Ready Player One could be the most hated movie of 2018. Considering the fact that it’s a Spielberg film with relatively respectable reviews, that’s quite an achievement. But like Fifty Shades of Grey, it’s based on a bestselling book that lends itself well to embarrassing viral quotes. Ready Player One has come to represent a certain kind of toxic fanboy mentality, and no amount of positive reviews can change that now.
At this point, the film’s quality is almost irrelevant to the backlash. Opponents are going after Ready Player One’s basic concept, because it’s such a perfect illustration of Big Bang Theory-stylegeek culture and its obsession with masturbatory trivia.
It simultaneously caters to the idea that white male nerds are underdog heroes, while proving that they’re actually a dominant force in Hollywood.
There’s a thirst for new material based on old sources, which occasionally results in something genuinely fresh (Black Panther) but mostly toes the line of “new, but not too new.” Ready Player One is the peak example, with Spielberg helming an “original” story that relies wholly on pop-culture retreads. A very specific type of pop-culture retread, because while the novel is heartily obsessed with the 1980s, it never mentions rap. Like Stranger Things, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Adam Sandler movie Pixels, its archetypal audience is a white guy member of the original Ghostbusters generation.
applies to most of the current 80′s nostalgia wave, but nobody brings this up
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