movie review ready player one

Ready Player One

Do you know the name of the high school the characters attended in John Hughes ’ movies? Did you play “Pitfall!” on the Atari 2600 when you were a kid? And are you aware of what lurks behind the door of Room 237?

You may be able to answer “yes” to all three of these questions (as I was), and yet still not be able to register much more than a chuckle of recognition in response to the vast majority of voluminous pop-culture references scattered throughout “Ready Player One.” The action is breathless and non-stop, both in the virtual reality and the reality reality, but wallowing in ‘80s nostalgia is only so much fun for so long—even if you’re a child of the era (as I am)—and it only really works when it serves to further the narrative. So much of what constitutes the humor in Steven Spielberg ’s adaptation of Ernest Cline ’s best-selling novel is along the lines of: “Here’s a thing you know from your youth.” And: “Here’s another thing.” And: “Here’s an obscure thing that only an elite few of you will get, which will make you feel super-smart.”

Chucky from the “Child’s Play” movies shares the screen with The Iron Giant and the DeLorean from “ Back to the Future .” A thrilling auto race through the virtual streets of New York finds the characters daring to outrun the T. Rex from “ Jurassic Park ” as well as King Kong. There’s no way to catch it all in one sitting. This is a movie that has a literal Easter egg—and it is indeed a “movie,” not a film, as Spielberg himself pointed out earlier this month during its South by Southwest premiere .

Spielberg would seem to be the ideal director for such a thorough (and overlong) trip down memory lane. This is, after all, the decade he helped define, asserting himself as one of our greatest and most influential filmmakers. “Ready Player One” may have sprung from someone else’s brain originally, but it’s a Spielbergian hero’s journey at its core, complete with lens flares early and often. The young man at its center is an obsessed gamer named Wade Watts who goes by the moniker Parzival in the massive virtual reality everyone inhabits in the movie’s dystopian future. But he’s very much a figure in the same driven, single-minded vein as Henry Thomas in “E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial,” Harrison Ford in the “Indiana Jones” films, Tom Cruise in “ Minority Report ” or Tom Hanks in “ Catch Me If You Can .” The actor who plays Wade Watts, Tye Sheridan (“ Mud ,” “ X-Men: Apocalypse ”), even resembles a “Close Encounters”-era Richard Dreyfuss .

“Ready Player One” is at once familiar in its fabric and forward-thinking in its technology, with a combination of gritty live action and glossy CGI. It’s an ambitious mix that can be thrilling while it lasts, and yet it fails to linger for long afterward, leaving you wondering what its point is beyond validating the insularity of ravenous fandom.

The movie’s copious needle drops drag us deeper into the decade, from Van Halen’s “Jump” and Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” to George Michael’s “Faith” and Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” At times, the selections can be painfully on the nose; the use of New Order’s “Blue  Monday ” to set the tone as we enter a large, laser-filled dance club is absolutely perfect, however.

Somewhere in the middle of all this retro mayhem (which Cline himself co-scripted with Zak Penn ) is an actual story—which itself is a throwback to something that’s never specifically named. This is essentially “ Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ,” complete with a scrappy, crafty underdog attempting to solve a series of challenges posed by a whimsical, mystical genius in hopes of winning a grand prize at the end.

The year is 2045 and the place is Columbus, Ohio. Wade lives, as so many others do, in “The Stacks,” a densely populated cluster of cruddy trailers piled high atop each other and tied together by scaffolding. To escape their dreary lives, Wade and his neighbors strap on their headgear and enter the Oasis, a sprawling virtual reality where everyone spends the bulk of their time. Yes, they’re doing VR in their RVs.

You can be whoever you want to be, go wherever you want to go, do whatever you want to do. You can be a fearsome warrior or a sexy anime vixen. You can gamble in a casino the size of a planet or climb Mount Everest with Batman. Or you can just hang out with your friends—people you’ve never actually met, but you feel like you intimately know—as Wade does when he’s in the Oasis as the chicly rebellious, “Final Fantasy”-styled Parzival. His best buddy is a hulking orc with a heart of gold named Aech ( Lena Waithe ), and he’s smitten with a motorcycle-riding, punk rock badass named Art3mis ( Olivia Cooke ).

“Ready Player One” would have been a far more compelling film with either of these characters at its center, but we’re stuck with Parzival as our bland yet brave conduit. Waithe has a swagger that’s hugely compelling; Cooke doesn’t get nearly as much of a character to work with here as she did in the gripping dark comedy “ Thoroughbreds ,” but at least Art3mis is Parzival’s equal in terms of her smarts and abilities, and she and isn’t simply relegated to being “the girl.”  

They (and everyone else) are searching for the three hidden keys left behind by the late creator of the Oasis: the socially awkward, Steve Jobs-esque James Halliday ( Mark Rylance , a much-needed source of quiet and humanity in this noisy, overwhelming world). These are literally the keys to the kingdom. Whoever finds them becomes the heir to his empire and the ruler of the Oasis. No one has ever gotten close—not even Parzival, despite his encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of Halliday’s life and inspiration. Meanwhile, the greedy corporate villain Nolan Sorrento ( Ben Mendelsohn , chilling as always) has built a massive army of mercenaries to scour the Oasis for the keys so that he can exploit this realm for commercial gain. Which is totally evil, according to this behemoth studio blockbuster.

So much of “Ready Player One” consists of following these characters around as they jump from one challenge to the next, solving one problem before moving on to the next problem, with clues from the movies, music and video games Halliday loved. But this instinct leads to the film’s strongest sequence of all, which finds the characters’ avatars landing right smack in the middle of “ The Shining .” I wouldn’t dream of giving away which elements of Stanley Kubrick ’s film they explore—or which rooms of The Overlook Hotel. But I will say it is the cleverest use of CGI within a live-action setting, and it upends our expectations of a pop-culture phenomenon rather than simply regurgitating something we know and love back to us. It comments on why “The Shining” matters while also giving us the opportunity to see it unexpectedly from a fresh perspective.

More of that kind of multi-layered approach could have elevated “Ready Player One” from a rollicking, name-dropping romp to a substantive tale with something to say about the influences that shape us during our youth and stick with us well into adulthood. Oh, and the answer to that John Hughes question? It’s Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois, 60062.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series “Ebert Presents At the Movies” opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Lena Waithe as Aech
• Susan Lynch as Alice
• Tye Sheridan as Wade Watts / Parzival
• Win Morisaki as Toshiro Yoshiaki / Daito
• Kae Alexander as Reb
• Hannah John-Kamen as F'Nale Zandor
• T.J. Miller as i-R0k
• Ben Mendelsohn as Nolan Sorrento
• Olivia Cooke as Samantha Cook / Art3mis
• Philip Zhao as Akihide Karatsu / Shoto
• Simon Pegg as Ogden Morrow
• Mark Rylance as James Donovan Halliday / Anorak
• Ralph Ineson as Rick
• Alan Silvestri

Writer (based on the novel by)

• Ernest Cline

Cinematographer

• Janusz Kaminski
• Michael Kahn
• Sarah Broshar
• Steven Spielberg

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Ready player one.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 70 Reviews
• Kids Say 185 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Intense virtual reality adventure will dazzle '80s fans.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Ready Player One is director Steven Spielberg's much-anticipated adaptation of Ernest Cline's near-future sci-fi adventure novel about an avid gamer (Tye Sheridan) who spends most of his time in the Oasis, a virtual reality universe/multi-user game. Expect both virtual (i.e.,…

Why Age 12+?

Many action-packed battle/fight/destruction scenes in the Oasis, a few in real l

Many uses of "s--t," plus the occasional "a--hole," "bi

Nonstop references to movies, video games, directors, and '80s pop culture.

Virtual flirting, dancing, touching, including a moment when Art3mis touches Par

Empty/half-filled wine glasses in a post-office party flashback scene. An avatar

Any Positive Content?

Ultimate message is that games, movies, TV shows, other forms of popular culture

Wade/Parzival triumphs in the Oasis despite disadvantaged upbringing, thanks to

Violence & Scariness

Many action-packed battle/fight/destruction scenes in the Oasis, a few in real life. In the Oasis, Parzival and friends must survive enemy attacks in the form of dinosaurs, King Kong, and other players targeting them with arsenals of virtual weapons (from guns and swords to grenades and world-leveling bombs). Scary re-creation of a horror film includes a literal flood of blood, ax attacks, frightening/gross zombies. Intense car chases/crashes. Characters die frequently in the Oasis (often brutally), breaking apart and turning into coins, which "zeroes out" their avatars. In the real word, an evil corporation sends assassins to kill and/or arrest people, put them in debtors' prisons, blow up their homes, pursue them in armored vehicles, and shoot at them. Gun threats. Creature from alien pops out of an avatar's stomach in a jump-scare moment.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Many uses of "s--t," plus the occasional "a--hole," "bitch," "dickweed," "douche bag," "balls," "hell," "damn," "goddamn," "oh my God," "pissed," "ghetto trash," "noob," etc. And there's one momentous use of the word "f---ing."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Nonstop references to movies, video games, directors, and '80s pop culture. The movies The Shining and Back to the Future play a pivotal role, and there are glimpses/mentions of Atari, Dell, Apple, Minecraft , Firestone tires, Batman, Iron Giant, Robert Zemeckis, John Hughes films, Tab cola, Pizza Hut, and more.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Virtual flirting, dancing, touching, including a moment when Art3mis touches Parzival seductively (in his crotch region) and asks whether he can feel it in real life with his high-tech suit (the corresponding area of his suit glows red); he says of her "she's hot." A few big kisses. Brief innuendo about the kinds of things you can do in the Oasis; some avatars wear pretty skimpy outfits. During one of the key challenges, a naked woman gets out of a bath and approaches a character's avatar; her bare back/top of her buttocks is shown. A woman mimes pole dancing while plugged into the Oasis.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Empty/half-filled wine glasses in a post-office party flashback scene. An avatar has a cigar.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Ultimate message is that games, movies, TV shows, other forms of popular culture definitely matter, but consuming them shouldn't be more important than connecting with people, fostering friendships, finding love in the real world. The Oasis -- a symbol for various forms of online culture -- is both a blessing and a curse; it's a powerful tool, but it can also isolate people. Also promotes teamwork and perseverance, taking calculated risks, researching, practicing, and studying to become an expert/skilled in a particular field.

Positive Role Models

Wade/Parzival triumphs in the Oasis despite disadvantaged upbringing, thanks to his discipline in studying Halliday's life and interests. He's quick thinking, focused, and friendly in the virtual world. Women/girls can play and participate in and succeed in the Oasis as well as men/boys, and Art3mis is intelligent, proactive, committed, and hardworking (though she also defers to Wade in some areas where she doesn't really need to). Aech is a skilled fighter and a loyal friend to Parzival. Avatars come in every shape, size, and color in the Oasis; real-life characters also show a range of representations.

