Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
Not only did I not read the book, I also basically didn’t watch the first hour because it kept putting me to sleep. It did rouse me awake for the last hour or so though, and for a little while I was thinking that I’d go back and try to rewatch the first half. But by the time the resolution hits, it feels like such a pro forma kids’ adventure with, aside from the mechanics of the virtual hardware, a real poverty of imagination.
More than anything it really made me think about how history will look back on Spielberg’s generation and their use of digital technology in moviemaking. Given just a little distance from it now, it seems like we can readily identify a few key characteristics: a relentlessly mobile camera that prizes hyperactive acrobatic track-less tracking shots; a predilection for shiny, chrome surfaces and elaborate, fantastical machinery; and an insistence that any crowd scene should be comprised of not dozens or hundreds of people but literally thousands of digitally created entities. There’s also a clear preference for investing time and energy in quantity and complexity and surface detail instead of rendering characters or scenery in a succinctly believable way. The scale of this kind of CG work is massive and meant to be awe inspiring, but none of the frames look very good, and none of them are believable for a moment. If anything, this era of digital effects work will be regarded as a time when filmmakers just tried to throw as much shit at the wall as they possibly could, in hopes of impressing audiences with sheer volume. There is A LOT of shit on the screen in “Ready Player One.”
It also all made me think about how Spielberg got to this point. He used to be a classical filmmaker, right? Now he’s some kind of digital maximalist. Even his “quiet” films seem to be bleeding at the edge of the frames with post-processing trickery. It’s quite a journey.
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