Bringing one of nerd cultures' most celebrated novels to the big screen, Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One is biting critique of pop culture, celebrity cultism, and general escapism, a film which finds the iconic filmmaker come face-to-face with his own cinematic transgressions as he delivers a film about the importance of "real world" problems. A story intrinsically draped in nostalgia, Ready Player One is a film that feels at odds with itself throughout the course of its running time. Ready Player One romanticizes the larger-than-life, grandiose cinematic escapism which Spielberg made a career on, recognizing the significance and importance such designs can have on society yet it also is unabashedly critical of the internal shallowness which so often manifests itself in such designs, offering up a biting critique of our self-absorbed culture in which personal achievements and shallow escapism often distract from the communal problems plaguing humanity and society as a whole. Ready Player One is a plea for more attention being paid to "the common good", and while I personally don't subscribe to such mythology about "the common good", it is admirable to see a filmmaker such as Spielberg self-critique a culture he had a large part in creating. Ready Player One suffers from many of the same problems plaguing blockbusters of its ilk, namely a running time that overstays its welcome, yet it manages to at least be self-aware in its attempt to balance both its social-thematic assertions with its more vapid thrills and escapism, being a film which largely satisfies on both levels. A celebration and critique of pop culture, Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One is a flawed yet engaging piece of blockbuster filmmaking which manages to be reflective in its deconstruction of how escapism by-definition, often distracts an individual and society itself from what really matters in life.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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