Parents need to know that Ready Player One is director Steven Spielberg 's much-anticipated adaptation of Ernest Cline's near-future sci-fi adventure novel about an avid gamer ( Tye Sheridan ) who spends most of his time in the Oasis, a virtual reality universe/multi-user game. Expect both virtual (i.e., in the Oasis) and real-life violence, although the movie's real-world violence isn't quite as traumatic as the book's. The in-game action can get pretty intense (especially when seen in 3D) and includes over-the-top shoot-outs (with every kind of weapon imaginable), all-out attacks, large-scale battles, destructive car chases, giant monsters, and a frightening re-creation of a gory horror film that includes ax attacks, zombies, and more. Outside the Oasis, there are assassination attempts, an explosion that kills civilians and destroys homes, forced labor, a car chase, and gun threats. Characters also flirt, kiss, and touch each other suggestively, and there's quite a bit of swearing (mostly "s--t," though there's a memorable use of "f---ing"). Although fans of the book, gamers, and Gen Xers with '80s nostalgia are the most obvious audience, you don't need to have read the book to understand or appreciate the story (in fact, if you haven't read it, you're less likely to be distracted by the massive story changes made for the movie...) and its themes of teamwork, perseverance, and valuing real-life connections. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (70)
• Kids say (185)

Based on 70 parent reviews

BEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME MUST WATCH!!!

Colourfully animated thrill ride, what's the story.

Based on Ernest Cline's best-selling 2011 sci-fi novel , READY PLAYER ONE takes place in a dismal 2045, where most people live in squalor, choosing to spend most of their time online in a virtual universe called the Oasis. Wade Watts ( Tye Sheridan ) lives in the "Stacks" of Columbus, Ohio -- a tower of mobile homes -- and spends every spare moment logged in. For the past five years, Wade and millions of other dedicated gamers have been hunting obsessively for an elusive Easter egg left hidden in the game's code by its late creator, James Halliday ( Mark Rylance ). To find the egg, gamers must find three keys and pass through three gates, where their skills will be tested. The winner will receive the entirety of Halliday's trillion-dollar fortune, including his controlling share in the Oasis' parent company. Halliday was an eccentric genius obsessed with the decade he grew up in -- the 1980s -- so Wade and his fellow egg hunters ("gunters" for short) have all become experts in '80s pop culture themselves, from early video games to chart-topping music, movies, and TV shows. When Wade's avatar, Parzival, finds the first key -- followed quickly by four other top gunters he considers friends -- he's quickly threatened by IOI, a global corporation that hires professional gamers (called "Sixers") to work on their behalf in the hunt. With the stakes so high, can Wade and the other "High Five" gunters -- Art3mis ( Olivia Cooke ), Aech, ( Lena Waithe ), Daito (Win Morisaki), and Sho (Philip Zhao) -- keep Halliday's egg out of IOI's hands ... and not get killed in the process?

Is It Any Good?

Although the many story changes might be hard for book purists to accept, Steven Spielberg has lovingly captured the zeitgeist of '80s nostalgia in this adventure. Plus, he brings his own spectacular style to the visuals. Those expecting a faithful or pure adaptation should prepare themselves for key departures from the novel; some of the changes are understandable, while others are initially a bit disappointing. The first challenge is completely different; there's no high school, Oklahoma, Joust , WarGames , or Rush; and the High Five's meeting/collaboration is completely sped up (and that's just a few of the changes). Of course, screenwriters Zak Penn and Cline couldn't depict all of Parzival's '80s trivia-dropping, game playing, and theory-obsessing in the film -- what works on paper doesn't always translate to the screen. What is on screen is pure Spielberg: an epic quest, young people banding together, and a love of the decade when he himself (as well as fellow filmmakers like Robert Zemeckis and James Cameron) reigned supreme in popular culture. The movie, like Halliday's hunt, is filled with Easter eggs for movie buffs and nostalgic enthusiasts. Multiple viewings may be in order to catch them all, because some are fleeting, while others are more overt. (Chances are if the audience is laughing and you aren't, you just missed a visual tribute to an '80s movie, fictional character, cartoon, or game.)

The movie is most impressive when the action is taking place in the Oasis. Spielberg immerses viewers in the sort of virtual reality it would be easy to get lost in, particularly when real life is so bleak. And that, if there's one thing that keeps a very good movie from being extraordinary, is the problem. The virtual scenes dazzle and inspire, while the real-world plot is slightly less interesting. An action sequence between geared-up avatars inside a game is naturally more colorful and imaginative than the grim reality of car chases and debtors' prison. The actors all do a fine job with their roles, even though two of them are far off the ages of their book counterparts. Cooke (who was so wonderful in Thoroughbreds ) is believably passionate, if for some reason not quite as much of a genius as she is in the book ("book Art3mis" is even smarter about all things Halliday than Parzival). Rylance (who's become one of Spielberg's most frequent collaborators) is excellent as the nearly mythical Halliday, and Ben Mendelsohn is perfectly smarmy as IOI's greedy (and evil) executive, Nolan Sorrento. Alan Silvestri's score, along with the many '80s jams, is wholly evocative of the decade -- which is only to be expected, considering that his previous scores include the Back to the Future trilogy, which is heavily referenced in this film. Considering the Herculean task of translating Cline's epic novel onto the screen, Spielberg has kept the wonder and the nostalgia; ultimately's that's what will enchant viewers.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Ready Player One 's role models . How do they display teamwork and perseverance ? If you were part of their team, which character would you want to work with? Why?

How did you feel about the video game-like violence in the Oasis vs. the violent scenes in the real world? Which had more impact ? Why?

What's the story's message about screen time /virtual life? Why is it important to step away and live in the real world?

How do the movie's real-life characters compare to their Oasis avatars? What's the appeal of changing your appearance online or in virtual space? Is Art3mis right when she tells Parzival that "you don't know me"?

Fans of the book: What do you think of the page-to-screen changes in the story's plot details and characterizations? Why do you think they decided to make them? Which differences do you appreciate? Was there anything from the book you missed seeing on-screen?

Movie Details

• In theaters : March 29, 2018
• On DVD or streaming : July 24, 2018
• Cast : Tye Sheridan , Olivia Cooke , Ben Mendelsohn
• Director : Steven Spielberg
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Adventures
• Character Strengths : Perseverance , Teamwork
• Run time : 140 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : sequences of sci-fi action violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, nudity and language
• Last updated : August 11, 2024

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Review: Spielberg’s ‘Ready Player One’ Plays the Nostalgia Game

• Share full article

By A.O. Scott

• March 28, 2018

It isn’t going too far out on a limb to predict that “Ready Player One” will turn out to be one of Steven Spielberg’s more controversial projects. Even before its release, this adaptation of Ernest Cline’s 2011 best seller — what one writer called a “nerdgasm” of a novel — was subjected to an unusual degree of internet pre-hate . That was only to be expected. Mr. Spielberg has tackled contentious topics before — terrorism, slavery, the Pentagon Papers, sharks — but nothing as likely to stir up a hornet’s nest of defensiveness, disdain and indignant “actually”-ing as the subject of this movie, which is video games.

And not only video games. “Ready Player One,” written by Mr. Cline and Zak Penn, dives into the magma of fan zeal, male self-pity and techno-mythology in which those once-innocent pastimes are now embedded. Mr. Spielberg, a digital enthusiast and an old-school cineaste, goes further than most filmmakers in exploring the aesthetic possibilities of a form that is frequently dismissed and misunderstood.

Aided by his usual cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, and by the production designer Adam Stockhausen, he turns a vast virtual landscape of battling avatars into a bustling pop-cultural theme park, an interactive museum of late-20th- and early-21st-century entertainment, a maze of niche tastes, cultish preoccupations and blockbuster callbacks. Mr. Spielberg navigates this warehouse with his usual dexterity, loading every frame with information without losing the clarity and momentum of the story.

Nonetheless, the toy guns of social media and pop-up kulturkritik are locked and loaded. Mr. Spielberg will be accused of taking games and their players too seriously and not seriously enough, of pandering and mocking, of just not getting it and not being able to see beyond it — “it” being the voracious protoplasm that has, over the past three or four decades, swallowed up most of our cultural discourse. Whatever you call it — the revenge of the nerds, the franchising of the universe, the collapse of civilization — it’s a force that is at once emancipatory and authoritarian, innocent and pathological, delightful and corrosive.

Mr. Spielberg and some of his friends helped to create this monster, which grants him a measure of credibility and also opens him up to a degree of suspicion. He is the only person who could have made this movie and the last person who should have been allowed near the material.

‘Ready Player One’ Is a Vintage Pop Bonanza

Here’s a rundown of some of the bigger references you need to know before watching Steven Spielberg’s film.

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Ready Player One Reviews

While the first half of [Ready Player One] is all trivia is the superior form of geekdom and awkward geekboy somehow managing to get the geekgirl interested the second half shows how you can form real communities online.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jan 21, 2023

Steven Spielberg delivers the ultimate expression of why we digest media, and possibly a glimpse into a world we could all be heading towards.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 3, 2022

With Ready Player One, you can feel director Steven Spielberg pushing to reclaim his status as Hollywood's crowned head of spectacle as he pours his considerable talent into another memorable science-fiction fantasy.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 14, 2022

What Ready Player One does through its story is never quite as interesting as what it means, but its a Spielberg science-fiction pop culture souffle...

Full Review | Feb 11, 2022

An ugly FX monstrosity that misunderstands the misguided message of the book & fails to address its antiquated notions of race, gender and capitalism. Abysmal fan service from Spielberg, who should be able to shoot and edit a climax better than this

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Nov 17, 2021

A heckin fun movie, full of stunning action sequences and laughs and winks at the kids who grew up watching Back to the Future and Jurassic Park and E.T. and Indiana Jones.

Full Review | Aug 27, 2021

Steven Spielberg has basically made the best possible version of this material with the serviceable-at-best script he was given.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Aug 21, 2021

If you go to the movies to watch big blockbusters with big explosions and effects, or to just have an enjoyable time with family and friends, then this is the movie for you.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Aug 14, 2021

It's not nostalgia so much as a hyperactive computer algorithm.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2021

The setting of the film allows for some truly spectacular action set pieces and these are the strongest parts of the film

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5 / 5 | Jun 24, 2021

It's a film to watch and enjoy once, but probably not to return to again and again, like Spielberg's best. It's fixated on easter eggs and it's like an easter egg itself: shiny and pretty, inducing a brief sugar high, but ultimately hollow.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 29, 2021

Pure escapism that begs the question, Will there ever be a video game movie that really works?

