But as hated as Prepared Participant One is amongst cineastes and people sick of Nineteen Eighties Gen-X nostalgia, that particular overload of member berries nonetheless appears to be like like a masterpiece subsequent to The Electrical State. And that’s not simply because the Russo Brothers aren’t Spielberg (who’s?). It’s as a result of Prepared Participant One retains a real sense of loss because it rummages by means of the previous, one thing that The Electrical State can’t even pretend. Ultimately, The Electrical State is the film all of the detractors claimed Prepared Participant One to be: the bitter finish level of cinema within the IP age.
Going the Mistaken Method
Primarily based on the novel by Ernest Cline, Prepared Participant One additionally takes place in a near-future the place most individuals reside in a digital actuality world known as the OASIS after society’s fast decline. Lots of the OASIS’ inhabitants take part in a seek for the Golden Easter Egg, a particular treasure designed by the digital actuality’s creators James Halliday (Mark Rylance). It’s additionally a key to the late Halliday’s fortune and management over the OASIS. In different phrases, it’s a glistening promise of achievement and happiness in an empty world.
In one of many film’s standout set-pieces, contestants have a race to search out the subsequent clue resulting in the Egg’s location. The sequence is all Spielberg bravura filmmaking, an extremely chase through which autos—together with the DeLorean from Again to the Future, the motorcycle from Akira, and monster truck Bigfoot—fly down a street full of explosions, wrecking balls, the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, and naturally King Kong. It’s thrilling stuff and by no means illegible because of Spielberg’s understanding of spacial dynamics and the viewers’s relationship to the digital camera.
Pleasant because the race is, it at all times ends in failure. Nobody can determine the best way to get previous Kong, who swipes away automobiles as they attain the end line. That’s till protagonist Parzival (Tye Sheridan) visits the archives of the now-deceased Halliday and watches a dialog between him and the OASIS’ co-founder Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg). Whereas Morrow insists that know-how, tradition, and our very lives should transfer ahead, Halliday wistfully wonders why we will’t simply “go backwards.”
Spielberg’s digital camera does considered one of his signature push ins as Parzival has a realization. That’s the reply. Go backwards. And within the subsequent scene, we watch him undergo the race once more. However this time he doesn’t proceed to barrel ahead when he will get to the tip. As a substitute he goes backwards, unlocking the key to profitable the race.
At first look, the scene appears to be about Parzival being smarter than everybody else, and thus deserving of the standing as champion. He has the popular culture data to drive his DeLorean and the gaming smarts to method the competition differently. Thus he’s the hero. However as Prepared Participant One unfolds, it turns into clear that Halliday wasn’t simply making an attempt to offer a touch concerning the sport. He was making an attempt to warn his gamers in opposition to enjoying the sport altogether, or a minimum of devoting a lot of their lives to video video games and popular culture ephemera.
