Ready Player One: Homage as Damaging the Original

Ready Player One is exactly what you would expect, a blockbuster that entertains you in the confines of the cinema but falls apart as the doors open and you return to the real world. But I did leave with one huge question; when does the act of referencing or creating a homage go too far?

Obviously this film is an exception to most as it is a film that is almost solely reliant on referencing to keep an audience gripped—you can see this from even a single exposure to its homage style posters and other marketing materials where characters like Overwatch’s Tracer and the Iron Giant crop up with almost greater importance than the film’s own characters (although one could argue that they are the film’s own characters!). We can easily handle a film’s character idealising popular culture that we love—take for example Belmondo gazing at the many posters and photographs of Humphrey Bogart in Breathless. But Ready Player Onetakes a very different approach, instead of incorporating the imaginative image of these characters they are implemented directly into the film becoming the characters—to reuse our analogy this would be to take Jean-Paul Belmondo and turn him into Bogart in the OASIS (RPO’s virtual world). I think it is hard to criticise thisusage of characters from popular culture as the film justifies it as they are not in fact thecharacter (e.g. Tracer isn’t the tracer, but is a human player using her avatar within the virtual OASIS). Besides, these characters are often only on screen for seconds and therefore can mean something to a pop-culture fan but can as easily act as an extra for anyone unknowing.

Instead the form of referencing/homage I do contest is the extendedusage of assets from other films/culture, which primarily manifests as a thorough exploration of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel—complete with narrative moments from the original. The scene unfolds with RPO’s characters wandering into a virtual recreation of The Shining, they witness the typewriter, the twins, the blood rushing from the elevator, room 237, the maze, the kitchen (and likely even more background details). The narrative surveys so much of the film that we could either pass it off as a spoof or a recreation, two concepts that grind with many film fans because of their inherent lack of originality. But let us consider this; you are sitting in the cinema never having seen The Shiningand are confronted by this sequence that reveals many of its shocks and iconic moments. Doesn’t this then ruin this hypothetical viewer’s first experience of watching The Shining, instead of being met with mysteries and nuance they will instead be met with recognition and immediate comparison. This viewer already knows what’s in room 237, they know the blood exits the elevator and they know there is a axe-wielding chase sequence in the snowy maze. Therefore isn’t this sequence in RPO near to reading a surface synopsis of The Shining? This is the key difference between reference/homage and going across the line. This form of ‘homage’ in fact alters the viewer’s experience of the original text, whereas the inclusion of characters from elsewhere in popular culture simply references their visage and harks back to a film/show/game which a viewer may have experienced.

To solidify this example further we can look at Jurassic Park’s T-Rex and King Kong who appear early in the film as obstacles in a death-race, these simple surface references. If the viewer had never seen Jurassic Park or King Kongthese creatures just turn back into a T-Rex and a giant ape, producing no harm on the front of the original texts. Whereas the inclusion of the whole sequence from The Shiningintroduces elements from the film, contextualises them and goes so far to reveal turns in the plot—so maybe we can’t even call this a homage or reference as it is something else entirely.

The issue does go slightly deeper than this, as there are some mediums which we permit such recreations to exist. For example The Simpsons, Rick and Mortyand many other shows (primarily cartoons) take the spoof as a foundation for a number of episodes per season—The Simpsons even spoofs The Shining! But we expect this and these take on the definitive stance of the spoof, yes they can still effect our expectation of the original but through their cartoon style, replacement of characters and (often) entire flip in the mood (horror to Comedy) we can hardly say that Rick and Morty’s Look Who’s Purging Nowruins or alters our experience of The Purgeto the same extent that recreating the film’s environment exactly in ‘live action’ would.

I understand that Ready Player One is a film about referencing popular culture, even that around 90% of its entertainment value comes from this, but I don’t think we should excuse its use of The Shining as a simple reference. It’s an experience which is detrimental to the original text, instead of being, as was likely intended, a supplementary and loving look at one of their favourite films.

1/1/1

3/13

~Leo

*Again this is an example of a film scoring extremely low. As I said at the beginning, I enjoyed the film but it simply is a blockbuster set in its ways—it has very little to offer in terms of nuance.