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 4, 2021

While the video game preoccupation is adequately and thoroughly visualized, the real world has plenty of missing details.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 7, 2020

A kid at heart until his end, Spielberg's renegade sensibilities turns Ready Player One into a true treasure.

Full Review | Nov 10, 2020

The film asks the viewer to find their purpose in life, like Wade has, so there isn't always this instant urge to run off to a different reality as found in video games, movies, or television.

Full Review | Nov 4, 2020

While Ready Player One is an entertaining thrill ride, its storytelling still feels rather empty.

Full Review | Oct 9, 2020

Most filmmakers fail miserably when trying to meld together both real and fantasy worlds, yet this is truly where Spielberg reminds us of his extraordinary talent.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 21, 2020

Even the most hardened of cynics can appreciate the take-away message: it's important to live in reality because it's the only thing that's real and the only place you can get a decent meal.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 29, 2020

Ready Player One won't be remembered as Spielberg's worst film but it's not his best either. It's a purgatory state of a film that understands the appeal of the book but fails to convey those aspects in a satisfactory manner.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 26, 2020

[I]t's a montage, an audiobook, and a love letter to the art that fuels us. But does it actually emulate the wonder of nostalgia itself? No, not even close.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 24, 2020

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Film review: Ready Player One

In his latest, Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg blasts his way into the 21st Century. It’s ‘dazzling stuff’ writes Nicholas Barber.

Steven Spielberg’s hectic sci-fi action-adventure, Ready Player One, is set half in the real world and half in virtual reality, so it’s not surprising that two of its characters should discuss the differences between those competing realms. What’s striking is that the characters should have their discussion in the middle of a furious gun battle in a zero-gravity disco – and yet you can somehow follow both their arguments and the course of the shoot-out.

It’s dazzling stuff. Recently, a generation of directors has been paying homage to Spielberg’s popcorn films (in Super 8, Jurassic World, and Stranger Things, for example), but with Ready Player One he proves with stunning aplomb that no one does Spielberg quite like Spielberg. No one has more empathy with pasty American kids from broken homes. No one packs scenes with so much information, or elaborate action set pieces with so much energy, while ensuring that you always know what’s going on and why.

And Spielberg isn’t just competing with his imitators and his 1980s self. He is blasting his way into the 21st Century. As his spectacular film travels back and forth between a dingy Orwellian dystopia and a computer-generated dream world, he stampedes across territory occupied by Terry Gilliam, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan and the Wachowskis, not to mention the directors of The Lego Movie. He isn’t just making this territory his own, but demonstrating that it was his all along.

Adapted from the best-selling novel by Ernest Cline, and scripted by Cline and Zak Penn, Ready Player One is set in the year 2045. Its orphaned hero, Wade (Tye Sheridan), lives in a grey Ohio ghetto called The Stacks, where higgledy-piggledy skyscrapers are made of mobile homes piled on top of each other and held together with scaffolding. This opening setting would be enough to occupy most films, but no sooner have we glimpsed Wade’s vertiginous home than he slips on his VR gloves and helmet and flits across to the OASIS, an online role-playing game.

Most of the population passes most of its time in this game, it seems. The America of 2045 is so rundown that it makes sense to cross over to an infinite digital wonderland where you can live in every film you’ve ever seen. On a first viewing, I spotted King Kong, the chest-burster from Alien, the DeLorean from Back to the Future, the Tardis from Doctor Who, the Tyrannosaurus from Spielberg’s own Jurassic Park, and about 50 other pop-culture icons. But the film invites you to rewatch it repeatedly, pausing regularly, until you’ve ticked off all the references. Each crowded frame is like a ‘Where’s Wally?’ spread for Comic-Con regulars. 

Naturally, once people are in the OASIS, they tend to choose avatars who are slimmer, taller and generally less human than they are. Wade becomes a white-and-blue-skinned alien boy-band dreamboat named Parzival, and his online friends include a punky manga babe, Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), and a hulking cyborg, Aech (Lena Waithe), neither of whom he has ever met in reality. They all love the virtual thrill of climbing Mount Everest, visiting casino space stations, machine-gunning opponents, and racing around Manhattan in their souped-up cars (hence the DeLorean), but they have a specific mission to keep them occupied, too.

The OASIS, we learn, was designed by a fragile genius, James Halliday (Spielberg’s late-period muse, Mark Rylance), and his ousted business partner, Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg, a particularly apt casting choice, given that the film amps up the nerd-tastic sensory bombardment which he and Edgar Wright developed in their sitcom, Spaced). Halliday is now dead, but he has left an ‘Easter egg’ behind in the OASIS: anyone who can complete three challenges within the game will be handed sole executive control of his trillion-dollar firm. Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the rat-like boss of a rival tech company, devotes endless resources to figuring out Halliday’s riddles, aided and abetted by an amusingly intimidating but whiny sidekick called i-R0k (TJ Miller) – literally, an online troll. But the heartfelt geekery of Wade / Parzival and his friends gives them the edge. Regardless of what their parents may have told them, spending their childhoods in front of a screen was actually sound preparation for later life.

What this convoluted but comprehensible premise means is that, for most of Ready Player One, we are watching Wade playing a video game: at one key stage, we’re watching Wade play a video game within a video game. But Spielberg and his team convince us to care about what’s happening, both in the OASIS and out of it. Even when Wade is essentially a CGI cartoon character, hurtling around an artificial planet at helter-skelter speed, the film is making piquant points about corporate advertising, the internet, and the human urge to appear bigger and better than we are: Sorrento’s avatar looks suspiciously like Superman. Some viewers will still be turned off by a narrative which separates itself from reality for so much of the running time. But it’s horribly easy to believe that one day we’ll all be plugged into a game like the OASIS – and a lot sooner than 2045.

Having said that, Ready Player One did leave me feeling slightly sorry for today’s pre-teen and teenage cinema-goers, because they so rarely get to see a new fantasy film which doesn’t nod and wink to older ones. Back in the past, you didn’t need to pass an exam to enjoy Back to the Future, whereas the current Star Wars and Marvel movies assume an encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of films, television series, games, books and comics. But I think that Spielberg is aware of what a headache these nostalgia-fests can be. Despite its name, the OASIS is cluttered and exhausting rather than peaceful and calm.

Besides if any film should be allowed to let its geek flag fly, it’s Ready Player One, which clearly aims to be the ultimate celebration of the fanboy and fangirl mindset. If pop culture is eating itself, this is the feast to end all feasts. You could also argue that Spielberg is the godfather of this kind of coach-potato cross-referencing. I can still remember going to see ET The Extra-Terrestrial when it came out, and being startled when ET spotted someone dressed up as Yoda for Hallowe’en. How could one science-fiction blockbuster joke about another, completely different science-fiction blockbuster? My young mind was blown. Thirty-five years on, Spielberg has blown my not-so-young mind again.

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‘ready player one’: film review | sxsw 2018.

Steven Spielberg adapts 'Ready Player One,' Ernest Cline's pop-culture-soaked novel about a teen's quest to win control over a virtual universe.

By THR Staff

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A rollicking adventure through worlds both bleak and fantastic, Steven Spielberg ‘s Ready Player One makes big changes to the specifics and structure of Ernest Cline’s best-selling novel but keeps the spirit and level-up thrills intact. With Cline as a screenwriter alongside Zak Penn, it’s not surprising that while some of the book’s dorkier elements are excised — sorry, Rush fans! — their replacements display similar pop-culture obsessiveness while lending themselves more to the cinematic gifts of the man Cline surely dreamed would adapt the book. Gamers are far from the only ones who will respond to this virtual-world-set picture, which strikes an ideal balance between live action and CGI.

The setting is 2045, in the fastest-growing city in the world: Columbus, Ohio. Around the globe, people spend as much of their free time as possible in an online virtual universe called the OASIS, where the focus is as much on living in a fantasy character’s skin as on shooting things and keeping score. You can look like Beetlejuice and drive a Batmobile ( 1960s vintage, please); you can dance in zero gravity with a green-skinned swimsuit model; you can do anything to forget that, beyond your VR goggles, your physical body lives in a slum made of RV trailers stacked perilously high atop each other.

Release date: Mar 29, 2018

The tech-artistic genius who created the place, James Halliday (Mark Rylance ), died not long ago, and left OASIS members with one last game: Whoever can solve a series of clues and missions within the online world will inherit both his vast fortune and total control over what happens in the OASIS.

While mighty corporate interests — like IOI , a proletariat-exploiting company run by Ben Mendelsohn’s Nolan Sorrento — are hiring teams of gamers to find Halliday’s “Easter egg,” hardcore geeks (the egg hunters, or “ gunters “) have the advantage, since the clues draw on every comic book, movie and video game the inventor consumed in his life — not to mention the biographical trivia housed in a vast archive of digitally reassembled memories. (That archive was just a published memoir in the novel; here, it’s an entrancing living museum overseen by a stuffy butler-like robot.)

Wade Watts ( Tye Sheridan), known as Parzival in the OASIS, has been hunting for clues alongside his best friend Aech , a mechanical genius whose avatar is a giant black man with robot parts in his midsection. (The spoiler-averse should avoid looking at the credits to see whose voice is delivering Aech’s lines.) From afar, the two have been admiring the egg-hunting work of Art3mis ( Olivia Cooke ), an anime-styled woman whose online motorcycle has Tron flair, and their paths cross in the movie’s first really thrilling set piece: Gamers trying to solve the first challenge must win a car race whose course is a fast-mutating obstacle course, where wrecking balls or a T-Rex will kill you if the road doesn’t simply uproot itself under your wheels and throw you off. The obstacle just before the finish line is a doozy, but the trick to beating the thing is even more fun. Soon, Parzival beats the first challenge, followed by Aech , Art3mis and a pair of Japanese players, Daito (Win Morisaki ) and Shoto (Philip Zhao).

Uniting these five as a team more quickly than the book did, the film lays the groundwork for a big change that is key to its success as a film: Midway through, it starts bringing them together in the real world, getting them in trouble that gives the action both flesh-and-blood stakes and offers viewers a break from the well-executed but fake-by-design character avatars. Parzival’s crush on Art3mis is vastly more interesting when we watch Sheridan and Cooke share the screen together, and returning to the world of slums and class warfare helps imbue the battle between gunters and IOI the flavor of a rebellion. Though the workings of the megacorp’s debt-enslavement scheme aren’t fleshed out much, it’s clear that if they gain control over the OASIS, the kind of garbage we face on our own internet and social media will enjoy next-generation proliferation there.

