‘Ready Player One’ Isn’t Great, but It Got This Part Perfect

The Big Picture

• Ready Player One pays homage to The Shining, recreating the iconic hotel and expanding on the original’s frightful scenes.
• The film deviates from the source material by skipping the Flicksync challenge and instead recreating The Shining.
• Ready Player One celebrates and weaponizes pop culture nostalgia, rewarding those with obsessive knowledge of ’80s trivia and films.

It may not be a Top 10 Steven Spielberg joint, but Ready Player One is still the embodiment of popcorn with M&Ms and marshmallows blended together for the ultimate sugar blast, represented most exceptionally in its most perfect scene. You probably know the one we’re talking about even if you’re unsure of what the film it references actually means. Ready Player One’s recreation of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is nothing short of a miracle to behold as one of the greatest directors of all time pays perfect homage to another one of the greatest directors of all time, turning what could have been a cheap joke into the best sequence of a film already stuffed to the brim with amazing set pieces. Without further ado then, let’s get into how Spielberg masterfully recreated the Overlook Hotel, and how his deviation from the source material pays off.

What Is ‘Ready Player One’ About?

Ready Player One follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) in the dystopian future of 2045, a world in which humanity’s greatest joy comes from an online open-world virtual reality called the OASIS. Created by the late James Halliday (Mark Rylance as a potential analogue for Spielberg himself), the game designer left several keys throughout the world that, when collected, will result in the winner receiving complete control of the OASIS through their discovery of the Halliday Egg. He was determined not to let the Egg fall into the hands of IOI (Innovative Online Industries), an evil corporation led by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who wants to start charging for game time and populate players’ screens with as many ads that they can physically handle before inducing a seizure. The irony is that, with the sheer number of characters and Easter eggs from different IPs on display in the backgrounds, Ready Player One is already as close to a sensory overload as you can get, but boy is it fun!

The film’s homage to The Shining may seem like a rather random choice, but Ready Player One is all about the powers of pop culture nostalgia and the life-saving powers of extreme fandom (provided that it remains un-toxic). As a result, the game’s Egg Hunters (known as Gunters for short) are rewarded for their obsessive knowledge of ‘80s trivia and the amount of detail they can recall from their favorite films and video games, whether it’s Parzival’s (Watts’ username) donning of the costume from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai or his mounting of the DeLorean from Back to the Future. After assembling a squad of like-minded Gunters, they set about finding the second key, which can be found in a film by a creator who “hates his own creation.” Enter Stephen King’s The Shining, an adaptation that the horror master famously hated in spite of it being recognized as among his best.

How Did Steven Spielberg Recreate ‘The Shining’ in ‘Ready Player One’?

As Parzival and his Gunter friends enter the Overlook Hotel, some of them aren’t prepared for what’s waiting for them. They enter through the staircase that leads to Johnny’s typewriter, where the ridiculously crisp digital imagery is jarringly abandoned as the screen becomes washed in film grain to emulate the horror classic’s aesthetic. In an interview with VFX supervisor Roger Guyett, the six-time Academy Award nominee explained the painstaking process they went through in order to do the film justice. “We digitally matched the performance of the original lenses from the film and also the grain and quality of the film,” he explains, even matching the exact choreography for sequences like the “elevator of blood” before continuing it to its next logical step (the witness and the camera itself being washed away in a red river of death). However, special care was taken in order to avoid the infamous Uncanny Valley effect.

Had the transition been too jarring, the movie could have crumbled then and there. As the characters are all primarily presented embodying their digital avatars, a mix of digital and practical sets had to be created for audiences to believe that they had in fact entered the world of The Shining while still making it look in sync with the rest of the film. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Spielberg explained, “We built the elevators and we built the hallway leading up to the elevators, but the main living area of the Overlook with the fireplace is digital.” Basically, any shot of the avatars of Parzival and the gang wasn’t able to use real-life scenery as it would “block the infrared cameras that were trying to record the performance of the actors,” according to production designer Adam Stockhausen. On the contrary, the elevators, bathtub, shower curtains, and everything that involved CGI-less actors was shot practically “so you wouldn’t get that green-screen effect.”

What’s fantastic about Spielberg’s use of The Shining in this scene is that it both pays excellent homage to the original, faithfully recreating it shot-by-shot, whilst also expanding the frightful shenanigans taking place through extending certain sequences and having them bleed into one another. There’s no “Here’s Johnny!” scene, but there is a rotting zombie lady chasing the gang through the maze with a giant ax. While you do get to see the back of Jack Torrance’s legs as he pursues Aech (Lena Waithe) through the maze, the film rightfully decides never to show actor Jack Nicholson’s face. The logic is similar to the reason that you never see Michael Jordan’s face in Air: When dealing with the portrayal of such an icon, it’s impossible to capture it without sucking the audience out of the film entirely.

‘Ready Player One’ Deviates From Its Source Material

You’d think that the best sequence from the film would have been adapted from its source material, but, while certainly not out of the blue, The Shining doesn’t get a lot of love in Ernest Cline’s original novel. Instead, Parzival obtains the key through undergoing a Flicksync, an activity in the OASIS that the film fairly opts out of portraying. A Flicksync basically allows you to relive your favorite movie from the perspective of the main character, where you’re graded on how much you can recall and quote from the movie. It takes a real obsession to make it through these things, but fortunately, Wade Watts is up to the challenge. In order to obtain the keys in the original novel, Watts has to complete the Flicksync for both WarGames (a seminal ‘80s classic) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The first version requires him to “play the movie” as Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman, but the second challenge sees Parzival reciting the lines from every character in the Monty Python classic. That’s a titanic task, reflective of Parzival’s dedication to being the biggest nerd to ever live.

Part of the fun in Ready Player One is showing its audience a world in which their fandom can be weaponized. All of that movie and video game trivia taking up so much RAM in our minds is, on the surface, entirely useless. But beyond that, for some inexplicable reason that scientists have yet to determine, it makes us happy. Make no mistake, depending on who you ask, the OASIS is both a heaven and a hell. But for geeks like us, it’s a resounding middle finger to anyone who ever tried to bully the kid who brought their comic books and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards to school. Odds are that someone in your life has once told you that you watch too many movies, but Ready Player One congratulates you for it instead.

Ready Player One is available to rent on Prime Video in the U.S.

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