MovieChat Forums > Ready Player One (2018) Discussion > The stakes in director Steven Spielberg’...

The stakes in director Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One are pop-up ads. Seriously?

posted 7 years ago by Satan2016 (26201)
19 replies | jump to latest

Here's a funny review but John Nolte. Is this summary accurate?

http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2018/03/30/ready-player-one-review-morally-shallow-duller-npr-breathtakingly-dumb/

Everything changed in the OASIS after the death of its creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance — doing an awesome impression of Dana Carvey’s Garth). Like a CGI’d Willy Wonka, Halliday remains in the OASIS where he hosts a contest that includes three golden tickets in the form of keys hidden somewhere within his vast creation. The lucky Charlie who finds those keys will win ownership of the OASIS.

Control of the OASIS means control of…

And now we come to one of the movie’s biggest problems. The stakes are nonsense. We are actually supposed to care that Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), CEO of IOI (the second largest corporation in the world), wants to win control of the OASIS so he can make money by … placing … ads … in the … OASIS.

Let me boil Ready Player One down for you… It is as if the CEO of Netflix died and offered his company to whoever wins a Mortal Kombat tournament. Enter Bill Gates, who uses all of his corporate power to win the tournament so that he can interrupt all those Netflix shows with Microsoft ads.

Not exactly a Bwahahahaha.

[–] [deleted] 7 years ago

it's just a movie.

still.... ads ARE the bane of our civilization. turning a huge virtual world of beauty and imagination into wall to wall plastered ads would remove everything that it was. Look at TV, look at movie theater shows now. Look at ads power over people on Facebook...

[–] Frogarama (12942) 7 years ago

Control of the Oasis is just a gimmick in the movie.

The true stakes are very obviously the lives of Wade and his surviving family members, which are outright threatened.

Leave it to a Breitbart writer to miss the bleedingly obvious.

[–] Frogarama (12942) 7 years ago

Oh, and the movie compares best to The Truman Show. It has a very similar vibe in many ways. What were the stakes in that movie?

[–] Renovatio (2990) 7 years ago

I haven't seen Truman's show in years, but I think the stakes were the humanity of the show's subject as well as the audience and showmaker...

In Ready Player One, there is no real reflection on the nature of reality, nor of virtual escapes from it... Just a couple of platitudes about getting laid...

[–] Frogarama (12942) 7 years ago

Lives were at stake. Several of them were lost. People were murdered in Ready Player One. All because of a game, and profits.

[–] Renovatio (2990) 7 years ago

Frog, we know that people were killed later in the movie, but this is not what the protagonists in the movie were concerned about in fighting IOU/Nolan, it happened incidentally and as a consequence, not as the ultimate goal, or even primary method. The lives were risked and taken for what purpose? What was at stake? Pop-up ads*...

The ultimate stakes in the movie, what people were risking their lives, and their families lives for was control of advertising in a virtual reality video game. That's what people died for.

They weren't fighting against the fact that they were living in indentured servitude due to their video game addiction, or being financially indebted to the video game. That is incidental. The main motivation is to stop the ad-installing guy, because the ads would make their virtual reality game less pleasant.

At the end instead of emancipating themselves and one another from this virtual cage, they simply de-couple it from the indentured servitude and maintain it as ad free. That is the extent of Watt & co's political awakening. They don't even realise that they are still living in virtual prisons... By choice...

Or... Maybe, the actual subtext of the movie is that this virtual utopia of the Oasis is being sold to us as an audience as a cure for our 'problem' of identity and of society. We are no longer trapped in our imperfect human bodies, in our biological sexes and ethnicities, etc... Our physical living conditions as well as how we relate to one another... Instead we can escape into the narcissism of the video game, with our custom avatars and toys in a virtual consequence-free world...

A thoroughly dystopian and dehumanising situation... But that is not the topic of this thread...

* The irony of this movie is that the whole thing is a consumerist advertisement of epic proportions, with countless toys and brands referenced, as well as having objects of consumer lust (fictional and actual) not only displayed, but endorsed... The gamers lust after Sorento's gaming rig, or Watts X1 bodysuit, etc...