Mendelsohn does his usual mustache twirling as Sorrento sends both real-world hit squads and a virtual bounty hunter after our heroes. The latter, a cartoonishly menacing hulk voiced by T.J. Miller, gets most of the film’s laughs. (The lines sound written specifically for, or by, the former Silicon Valley actor.)

Rylance gets to play a few versions of the OASIS’s eccentric inventor, and seems most to enjoy being the space-cadet genius, his jaw slackened and his delivery stoned-sounding. (It costs a hundred dollars-plus to see this wonderful actor create a character on Broadway; please, Hollywood, keep giving us access to him for the price of a movie ticket.)

The movie’s biggest attractions can’t be described here without ruining the fun of mystery-solving and spoiling surprise appearances of characters we treasure from our own childhoods. The trailers reveal the very welcome presence of the Iron Giant, whose role in the climax is sweetly true to the character’s nature. But other guest stars play significant roles in the action as well, and they’re not necessarily the ones fans of the novel will expect.

It’s a little twisted, at a time in which much of what is soul-sucking in our world was created or enabled by the internet, to cheer for humans who risk their lives to remain in a digital reality. In a film and novel full of nostalgia, perhaps the deepest throwback is to the spirit of those early home-computer adopters — many of them trained on Dungeons & Dragons world-building — who deeply believed that wondrous things could spring from the primitive programs they were learning to write. If today’s digital citizens could step back from their newsfeed troughs and think about a web they’d actually like to be caught in, maybe there’s an oasis worth fighting for somewhere out there.

Production company: Amblin Entertainment Distributor: Warner Bros. Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Lena Waithe , Ben Mendelsohn , Mark Rylance , T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg , Win Morisaki , Philip Zhao, Hannah John-Kamen Director: Steven Spielberg Screenwriters: Zak Penn, Ernest Cline Producers: Donald De Line, Dan Farah, Kristie Macosko Krieger , Steven Spielberg Executive producers: Bruce Berman, Christopher DeFaria , Daniel Lupi , Adam Somner Director of photography: Janusz Kaminski Production designer: Adam Stockhausen Costume designer: Kasia Walicka-Maimone Editors: Sarah Broshar , Michael Kahn Composer: Alan Silvestri Casting directors: Lucy Bevan, Ellen Lewis Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Headliners)

Rated PG-13, 140 minutes

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Ready Player One

When the creator of a virtual reality called the OASIS dies, he makes a posthumous challenge to all OASIS users to find his Easter Egg, which will give the finder his fortune and control of ... Read all When the creator of a virtual reality called the OASIS dies, he makes a posthumous challenge to all OASIS users to find his Easter Egg, which will give the finder his fortune and control of his world. When the creator of a virtual reality called the OASIS dies, he makes a posthumous challenge to all OASIS users to find his Easter Egg, which will give the finder his fortune and control of his world.

• Steven Spielberg
• Ernest Cline
• Tye Sheridan
• Olivia Cooke
• Ben Mendelsohn
• 1.9K User reviews
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• 64 Metascore
• 11 wins & 57 nominations total

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• Trivia In an interview, Steven Spielberg said this was the third most difficult movie he has made in his career, behind Jaws (1975) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) .
• Goofs Parzival doesn't count to 3 before throwing the Holy Hand Grenade, as depicted in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) . In that film, King Arthur counts "One, two, five," is corrected, and shouts "Three!" before throwing the grenade. However, these instructions are never specified in the Oasis so there is no particular reason to expect them to match the Monty Python version.

Halliday : She wanted to go dancing, so we watched a movie.

• Crazy credits The title doesn't appear till about 10 minutes into the movie
• Connections Featured in Kain's Quest: The Terminator (2017)
• Soundtracks Jump Written by David Lee Roth , Edward Van Halen and Alex Van Halen Performed by Van Halen Courtesy of Warner Bros. Records Inc. By arrangement with Warner Music Group Film & TV Licensing

User reviews 1.9K

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• March 29, 2018 (United States)
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• $175,000,000 (estimated)
• $137,715,350
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• Apr 1, 2018
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• Runtime 2 hours 20 minutes
• Dolby Digital
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Film Review: ‘Ready Player One’

Steven Spielberg has turned Ernest Cline's novel into a virtual-reality fanboy geek-out that's entrancing when it's virtual, less so when it's real.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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In “ Ready Player One ,” Steven Spielberg ’s dizzyingly propulsive virtual-reality fanboy geek-out, Wade Watts ( Tye Sheridan ), a teenager living in a dystopian trailer park in the year 2045, spends most of his time strapping on a headset and immersing himself in the OASIS, a techie surrealist theme park of the senses. Once inside, you never know what you’re going to see or imagine next — though it’s hard to go for more than 30 seconds without encountering some succulent tidbit of pop nostalgia, most of it from the 1980s.

Early on, there’s a shoot-the-works car chase in which Wade — or, rather, his avatar, Parzival, who resembles a frosted-blond, plane-cheeked Keanu Reeves in a jean vest — climbs into the wing-doored DeLorean DMC-12 from “Back to the Future” and races through a cityscape at pedal-to-the-metal speed to the tune of Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” even as he’s pursued by King Kong and the T. Rex from “Jurassic Park.” (Blink and you’ll miss the Batmobile.)

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A bit later, Parzival goes on a date with Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), who is also an avatar, with punk-red hair and the oversize eyes of an anime kewpie doll. He gets ready for the evening by morphing into assorted outfits — he tries on Prince, Michael Jackson, and a Duran Duran trench coat before settling on the shaggy suit and tie of Buckaroo Banzai. At a nightclub, Parzival and Art3mis boogie to “Staying Alive” on a floating disco floor and wind up literally dancing on air. All very trancy and romantic, though what good is virtual reality if you can’t wage an unholy battle in it?

Have no fear: In “Ready Player One,” there is plenty of vicarious fantasy combat, notably a war of the worlds that features the Iron Giant as well as the red-eyed, gleaming silver Mechagodzilla. Every time a creature like that shows up (at one point, even the monster fetus from “Alien” makes a kind of palm-buzzer cameo), it’s entrancingly cool. “Ready Player One” tells a breathless and relatively coherent story — essentially, the future of civilization is riding on the outcome of a video game — but the movie, first and foremost, is a coruscating explosion of pop-culture eye candy.

Spielberg, when he got up on stage to introduce “Ready Player One” at the film’s SXSW premiere, made a point of insisting that it wasn’t a film — he said it was very much a movie . Yet I wondered why he needed to make the distinction. Years ago, the words “Spielberg” and “fantasy” went together like “ice” and “cream,” or maybe “Citizen” and “Kane,” and one reason for that is that Spielberg grounded fantasy (even the spectacular extraterrestrial visit of “Close Encounters”) in the nitty-gritty of the real world. That’s what made his fantasies magical.

Yet ever since he became more of a serious, real-world dramatic filmmaker, Spielberg seems to have dichotomized reality and fantasy in his thinking. “Ready Player One” isn’t an obnoxiously flashy and hollow indulgence, like “Speed Racer” or last year’s live-action “Ghost in the Shell.” It’s an accomplished and intermittently hypnotic movie. Yet you may feel like you’re occupied more than you are invested. The virtual world that Spielberg creates, though it just about pops off the screen, isn’t an emotionally textured place. Mostly we’re just staring at it, or “riding” it.

The most telling sequence in “Ready Player One” is the one in which Parzival, Art3mis, and Parzival’s best friend and protector, an avatar named Aech (pronounced H ), who resembles a metalloid cross between Vin Diesel and Shrek, enter the Overlook Hotel from “The Shining.” The reason they’ve gone there is that they’re trying to track down the woman who James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the disconnected nerd-genius inventor of the OASIS, once had a date with and nearly kissed. It turns out that the two went out to the movies (they went to see “The Shining”), and as the characters in “Ready Player One” stroll around on the sets and images from Kubrick’s film, it’s ticklish, after an hour or so of slippery mutating synthetic digital imagery, to envision “virtual reality” as something that’s this iconic and analog and concrete.

Aech winds up next to the Overlook’s infamous Art Deco elevators, slipping and sliding around in the jellied blood that pours out of them, and that’s before he ventures up to Room 237. The black-and-white New Year’s Eve photograph that pictured a tuxedoed Jack Nicholson now features, in his place, James Halliday, and Art3mis is able to make contact with Halliday’s date, which results in our heroes getting one of the three keys they need to win the game. Yet when that victorious moment happens, it’s a bit of an anti-climax. In “Ready Player One,” everything you could call virtual is clever and spellbinding. Everything you might call reality is rather banal.

If Wade can win the three keys, he’ll unlock the hidden Easter Egg that Halliday tucked inside the OASIS and inherit Halliday’s empire, worth half a trillion dollars; he’ll also gain control of the OASIS itself. Competing for the same prize is Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), a corporate weasel who’s the head of Innovative Online Industries (I.O.I.), a company that wants to dominate the world. Ernest Cline, the Austin novelist who wrote the 2011 novel on which “Ready Player One” is based, and co-wrote the screenplay as well (along with Zak Penn), packs in the geek references — and not just the stated ones (Hot Pockets! John Hughes! Robotron! Beetlejuice! Chucky!) but the fact that Halliday is a kind of Steve Jobs crossed with Willy Wonka. Or the way that the OASIS, an escape valve from the world, isn’t just a projection of what VR might one day become but a metaphor for how people relate to the Web right now.

Yet the contradiction of a video-game/VR movie is that games are, of course, awesomely immersive, whereas a movie about games is more akin to watching somebody else play one. The hoops that Wade and his team have to jump through to win each key feel arbitrary, like rules made up as the plot goes along, and you wish there were a greater sense of intrigue to it. The movie has more activity than it does layers.

Eventually, we meet the real-life people behind the avatars. Art3mis is really Sam, played by Cooke as a pensive redhead made shy by her birthmark, and Aech, though still called Aech, is played by the spiky and ebullient Lena Waithe, from “Master of None.” The one actor who gives a genuine crafted performance is Mark Rylance, who plays Halliday as a spooked angel trapped inside his frizzy head. We see slices of his past, including his fateful break-up with the partner, Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg), who launched the OASIS with him. Yet all of this adds up on paper without ever seeming like more, in the movie, than a frame on which Spielberg can hang his eruptive visual imagination. “Ready Player One” is set in a dilapidated future where fantasy rules because reality looks hellish by comparison. Yet the movie puts you in a different mindset. By the end, you’re more than ready to escape from all the escapism.

