Ready Player One Is a Feat of State-of-the-Art Pop Culture Navel-Gazing

Ready Player One opens less than two weeks after the eruption of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is only the most recent reminder that we must be vigilant about the tech industry, as that vigilance likely won't come from within. Directed by Steven Spielberg, the video game–inspired sci-fi epic--a hybrid between live action and motion-capture-assisted animation--initially seems to be exactly the kind of plugged-in dystopia tale we need right now. Twenty-seven years in the future, the film's Columbus, Ohio, setting is a teeming scrapyard. Trash lines the streets, trailers resembling shipping containers are perilously stacked on top of one another, and the stench of mass civic disengagement pervades the neighborhood. The only reality that matters to almost everybody is the virtual one known as the OASIS, the control of which went up for grabs five years earlier, with the death of its founder, James Halliday (Mark Rylance).