Recognising Stuff: The Movie

We all love a bit of nostalgia these days. Whether it's the booming retro gaming community (and it is a community) that I have unwittingly found myself becoming a part of despite not really playing old games or owning any console older than a PS2 or the deeply unsettling and unfathomable urge for people who consider themselves fashionable to drag clothing out of forsaken decades and parade around as if they've somehow found the Holy Grail of retro couture, when in fact they just look like most 5 year old kids do when they first start dressing themselves and have been given access to Cyndi Lauper's wardrobe. It's fun to look back of course, but I'm beginning to wonder if this inescapable yearning for things that happened in a time most of these people weren't even born in is really just a subtle way of telling us that the last decade has become fairly devoid of inspiration or creativity. You'd hope not, but I genuinely can't think of any other reason why you might be tempted to buy and wear a shellsuit in 2018.

That being said, I can point you to a number of blog entries on this very site that both lambast and espouse nostalgia to some point, so maybe I'm really just saying that I like better old stuff than everybody else. It's not unfeasible. It would also explain, to some extent, the rift that seems to have opened up in terms of my opinion on Ready Player One and pretty much everybody else's.

Full disclosure; I haven't read the book yet, which is something that apparently people keep feeling the need to tell me I should do because it's way better than the movie. I'll get round to it at some point but for now we're just going to have to settle for Spielberg's take on things. On paper, you would have thought that this was a match made in heaven; some of Spielberg's greatest successes have been his family action movies and Ready Player One ought to sit firmly in that bracket. The marketing team knew that well enough that one of the promotional posters was a homage to the Goonies. Here lies the real heart of my problem with this movie; if you take out all the pop culture references you're left with maybe enough plot to fill an episode of Eerie Indiana. Whilst I realise the irony of using a pop culture reference whilst denouncing pop culture references (what hypocritical madness is this?) it's exactly what Ready Player One tries to do, except dragged out over the space of nearly two and a half hours. It genuinely feels like more.

To cut an overly long story short, in the future The Matrix is voluntary and called the Oasis to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits (a phrase that will probably haunt the production company's legal department for years to come) and so long as you're a decent gamer you can buy enough cool retro stuff to kit your avatar out to look like whatever you fancy. If you die in the games your cash and belongings get reset to zero, which is a dumb feature but necessary for the story later on and since the creator of the Oasis died in real life he left three keys in deviously hidden locations; if you collect all of them you get his controlling shares in the company or something. Look, it's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory minus the chocolate but with added Things That We Might Remember. There's an evil corporation, a painfully shy loner hero who's cool in the game because he has a random mixed bunch of references for clothes and a whole host of other terrible cliches that you're invited to ignore in favour of spending two hours clapping your hands together every time you see something on screen you recognise, like a demented seal who's been in captivity so long he doesn't remember what live fish look like. It becomes like a gruelling admittance exam to the Cool Kids Club; if you don't catch enough of the references you don't get to hang out on Internet forums with the rest of them.

After spending the first 20 minutes telling us the exact same information two different ways (I wish I was joking. I had to check I hadn't zoned out and they'd not re-started the movie as some sort of cruel prank) our hero logs in and we get bombarded by painstakingly rendered Things We Might Remember. His avatar has Han Solo's belt with a Thundercats Logo on it for some reason and he drives Marty McFly's Delorean. Kaneda's bike from Akira shows up early although a character has to tell you that's what it is because it hasn't got all the decals on it so it looks more like a Tron Lightcycle. We get King Kong, characters from Streetfighter, The Iron Giant and a whole host of other film, TV and Game franchises but frankly too many. Basically, if they managed to secure the rights, it's in here. In honesty, I stopped trying to recognise stuff fairly early on because there's a time and place for wistfully lamenting the passage of time and the loss of my youth, enthusiasm and hairline via the medium of cartoons and it doesn't require me to sit through two hours of dull cinema to do it. The plot is older than time itself (hyperbole intended), there are no real surprises other than maybe being a bit perturbed that nobody has got anywhere with the clues until for some weird sudden reason, the hero does. By the time the ending rolls around I was hoping one of the main characters would get squashed by Roger Rabbit playing a falling piano or something so there would be at least some sort of intrigue, but remembered it was a Spielberg movie so that was really unlikely to happen. 

There's one very major thing that bugged me, and still does. All these references are roughly from the late 70's to early 90's which is right in the wheelhouse for my frame of experience, so I guess the novelist is probably around my age. Ignore the fact that in about 15 years or so this movie will be so horribly dated that practically nobody under the age of 50 will have any sort of clue where any of those references came from; there are some really odd choices for a movie nominally aimed at teens. Akira? 18 certificate. A Chestburster appears in a throwaway gag; Alien's an 18. One of the biggest set pieces in the film is based around The Shining which is another 18. Now I'm not so naive as to think for a second that the BBFC rating has any bearing on when kids watch movies they shouldn't (I first watched Predator on French TV, entirely in French, with no subtitles at the age of 12, so I get it) but if your whole schtick is "Look at all these things you remember, isn't it cool to remember stuff?" surely you'd go with something that your intended age dempgraphic stands a chance of remembering? I can't imagine there a bunch of 14 year olds out there who'd list The Shining as one of their favourites, or understand why the Zemeckis Cube reverses time briefly. This is of course, not actually a story for kids though; I'm no psychotherapist, but I get the feeling it was originally written as an escapist re-telling of the novelist's own childhood where he rights all the wrongs, gets with the girl he had a crush on and generally saves the day. My question then, would be this: why not just spend a couple of hours on Google searching the phrase "Cool Retro Stuff" and spare us all the hassle? I assume when they reboot it in a couple of decades they'll be searching for three magical fidget spinners so they can unlock the poo emoji and the ending will be available exclusively in a loot box.