Reviewed at SXSW Film Festival (TBA), March 11, 2018. Running time: 140 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. release of a Warner Bros., Amblin Entertainment, Village Roadshow Pictures, RatPac-Dune Entertainment, De Line Pictures production. Producers: Steven Spielberg, Donald De Line, Dan Farah, Kristie Macosko Krieger. Executive producers: Bruce Berman, Christopher DeFaria, Daniel Lupi, Adam Somner.
• Crew: Director: Steven Spielberg. Screenplay: Ernest Cline, Zak Penn. Camera (color, widescreen): Janusz Kaminski. Editors: Sarah Broshar, Michael Kahn. Music: Alan Silvestri.
• With: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Rylance, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg, Lena Waithe, Win Morisaki, Philip Zhao, Susan Lynch, Hannah John-Kamen, Ralph Ineson, McKenne Grace, Letitia Wright.

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Ready Player One is thrilling sci-fi popcorn fantasia that doesn't know when to say Game Over: EW review

Arriving in theaters a mere three months after The Post , Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi popcorn fantasia Ready Player One feels like a movie made by someone in his 20s rather than his 70s. Never mind the director’s still-prodigious work ethic, the big-screen adaptation of Ernest Cline’s giddily overstuffed, ’80s-saturated best-seller is, in a way, a movie that couldn’t be more bespoke to Spielberg. After all, so many of that decade’s most indelible touchstones poured directly from his brain. It’s the perfect marriage of fabulist and fable.

Written by Cline and Zak Penn, Ready Player One is set in 2045, a dystopian future where an 18-year-old orphan named Wade Watts ( Mud ’s Tye Sheridan) lives in a bleak Ohio ghetto of scaffolding and stacked trailers. Like everyone else, he escapes from the dreariness of real life through an immersive virtual-reality world called the OASIS. There you can be whoever you want (his avatar is a Final Fantasy -looking rebel named Parzival), as well as do whatever you want — ski down the pyramids, climb Mount Everest with Batman, you name it. His only friends are the anonymous fellow gamers he meets in this role-playing paradise, like Olivia Cooke’s punky, manga-eyed Art3mis.

The OASIS, we learn, was designed by a brainy, socially awkward merry prankster named James Halliday (Mark Rylance, underneath a nimbus of corkscrew curls). Upon his death, he left behind an Easter egg in his virtual world as his final prank: Whoever completes a series of challenges wins control of his trillion-dollar empire. Parzival and Art3mis aren’t the only gamers after this digital grail, though. Ben Mendelsohn’s Nolan Sorrento, the wolfish CEO of a rival tech company, forces countless enslaved citizens to hunt for Halliday’s egg for him.

Spielberg, a master world-builder, has created two distinct realms in Ready Player One , the film seamlessy shifting between the candy-colored OASIS and the bleakness of reality. But the OASIS, with its constant blink-and-miss barrage of pop culture references, is the place you want to be — a fanboy nerdvana where you’re constantly on the run from King Kong or the T. rex from Jurassic Park while zipping around in your Back to the Future DeLorean as Van Halen’s “Jump” cranks on the soundtrack. The best sequence in the film by far comes when Parzival and his pals follow Halliday’s high-tech scavenger hunt to the Overlook Hotel from The Shining , where they come face-to-face with the creepy Grady twins, the bathing woman in Room 237, and the infamous elevator of blood.

Still, the biggest allusion of all in Ready Player One is one that’s never explicitly stated: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory . For all of the adventure’s brave-new-world originality and hyperactive speed, Parzival is Charlie Bucket and Halliday is Gene Wilder’s mad confectioner looking for a guileless heir. It’s the tale of a kid whose childlike innocence turns out to be the greatest weapon in a world of adult corruption and greed. What could possibly be more Spielbergian than that?

For the first two-thirds, Ready Player One moves like a roller coaster. You’re so busy piecing together Halliday’s riddles and playing Spot the Reference that there’s barely a second to stop and catch your breath. But by the last half hour (which is punctuated by one of Spielberg’s cornier endings), a sort of fatigue sets in. And not the kind you get from playing a videogame for too long, but the kind you get from watching someone else play a videogame for too long. Eventually, you feel like you’re living through the ’80s in real time. In other words, Ready Player One is pure Thriller, until you eventually look at your watch and want to Beat It. B

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Ready Player One Review

29 Mar 2018

Ready Player One

There’s a moment, not long into Ready Player One , where hundreds of cars, including a DeLorean, the A-Team van and the Plymouth Fury from Christine (which happens to be driven by Lara Croft) are all racing each other through New York when, having already outmaneuvered the Jurassic Park T-Rex, King Kong swings into view. And as the giant ape appears, all lingering doubts are dispelled — it’s clear the film is going to deliver on its thrill-ride promise, and then some.

Set in Columbus, Ohio (relocated from the Oklahoma City of the book) 27 years from now, the world is overpopulated and, if not quite yet a dystopia, certainly thinking about it. Wade Watts ( Sheridan ), named to sound like a superhero’s alter-ego, lives in the Stacks — a shanty town of campervans piled perilously on top of each other. How the world got like this isn’t explicit (although both the “corn syrup droughts” and “bandwidth riots” are mentioned), but it’s not so outlandish you couldn’t see it happen. For most, it’s an existence worth escaping and to do so, humans plug themselves into the OASIS, a virtual world where anything is possible. For any filmmaker, that toy box is an enticing prospect, and there’s no-one better to play in it than Steven Spielberg .

The OASIS that Spielberg puts on screen is a visual marvel — obviously computer-generated as befits the fact it’s a fictional video game, but realistic enough that it doesn’t just feel as though you’re watching a very expensive cartoon. The action has weight and consequence. And it’s saturated with pop-culture references, some obvious (the Iron Giant; a squad of Halo Spartans), some so blink-and-you’ll-miss-it a Blu-ray and a remote control for freeze-framing will be required to spot them all. There’s a strange joy in scanning the screen in search of obscure characters that will make no impact on the vast majority of the audience — Zitz from Battletoads anyone? A less accomplished director could get bogged down in this, causing the film to be a moving riff on a Where’s Wally? book, but Spielberg strikes the perfect balance. He knows exactly when to pull back to focus on the characters — especially the central relationship between Wade/Parzival and Samantha/Art3mis ( Cooke ), which gives the film a necessary and touching grounding in reality — and the story.

It’s a joy, with Spielberg letting loose for the type of blockbuster moviemaking that made his name.

That story focuses on a competition announced by James Halliday ( Rylance ), creator of the OASIS who, on his deathbed, launched a competition to find his successor. Hidden somewhere in the virtual world are three keys — the first to find them all will be granted his billion-dollar fortune and control over the VR realm. Ready Player One picks up five years later with the first key yet to be claimed. Most have given up searching, but Wade, his friends and many more are still on the hunt. Some of those “many more” include Nolan Sorrento ( Mendelsohn ), the nefarious CEO of rival software company Innovative Online Industries (IOI), who employs a vast squad of players to find the keys for him. This would be a bad thing. His ultimate goal is to make as much money as possible from it, even going so far as to force players who fall into debt to work in (online) labour camps known as Loyalty Centers.

It’s a high-risk contest, then, and Spielberg switches the action between the real and virtual worlds with dazzling aplomb, seamlessly melding the peril in both states of reality and upping the stakes as the keys are uncovered and we approach the endgame. The film does occasionally get sidetracked by exposition (this is what an ‘Easter egg’ is, here’s why the Atari 2600 game Adventure is being used), but while it’s momentarily frustrating, it is understandable. Warren Robinett is hardly a household name. The other issue is with Mendelsohn, who does little to differentiate Sorrento from Rogue One ’s Orson Krennic or The Dark Knight Rises ’ John Daggett. But mostly it’s a joy, with Spielberg letting loose for the type of blockbuster moviemaking that made his name, but is increasingly infrequent in his filmography. And shows that when he’s on his game, there’s no-one else who comes close.

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Summary In 2045, the world is on the brink of chaos and collapse. But the people have found salvation in the OASIS, an expansive virtual reality universe created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance). When Halliday dies, he leaves his immense fortune to the first person to find a digital Easter egg he has hidden somewher ... Read More

Directed By : Steven Spielberg

Written By : Zak Penn, Ernest Cline

Ready Player One

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Ready Player One review

Spielberg’s film is a spectacle that’s more than just nostalgia

by Ross Miller

The biggest question I had going into Ready Player One was, absent any and all pop culture references, could the film stand on its own? After all, the book would spend pages poring over details about the films and video games of the ’80s — and many pivotal plot points would require the characters to have encyclopedic knowledge of that era. Would the movie put us through the same tedium?

Mercifully, no. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is colorful, frenetic and fun. It’s bursting with nods to decades of movies and games, but Spielberg mostly uses them to create the atmosphere of a world obsessed with pop culture. (What could be more realistic than that?) The film takes the broad strokes of the book and adapts them to make nostalgia more of an ambience than a narrative crutch. The result is something that feels like the biggest tribute to escapism; ironically, it’s when we leave the pop culture confinements of the virtual world, however sparingly, that the movie feels less fulfilling.

Ready Player One is unapologetically a commercial action movie designed to put spectacle first. To get there as fast as possible, it front-loads a lot of world-building by way of narration. Within the first five minutes, you know everything you need to know about this world: It’s the year 2045 and everyone — quite literally everyone — escapes the derelict future by plugging into a parallel virtual world called the OASIS. As we watch our hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) — better known by his online handle, Parzival — climb his way down from his home atop a vertical trailer park (“the stacks”) to his hidden VR den, we see a montage of neighbors logged in and miming various tasks that seem to coordinate with whatever their in-world characters are doing. It’s comical, both in execution and in the premise that so many people would be using motion controls. But if you swap VR for mobile phones, it doesn’t feel that far off — and, to be sure, people dancing in VR headsets is way more visually interesting than someone tapping on their iPhone.

The driving force of Ready Player One is to find the Easter egg. On his deathbed, the creator of OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), unveiled a series of challenges and mysteries that exist in the world. Solve three puzzles, collect three keys and unlock the coveted Easter egg, and you’ll win control of the entire OASIS. Parzival — it feels more appropriate to use his avatar’s name, given the majority of screen time is spent in the OASIS — is a “gunter,” short for “egg hunter” (i.e., someone who hunts for the Easter egg). Joining Parzival at the start is his best friend Aech (Lena Waithe), and soon afterward, a chance encounter with famed gunter Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) helps all three of them become the first people ever to solve one of the puzzles.

