T.,” he had a Missile Command arcade cabinet hauled to the set because he was obsessed with scoring over a million points. “I was determined to break the bank before we wrapped the movie,” he remembers. “That was the race for me.”

Spielberg’s new film scores high: “Ready Player One” is set in a dystopian near-future where cities have turned into slums due to “overpopulation, pollution, corruption, and climate change.” To escape this dismal existence, the population immerses itself in a virtual reality world called OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation).
However, some of the participants have discovered “Anorak’s Quest,” a game within the program where Grunters (“egg hunters”) can search for a hidden Easter egg. The first to find this prize will win the late creator’s fortune, including the rights to OASIS.

Innovative Online Industries, a manufacturer of virtual reality equipment, desperately wants these rights. IOI’s head honcho Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) puts together a team of Sixers (“indentured players”) to crack the puzzle and claim the prize.

Pitting themselves against Sorrento and the Sixers is a small group of teenage Grunters, known only by their avatar names of Parzival, Art3mis, and Aech. Sorrento hires a bounty hunter called i-R0k (T.J. Miller) to discover their true identities so they can be stopped. But Wade, Sam, and Helen (Ty Sheridan. Olivia Cooke, and Lena Waithe) are adept players, not so easily trapped.

As Anorak’s Quest unfolds, you’ll meet James Halliday, the man who created OASIS (Mark Rylance); The Curator of the virtual world (Simon Pegg); and F’Nale Zandor, head of IOI’s operations in the physical world (Hannah John-Kamen).

“I think in the future VR is going to be the super drug,” says Spielberg. “The message of the film is simply, it’s your choice. Where do you want to spend the majority of your time? With real people in a real world, or in a virtual world where you can be the person you always wanted to be?”

The film has been described as “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” meets “The Matrix.”

Don’t get confused by the fact you are rooting for avatars within a computer game … that’s within a virtual reality world … that’s part of a future 2045 earth … that’s the storyline in a movie directed by Steven Spielberg … and you are sitting there in a darkened theater watching it.

It’s enough to make Christopher Nolan’s multilayered “Inception” seem downright simple.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com