[–] naDaht (1087) 7 years ago

What they were fighting for was for EA to not buy say... Activision/Blizzard or perhaps Valve and in usual EA fashion shit all over games that people love.

[–] Renovatio (2990) 7 years ago

Exactly... I'm not a gamer I can see this. I don't understand why people are doubting it on this thread...

[–] Frogarama (12942) 7 years ago

The ultimate stakes in the movie, what people were risking their lives, and their families lives for was control of advertising in a virtual reality video game. That's what people died for.

Well to be fair, that was just one quick glimpse of one thing IOI wanted to do to monetize the Oasis.

Also, to be fair, the real world can be far more petty. It's legal where I live now, but there are still governments all over the place that dedicate resources to chasing people down, with guns drawn, over the harmless plant marijuana, and even dedicate resources to imprisoning "criminals" over this harmless plant, often ruining their lives and harming their future generations.

All for what? What's the stake? To keep some kids from getting high and playing video games while stoned? Yep.

The other big stake here, just like the Oasis, is money and pandering: For-profit prisons that need inmates and prefer easy-to-handle drug convictions instead of violent people. Police who need to get paid and need more criminals to chase down. Politicians who want to seem tough on crime, so they go for the easy targets and manipulate the public into supporting anti-drug policies. Catering to the pharmaceutical industry lobbyists who pay well and don't like competition from plants.

The end result: Wasted resources, wasted time, real criminals who don't get caught because police are focusing on drugs, CARTELS, exploding prison populations, out-of-control government costs with no end in sight, higher taxes, crippling a percentage of the populace with needless criminal histories, people DYING, innocent lives lost in the crossfire, and hurting generations of people.

All in a vain, self-defeating effort to keep people from getting high off a simple, HARMLESS, medicinal plant.

That's how low the stakes can be in reality. NOW let's talk about a FUN MOVIE that clearly revels in absurdity.

[–] Renovatio (2990) 7 years ago

I see where you are going with this, but the analogy doesn't quite work, as the act of gaming isn't what people were being hunted down and imprisoned for... So the stakes and the conclusion don't quite square up...

It's like a heroin addict that gets his house forclosed on and is also sent to prison for not paying his taxes (or something)...

The imprisonment of this addict is dehumanising, as is his addiction which is an escape from the reality into a utopia of the mind and imagination...

Ready Player One may make a small disaproving nod to the former as a side plot, but it actively promotes the latter as the main thrust of the film...

It's still a somewhat entertaining movie... fun at times... but that doesn't mean we can't discuss it more critically...

[–] Rorikon (18391) 7 years ago

When you surf the internet, most of what you see is ads on pretty much anything. The Oasis like the internet is the bane of the current civilization so that would be billions upon billions of wealth. Not to mention control over everyone's life and view of it inside.

I would stay away from toxic Breibart as well if I were you. It's just a cesspool of trolls, ignorant folks, and hate as seen on the comments below its articles.

[–] MoonbeamSunshine (-1) 7 years ago

[deleted]

[–] Renovatio (2990) 7 years ago

I know... the thing is, going by most internet-culture people online, youtube people and watchers, gamers, etc... their biggest concern seems to be ads ...

So prehaps it is a reflection of how debased society and politics will be at that time, but I think it's just part of how vapid gamer culture is and how slight this movie is...

[–] JigsawDude (173) 7 years ago

I wouldn't say it's pop up ads. IOI is basically like predatory game studios and businesses that keep trying to raise the price for things, releasing unfinished products that require tons of updates and releasing video games with a bunch of micro transactions that are both required and un-required for the full game but trying to incentivize people to pay more money anyway.

Basically, the bad guys are predatory businesses who want to make people go bankrupt and get them into debt so that they can use them as slaves to get them to pay off their debts. It's actually very much like what happens in real life, minus the slavery aspect (so far) of course.

[–] naDaht (1087) 7 years ago

IOI is like EA and The Oasis is kinda like your favourite stand-alone production studio.

[–] mitzibishi (2013) 7 years ago

The stakes are Xbox live and PS+ subscriptions.

Paying for something that was always free and still should be free until a greedy company comes along and puts a charge on it.

[–] papamihel (1616) 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure OASIS was already monetized in some more subtle ways. Otherwise how did Halliday's corporation earn their trillion?