Watts’ obsessions are less about pop culture writ large and more about the pop culture that Halliday consumed. All his expertise is tied to Halliday in some way, and indeed, where the movie differs most from its source material is in the Big Three Puzzles, which have largely been rewritten. Without giving anything away, it’s knowledge of Halliday as a human that plays a more substantial role here than the pop culture references themselves. It isn’t about knowing the factoids of his favorite movie so much as it is knowing his biggest dreams and regrets at the time he saw it. (Halliday himself gets ample screen time throughout the film, by way of archival footage that Watts watches from part of an all-encompassing James Halliday library within the OASIS.) When the reference does matter, it’s explained in such a way that anyone without prior knowledge will get it, not entirely unlike how Spielberg would treat ancient texts in an Indiana Jones film. (Remember the end of Last Crusade when Indy is trying to get through the temple using his biblical knowledge? It’s kind of like that, but with Atari 2600 games.)

Parzival is racing against Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), CEO of Innovative Online Industries (IOI), which makes VR equipment. IOI is a laughably over-the-top villainous corporation, using armies of players — sometimes against their will — to try and brute-force the puzzle solutions, with the goal of owning and better monetizing OASIS with advertising (among other means). It’s through IOI that the film almost mocks those who harp too much on the nostalgia factor: Mendelsohn tries to relate to Watts through movie references, using a team of “historians” who strive to learn everything about Halliday’s favorite games and films. (As an aside, why anyone would make hardware that lets you accurately feel a virtual kick to the groin is beyond me. Again, this is a very villainous corporation.)

Outside of Watts/Parzival, Halliday and maybe Sorrento, the supporting cast feels like just that — support. Art3mis and Aech in particular feel underwritten and underutilized, especially considering how good their few moments to shine are. And it’s in the real world where things just feel particularly off. For a movie that makes a point to talk about how digital interaction isn’t necessarily meaningful , the real-world chemistry between Parzival and Art3mis feels rushed to the point of unwarranted wish fulfillment. Conversely, their digital connection feels more fleshed out.

But the movie isn’t about the real world. It’s about protecting escapism — which is to say the OASIS — and every scene in the virtual world is a joy to watch. The attention to detail makes even minor moments, like watching characters go through their inventory, oddly engrossing. It’s unsurprising that many players choose to use Street Fighter or Halo characters as their in-world avatars, or that the in-game items reference ’70s and ’80s mainstays like Child’s Play and Monty Python and the Holy Grail . What is surprising is how well it all fits, and how interesting the nonreferential aspects of the universe are.

If there’s a deeper meaning to the movie that Spielberg wants to convey, it’s that we undervalue human interaction and perhaps spend too much time escaping through technology. That doesn’t quite work out when the film makes the virtual look so wondrous and the real so bleak. But Ready Player One , more than anything, is designed for spectacle. And in that, it succeeds.

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Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One improves immensely on the book

Ernest cline’s fast-moving novel was a treasure trove for pop-culture junkies, but the endless references work better on the screen.

By Tasha Robinson

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Fans tend to either love or hate Ernest Cline’s bestselling 2011 novel Ready Player One. There are legitimate reasons for both reactions. On the love side: it’s a light, airy pop confection, crammed with familiar cultural references, which Cline recontextualizes in surprising ways. On the hate side: the prose can be extremely clumsy, as it is in this paragraph where teenage protagonist Wade Watts describes the virtual car he constructed for himself in the vast online world where he spends most of his waking hours:

The DeLorean came outfitted with a (nonfunctioning) flux capacitor, but I’d made several additions to its equipment and appearance. First, I’d installed an artificially intelligent onboard computer named KITT (purchased in an online auction) into the dashboard, along with a matching red Knight Rider scanner just above the DeLorean’s grill. Then I’d outfitted the car with an oscillation overthruster, a device that allowed it to travel through solid matter. Finally, to complete my ‘80s super-vehicle theme, I’d slapped a Ghostbusters logo on each of the DeLorean’s gull-wing doors, then added personalized plates that read ECTO-88. 

That’s a lot of awkward verbiage to say two pretty basic things: people in virtual reality can express their personal tastes through their avatars in hyper-specific ways, and Cline is so obsessed with the culture of the 1980s — the geek-fodder of his youth — that he thinks it’s compelling even in the form of a shopping list. The book is a fast-paced adventure, but this kind of unwieldy lump of mix-and-match nostalgia acts as a roadblock. There’s no attempt to consider why Wade finds these specific objects appealing, out of the billion options available to him. The book assumes up front that readers find everything in this list as unbearably cool as Cline does, and that just running down an exhaustive list of Wade’s favorite things is enough to make him appealing, relatable, and enviable.

Steven Spielberg’s new film adaptation of Ready Player One prominently features that same car, but in a context that improves it immensely. Spielberg doesn’t have Wade talk audiences through it, and he doesn’t spell out the references. He just slaps the car down in the middle of a tremendous early action scene, where it’s prominent, distinctive, and memorable. Fans who want the full nostalgia trip, who want to wring every Easter egg out of the experience, will eventually be able to pause the movie and frame-by-frame through it, looking for the flux capacitor on the dashboard, checking the plates, and scanning for extra bonus material. But in the middle of the action, even to people who’ve never seen the Back to the Future movies and aren’t vibing on the connection, the car doesn’t need explaining. It’s just a sleek piece of visual energy, one breathless element among dozens of others. It’s not a citation or a list. It’s an effortless, integrated piece of the action.

That dynamic stretches throughout Ready Player One , scripted by Cline and X-Men: The Last Stand writer Zak Penn, and directed by Spielberg as a whiplash-fast tear through a world-spanning, all-encompassing video game. The story, which mostly takes place in the virtual-reality world called The OASIS, rarely slows down enough to explain the references, or geek out over them the way the book does. It’s still a visual festival of ‘80s culture that sometimes hinges significant jokes on the assumption that the audience knows the filmography of Robert Zemeckis, or will chortle over a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail . But the film improves significantly on the book by prioritizing the story over the signifiers. The hardcore pop-culture crowd that is this movie’s ultimate intended audience will have plenty to pore over and pick apart in this film. But the story moves briskly enough, and with enough giant-sized, screen-friendly excitement, that it doesn’t feel like it’s aimed solely and specifically at them. 

Some of that speed comes at the expense of artistry. Ready Player One opens by laboriously climbing a mountain of voiceover, explaining the setting: the year is 2045, and the world is terrible. Most people live in depressing poverty, and spend as much time as possible jacked into the fantasy world of the OASIS. There, they can be and do anything they want, or at least anything they can afford to buy with coins won in the universe’s eternally running video game arenas. The OASIS was created by reclusive genius James Halliday ( Bridge of Spies ’ Mark Rylance), who packed it with his own favorite culture. When he died, he created a three-part quest within the world, linked to his favorite films and games, but also tied to his own past regrets and frustrations. Whoever finds the three keys he’s hidden within the game world, and the ultimate Easter egg they unlock, will get full control of OASIS and Halliday’s vast fortune.

The quest has created a subclass of “egg-hunters,” or “Gunters” — quest-obsessives whose full-time occupation is hunting down the keys. It’s also created an evil dystopian megacorp, run by former Halliday intern Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, of Rogue One and Starred Up ), and devoted to gaining control of the OASIS to commercialize it. Wade ( X-Men: Apocalypse ’s Tye Sheridan) and his fellow Gunters — particularly too-cool-for-school solo hunter Art3mis (Olivia Cooke, also currently starring in the chilling Thoroughbreds ) and Wade’s big mechanical buddy Aech ( Master of None ’s Lena Waithe) — all want the keys and the egg for their own personal reasons, though those are barely articulated.

Cline’s book assumes everyone will know a DeLorean is cool; Spielberg’s film assumes the same thing about a teenage protagonist who loves playing video games. Wade (or Parzival, as he’s known in the OASIS) eventually develops an ethos, but for the most part, he’s like every other video gamer who’s ever sat down on a couch and hit “start” on the controller. He may appreciate the gameplay or the storyline or the people he meets online, but ultimately, he just wants that elusive win. He’s more a customized audience avatar than a real character, but that’s fitting for a world that’s so spottily drawn, at least outside of the virtual paradise where people prefer to spent their time.

The film version of Ready Player One has some major advantages over the book. The exposition is just as bald, but once it’s done, Spielberg can focus on the endless dynamism of a world where anything is possible. As Wade and others follow their quest through races, battles, and puzzles, they encounter a dizzying blur of visual references that act as “Hey, remember this?” in-jokes with the audience, including some major ones that weren’t in the book. But the filmmakers also delve into Halliday’s past and his wounded psyche, in a way that gradually becomes a little touching and tragic. (A conversation with Halliday’s online avatar closely recalls a similar scene with Professor Falken in WarGames , and carries the same sense of melancholy.) The film also goes further than the book in laying out why Halliday’s retreat into a fantasy world wasn’t necessarily good for anyone — especially not for Halliday himself. No matter how validating the onscreen gags are, they’re still a reminder of a man who found more emotional resonance in Jurassic Park ’s T-Rex than in a connection with a living human being.

The film inevitably has its cake and eats it too when it comes to addressing wish-fulfillment fantasy and delirious nostalgia: the story can only push so far in sorrowing over Halliday’s surrender and retreat from the world, while still turning every rambunctious game setpiece into a celebration of Cline’s favorite culture. Ready Player One is so heavily inspired by and inflected with the broad, black-and-white morality of ‘80s geek culture that any attempt to find the gray areas feels slightly daring, even as it feels slightly out of place. Given that Sorrento is a buttoned-down, stony-faced idea-thief of an evil overlord, straight out of Tron , there’s not a lot of room for narrative nuance in this story. But at least Cline and Penn make the effort, acknowledging some of the biggest complaints leveled at Cline’s book, and trying to take the story a little deeper.

The film version does carry over some of the book’s most notable flaws, especially a suspicious reliance on narrative convenience and coincidence. The characters are thinly drawn, and most of them are little more than cool avatars and signature moves. There’s no sense that anyone involved with the story really cares about the details of the real world in this crapsack future , given how little the real-world scenes hold together. And the film takes a particularly feather-light approach to what should be significant emotions, especially when a death that should devastate Wade is shrugged off within seconds, then brought back out for a cheap, unearned moment much later. Spielberg’s signature sentiment is operating in full force, as he builds up one highly symbolic confrontation solely for the feelings of triumph and justice it creates, and then has it come to exactly nothing. And in places, the story jumps forward so quickly that it feels like necessary connective scenes are simply missing.

