Ready Player One – 2018
First off, I’m going to try not to give a biased opinion of the visual effects in this film, just because I really liked the movie. There were two worlds in the film that have to be treated differently, from a special effects point of view. There was the real world, and the virtual world. The virtual world took up the bulk of the screen time, and every bit of it was CGI, from the characters to the environments. All the action and all the drama, every single pixel, was made in a computer.
But that was as it was supposed to be. One of the biggest plot points of the movie was that people spent too much time fantasizing in the virtual world, and not enough time living in the real world. The virtual world was basically a big video game, and thus, it was appropriate when the CGI world looked like a cut-scene in a video game. It wouldn’t have fit the story if it looked too realistic.
All the primary cast in the movie had to have their virtual avatars, for which the standard motion and facial capture techniques were used. But because it was a fantasy world, there were certain things they could do that looked really cool. For example, the avatar of Art3mis had oversized eyes. Both she and Parzival had colorful facial markings. Aech had a non-existent stomach, held together by metal support cables, resembling something out of the film Ex-Machina. But it was the expressiveness in their faces that really sold the emotional content of the movie. And the avatars of the bad guys had the same level of detail and emotiveness
The two action scenes that stood out were the first car race scene, where the competitors had to avoid things like giant swinging wrecking balls, a T-rex, and King Kong. But even that sequence was nothing compared to the final battle, in which hundreds of characters and items from every aspect of pop culture, or one might proudly say, nerd culture, at least the ones director Stephen Spielberg could get the rights to, like Batman, Halo, The Iron Giant, Mechagodzilla, He-Man, Krull, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Back to the Future, Street Fighter, Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, and Gremlins, just to name a few. Apparently, there were so many unique and individual characters on the screen at the same time, fighting in one massive battle, that a new software had to be developed to make it all work. And it all looked… just unreal enough to be recognizable as the film’s virtual world.
And in the real world, the three most notable effects were also pretty impressive. First, there was the Stacks, a giant slum neighborhood made of mobile homes stacked up on top of each other like metal-framed towers. Next was the destruction of one of those towers, though our hero had to use the Prometheus school of running away from things when it fell towards him. The third was the hologram of Parzival’s avatar being projected into Sorrento’s real-world office, made of sparkling pixels of projected light. But I can’t forget the digital recreation of the Overlook Hotel from Stanly Kubrick’s The Shining. The sheer number of pop-culture characters and reverences in this movie was just impressive!