Unequivocally, the film’s biggest problem is the half-assed love story between Wade and Art3mis, which operates on approximately 75 percent wish-fulfillment and 25 percent apathetic inevitability. When they first encounter each other, Wade is starstruck: he knows Art3mis from her online cool-girl rep, and watching her in action, he sees her as an über-badass with leet skillz and an appealingly punk devil-may-care attitude. It’s a short, shocking jump from there to him telling her he loves her. What follows should be important and telling — she reminds him that they don’t know each other, that he’s seeing an online avatar and a mental picture he’s largely invented. (And, of course, he thinks they’re perfect for each other because she gets his references.)

But the film never follows through on that mature and useful point. The insta-relationship that develops between them is as inauthentic and insulting as the central romance in Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World , without any of the sense of irony or intentionality. It’s bad enough to follow the “hero wins the girl as a prize” model without examining it at all. It’s worse still to have the characters examine it, find the flaws, then instantly forget about them. This isn’t a movie with a long memory (except when it’s reaching back 40 years for visual gags), but it’s infuriating to see it try to examine its own tropes responsibly, then take no steps whatsoever to address the issues it raises.

And yet, when Wade is in his kitted-out DeLorean, tearing along a preposterously difficult game racetrack, menaced by King Kong and dodging flying debris as his fellow racers crash and burn, very little of that matters. The sheer dynamism and energy of the movie are compelling, even when the character drama isn’t. The action scenes are deliberately overclocked and overwhelming, turning Wade’s quest into a thrilling blur of fast-paced decisions and the endorphin-rush highs of a good gaming experience. More importantly, the film is overtly funny in ways that constantly remind the audience that there are people behind the game avatars, and specifically people who are sometimes young, self-absorbed, immature, and caught up in their own created self-images of badassery. The human frailties behind the game avatars is a reliable well of humor for Ready Player One , and the script takes full, hilarious advantage.

And while the film’s real world gets left behind in the rush, the attention to detail during the OASIS scenes is absolutely astounding — not just the details Cline salivated over on the page, like that Knight Rider scanner in the grill of Wade’s car, but the subtle nuances, like the way Wade’s avatar constantly seems to be standing in a flattering breeze that ruffles his hair in the most winsome way possible, or the way Art3mis’ too-big anime eyes catch the light. The uncanny-valley effect is strong in these game avatars, but Spielberg uses it to his advantage, reminding his audience at every moment that what they’re seeing is mostly a fantasy, created by people who see image as almost everything. It’s a slick, sleek, surface fantasy, for sure. But for people who share Cline’s worldview, or identify with gamer culture in general, it’s an immense hit of validation and acknowledgement, delivered with joyful abandon and unmissable enthusiasm. All those feelings of love and obsession came through clearly on the page. But on the screen, they’re bigger and better, because they’re so much more intense, and so much closer to the memorable images that turned Cline into an obsessive in the first place.

This review was initially published after Ready Player One ’s premiere at the 2018 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. The film arrives in theaters on March 29th, 2018.

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Review: ‘Ready Player One’ blends old-school Spielberg and trendy technology to create an excellent adventure

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“Ready Player One” is a Trojan horse twice over.

While on the surface, this futuristic film is a celebration of gamers, gaming and the pleasures to be found in immersive virtual reality, underlying it all is a heartfelt brief for abandoning all screens and enjoying the satisfactions of the real world.

Similarly, though director Steven Spielberg and his crack team have seen to it that the visual surface contains as much head-spinning, hypermodern razzle dazzle as the law allows, what carries the day here is the kind of old-fashioned sweetness and sentiment that have been part of Spielberg’s films, not to mention cinema itself, since the start.

Trailer from the Warner Bros. Pictures film “Ready Player One,” directed by Steven Spielberg

This unlikely combination of old-school Spielberg with trendy technology eventually takes hold, but the film’s complicated plot and busy visuals take some getting used to.

While always clear in its broad outlines of young heroes battling to save the best thing in the universe from the worst people in the world, “Ready Player’s” plot and setting specifics are so elaborate they can be tough to follow in detail early on.

And the film’s digital effects, so labor intensive that Spielberg was able to start and finish “The Post” while they were being fine-tuned, create an initial feeling that unless you are a hardcore gamer this will be a movie easier to admire than to love.

All those complications come courtesy of the best-selling 2011 novel by Ernest Cline (so filled with 1980s pop culture references that science fiction writer John Scalzi famously called it a “nerdgasm”) that has been written for the screen by the author and Marvel adaptation veteran Zak Penn.

Spielberg had so much confidence in this story he didn’t worry about filling it with big acting names, wisely selecting the likable Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke as his leads and backing them up with veterans like Ben Mendelsohn and, in his third recent Spielberg film, the protean Mark Rylance.

“Ready Player One” is set in Columbus, Ohio, in the year 2045, where things are so seriously dystopian that people count themselves lucky to live in teetering vertical towers of trailer homes know as “the stacks.”

With daily life hopeless, the escape of choice is OASIS, a super-seductive virtual reality universe where, says our teenage guide Wade Watts (Sheridan), the only limits to who you can be and what you can do is your imagination. (To emphasize the difference between real and unreal, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski shot OASIS digitally, the physical world with film.)

No one would dare enter OASIS as themselves, everyone chooses an avatar to represent them, and studious, glasses-wearing Wade’s is Parzival, a bleached-blonde hipster with serious anime cred.

Parzival’s best friend in OASIS (who Wade has never met in real life) is Aech (Lena Waithe), a Hulk-sized behemoth who can fix anything and is building a full-sized replica of the Iron Giant in the shop.

The shy genius who dreamed up OASIS was ultimate nerd James Halliday (Rylance at his most distracted), a man who found the real world hard to cope with and left a very specific, very lucrative puzzle behind when he died five years earlier in 2040.

Echoing fairy tales past, Halliday presented the OASIS world with three challenges, each leading to a key which together unlocked a chance to find a hidden-away secret, known in the gaming world as an Easter egg. Find the egg and inherit OASIS, aka “the world’s most important economic engine.”

It goes without saying that a small army of egg hunters, known as gunters for short, seeks to solve these puzzles, but a wild and crazy race through a virtual Manhattan that’s the journey’s first step has been made almost impossible by a VR King Kong and other monsters.

It’s at the race that Parzival first sees Art3mis (Cooke), an online crush of his, who drives Kaneda’s bike from “Akira” while Parzival favors a vintage DeLorean from “Back to the Future.” (The film’s popular culture visual references are frankly endless. ) He’s immediately smitten, but Art3mis, at least initially, has other things on her mind.

Cast of “Ready Player One” at Comic Con.

We also find out early on about IOI, Innovative Online Industries, a prototypical evil corporation run by Nolan Sorrento (Mendelsohn, less menacing than in “Animal Kingdom” or “Bloodline”), who wants to control OASIS so he can ruinously commercialize it.

Though OASIS has been impressively imagined in dazzling detail by production designer Adam Stockhausen, these kinds of bells and whistles have a lasting impact only if you are a bells and whistles kind of person.

It’s the attraction Parzival feels for Art3mis that has the most staying power, less flashy though it is. Yes, it has undeniably hokey elements, and it doesn’t qualify as one of the great love stories of the age, but it carries the film’s theme and is a key part of the glue that makes us want to keep watching.

Though it likely would not have been made so effectively without him, it’s frankly not necessarily to “Ready Player One’s” advantage to think of it as a Steven Spielberg event film. Its plot is complexity itself, but its “kids save the world” soul is simple and earnest as opposed to earth shattering. With apologies to Bill and Ted, it’s an excellent adventure, and let’s leave it at that.

------------

‘Ready Player One’

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, partial nudity and language

Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes

Playing: In general release

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@KennethTuran

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‘Ready Player One’ Review: Steven Spielberg Remains the Master of Adventure

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I went into Steven Spielberg ’s Ready Player One with a lot of skepticism. Although I’m a huge fan of the legendary director, the source material was dodgy (great structure but prone to eye-rolling nostalgic diatribes) and the marketing kept seizing on the countless references to other media rather than promoting its own story. Thankfully, the finished feature has a more direct line of sight on what it wants to say and how it wants to say it. Although the movie certainly has no shortage of Easter eggs when it comes to beloved characters from movies, TV, and video games, those characters function more as a milieu rather than the point of Ready Player One . If anything, the movie wants you to craft your own story rather than getting lost in someone else’s.

In the year 2045 in Columbus, Ohio, Wade Watts ( Tye Sheridan ) is an orphan who, like pretty much everyone else on a planet ravaged by climate change and poverty, spends their time in the VR landscape of the OASIS. Going by the handle Parzival, Wade and his friend Aech ( Lena Waithe ) are “Gunters”, hunting for three keys that will lead to an egg left by OASIS co-creator James Halliday ( Mark Rylance ). The egg will give the finder half-a-trillion dollars and control of the OASIS. Although Parzival works alone, he’s working against the remaining gunters (most have quit in the five years since the challenge was announced) and, more ominously, the IOI corporation led by the nefarious Nolan Sorrento ( Ben Mendelsohn ), who wants to turn the OASIS into an ad-filled dystopia. Wade is also up against the beautiful and mysterious fellow gunter Art3mis ( Olivia Cooke ), who has her own designs for the OASIS.

There’s a lot going on in Ready Player One and you can feel the movie straining against all the exposition it has to carry. There are moments where facts are even repeated twice for some reason like the fact that Wade’s parents are dead. But Spielberg manages to handle these clunky moments by taking full control of the OASIS. Although some viewers will certainly go frame-by-frame to catch all of the Easter eggs, Spielberg rarely goes out of his way to call attention to these references. Instead, he lets them all blend together, and while there’s certainly some punctuation like Parzival’s DeLorean or Aech’s The Iron Giant, these aren’t the point of the movie.

Rather than a nostalgia parade or a chorus of “memba berries”, Spielberg is far more interested in a protagonist who has given his life to studying the life of another because his own is so empty. Wade doesn’t have much, but he knows every aspect of Halliday’s history. That’s a little weird that Wade probably knows more about Halliday than his own parents, but Halliday left the records and a purpose. Although the movie never questions the obsessions of fandom (and it’s clear that above all else, Wade is a fan of Halliday), it does ask where that fandom ultimately leads. When the script includes the line, “A fanboy can always tell a hater,” it’s a record scratch moment not just because of the noxious sentiment, but because the larger movie isn’t interested in those divisions. It’s not about “Who’s the biggest fan?” but what you do with that fandom.

Yes, the movie could go a little further in encouraging people to be their own creators, and it’s a bit rich that Sorrento’s avatar is just a guy in a suit, a condemnation that he has no imagination yet the world is filled with references to the creations of other people. Ready Player One is always straddling the line of fanboyism, but it never stumbles over, and that’s because of Spielberg showing that he still has complete mastery over telling a fleet-footed adventure story with clear arcs and characters worth rooting for in a fascinating setting.

The movie is nowhere near as disturbing as Spielberg’s last three sci-fi features— A.I. , Minority Report , and War of the Worlds —but the director always has his eye on a coming dystopia. The movie doesn’t dig deep into any single aspect, but that makes its flying drones and IOI’s constant outsourcing even more disturbing. By letting these elements sit on the periphery, they help ground the lightness of the OASIS, adding real stakes and providing a firm grasp of IOI’s villainy rather than just labeling them the “Evil Corporation”.

The film is also supported by the fact that Spielberg has mastered mo-cap technology. When Parzival comes across a “Zemeckis Cube”, it’s not just Spielberg paying homage to a pal, but to a director who led the charge for the motion capture technology that makes Ready Player One possible. The gap between this and Spielberg’s first attempt at mo-cap, The Adventures of Tintin , is night and day with excellent performances (particularly from Waithe) being channeled rather than erased in favor of digital wizardry. Ready Player One is a vibrant, visual marvel that demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

There are certainly moments where the movie stumbles a bit, and those that have already written off the picture, whether due to the marketing or screenwriter Ernest Cline ’s novel, probably won’t be won over by what Spielberg is doing here. But the movie is a different beast than the book, and it’s certainly not the cavalcade of character crossover the film has presented. Even moments that would have made me cringe, like The Iron Giant firing on people during a big battle scene, surprisingly work due to the context of the story and how Spielberg keeps the focus on his protagonists and their quest.

Ready Player One isn’t a flawless film, and it has some trouble getting started and finding an ending. But between the brief rough patches is an absolutely dazzling, dizzying adventure that sucks you in. Like he showed with last year’s The Post , Spielberg is still a master at work, and we disregard that at our own peril. Although Ready Player One may not reach the pantheon of classics in the director’s filmography, Spielberg shows yet again why he’s a permanent fixture on the leaderboard.

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Ready Player One Is a Lively and Agreeable Work of Fanboy Art

Steven Spielberg’s movie of Ernest Cline’s seminal gamer novel, Ready Player One, is a lively and agreeable work of fanboy art — a first-rate film fashioned from secondhand materials. It unfolds in 2045, much of it in a Columbus, Ohio, laid out like a filthy, decaying vertical trailer park. This is the world tech-phobics fear, in which social and political conditions are so depressing that most people prefer the drug of virtual reality — which, of course, renders them even more impotent to effect change.

The vast cyberworld that beckons on huge, animated billboards is called OASIS, and that’s the realm in which the movie’s protagonist, an orphan teen named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), strives to make his mark under the guise of his snazzy avatar, Parzival [sic].* Wade is a “gunter” — a hunter of an Easter egg that has been hidden in OASIS by James Halliday, the shambling gazillionaire misfit who created it. Halliday functions as a mentor/father figure to Wade. The problem is that he’s dead.

Early in his career, Spielberg plainly identified with fatherless boys or else boyishly ungrounded men, but over the last two decades he has focused on what it means to be a responsible patriarch — of a family or, in the case of Abraham Lincoln, a nation. So pay attention to how he handles the character of Halliday, whose cyber sword in the stone will determine the next king of his gargantuan enterprise but who doesn’t exist in the “real” world.

Halliday appears in two incarnations, both played by Mark Rylance, who won an Oscar for Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies and lent his voice and form to the gentle title giant of Spielberg’s The BFG . Halliday is a big kid — a fanboy with the means to build shrines to that fandom — rather than a Steve Jobs–like megalomaniacal businessman. Rylance’s Halliday has lank hair and slurry, unemphatic diction, as if he’s always grasping for the next word, along with the subtle panic of a man uncomfortable in his skin. He embodies the movie’s double-edged perspective on immersive fandom: It both liberated and stunted him. Halliday knows that whoever succeeds him in running OASIS must grapple with both the joys and the perils of virtual reality.

By rights, Wade should be that successor, OASIS’s King Arthur. (His real name is near enough to the young Arthur’s, Wart, while “Parzifal” with or without the z seeks the Holy Grail.) But first Wade needs to visit Halliday’s virtual headquarters and study the digital recordings that Halliday left of his life. The road to a higher truth begins with an avatar watching a ghost.

Two avatars, actually. In the course of the OASIS competition (briefly: one must cross a finish line to receive a key that opens a box with a clue to the location of the next key that opens a box …), Parzival falls for a sleek biker chick called Art3mis who exists in the real world as Samantha (Olivia Cooke). There’s an honorable history of nerds getting politicized by smart, pretty girls, and that’s Wade. Previously, he has wanted that Easter egg to get famous, but Samantha/Art3mis makes it clear that the overriding aim must be to stop one Nolan Sorrento, a business titan played by Ben Mendelsohn in shifty Dick Nixon mode. Sorrento oversees Innovative Online Industries (IOI), which has an army of enforcers and cyberwarriors, as well as “retraining centers” designed to redirect dissident behavior. Much is made of the fact that Sorrento is not a fanboy. Which is what it’s all about, really.

Fandom in Ready Player One is an exalted state, and fandom of all things born in the ’80s and ’90s — when Halliday and the digital universe came of age — is the kingdom of heaven. The good guys bond over movies and books and old-fashioned video games. Parzival’s lumbering pal Aech (an avatar) has a workshop full of pop-culture bric- a-brac that includes a nearly finished replica of the Iron Giant. The Iron Giant! On a cyber-date with Art3mis, Parzival wears a suit from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai . Yes, the most nakedly wannabe “cult movie” ever made finally has its cult! Cline’s novel is full of tech-speak and gamer minutiae, and that’s in the movie, too. (Cline wrote the screenplay with Zak Penn.) But Spielberg’s heart is clearly in the movies he can raid and the monsters he can repurpose. King Kong guards the first finish line. There’s a lengthy excursion into Stanley Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel — maybe the movie’s high point. The climax features the Iron Giant squaring off against Mechagodzilla. Mechagodzilla! Who was in charge of getting access to licensed characters? Superman? You’d need some kind of doctorate to get all the Easter eggs.

In Cline’s novel, Spielberg must have recognized an opportunity to make the ultimate CGI spectacle — to surpass the work of Michael Bay and Guillermo del Toro (in Pacific Rim ) and all those indentured Marvel/DC directors — and also to transcend CGI spectacle, to capture both the longing for transcendence at its core as well as the perils of virtual reality. The first — surpassing — he does handily. Even with so much clutter in every frame, the storytelling is clean, the action crisp and economical. There’s not much wrong with the movie on its own terms.

But there’s nothing great about it, either. It doesn’t have the breathless exuberance, the highs, of Spielberg’s best “escapist” work, maybe because everything is so filtered, so arm’s length. It’s all other people’s tropes animated by armies of computer artists. You can understand how Spielberg could have walked away from Ready Player One while the effects were being assembled and made The Post — and why he might have felt he had to. He must have been starved for making something by hand.

There’s nothing “real” about the reality that Halliday counsels that you have to break through to. Ready Player One ’s “real” consists of a young, carefully assembled multicultural clan contrived to appeal to markets white, black, and Asian. (Cooke’s Samantha is supposed to be disfigured by a giant facial birthmark, but it’s the loveliest giant birthmark I’ve ever seen.) The utopian gamer culture is fake to its marrow.

Spielberg looms over Ready Player One like his true alter ego, which isn’t the eager, sometime reckless Wade, but the forlorn, abstracted Halliday. Let’s not forget that Spielberg ushered in the age of the corporate blockbuster with Jaws , launched the era of CGI spectacle with Jurassic Park , and produced the Transformer movies that built such a profitable bridge to the Asian market. That has given him untold riches and power — but also, I’m guessing, the feeling that he hasn’t lived up to his responsibilities as a patriarch. Maybe he saw Ready Player One as a way of saying to the young, “Here’s how you can beat the corporations and break through to the real from inside this synthetic, secondhand fanboy world.” Maybe he even believes that. But the artist in him can’t quite make that comforting lie soar.

* An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the name of the gaming system as ORACLE.

Ready Player One has been nominated for a 2019 Oscar in Best Visual Effects.

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‘Ready Player One’ review

With ‘ready player one,’ spielberg digs up real feels in a virtual universe.

Nostalgia is a powerful force.

In 2011, a deep-rooted love for our pop-culture past propelled Ernest Cline’s novel  Ready Player One   onto bestseller lists, and the success of his sci-fi homage to ’80s media eventually put it in the hands of Steven Spielberg, one of Hollywood’s most prolific producers of cinematic nostalgia.

It seemed like the perfect pairing of story and filmmaker, but one question loomed large over the project: Could any director — even a three-time Oscar winner and director of genre-defining classics such as  ET and  Raiders of the Lost Ark  — prevent a  Ready Player One  movie from collapsing under the weight of its own reverence for, well … just about everything ’80s ?

It seemed like the perfect pairing of story and filmmaker.

Directed by Spielberg from a script by Cline and Zak Penn ( The Avengers ),  Ready Player One casts Tye Sheridan ( X-Men: Apocalypse ) as Wade Watts, a young resident of the Ohio slums in the year 2045 who gets caught up in a race to find the keys to a virtual universe known as OASIS. The treasure hunt pits him against a powerful corporation bent on owning OASIS (and its vast potential to create wealth), and allies him with a mysterious fellow treasure hunter and a group of other colorful heroes in a virtual environment where anything is possible.

In the wrong hands, a big-screen adaptation of the sprawling, fandom-fueled  Ready Player One  had flop written all over it, but Spielberg has rarely (if ever) been the wrong hands for any project he took on.

Luckily for us, despite the film’s heavy reliance on computer-generated visuals, Spielberg does an amazing job of filling the story’s virtual avatars with as much emotional depth as their live-action counterparts.

Where other films involving virtual universes typically have trouble maintaining the audience’s emotional connection to a character as the story shifts between live-action and virtual elements,  Ready Player One makes the transition look easy. Spielberg has always had a deft touch when it comes to forging a relationship between the audience and his characters, human or otherwise, and  Ready Player One is a great reminder of how important that skill is for a filmmaker.

There isn’t a single avatar in  Ready Player One that feels soulless or robotic.

To that point, there isn’t a single avatar in  Ready Player One that feels soulless or robotic, and even the most inhuman-looking avatars of OASIS feel fully inhabited by the human cast portraying them.

What might be an even greater accomplishment, however, is that Spielberg manages to strike a satisfying balance between the more overdone, fandom-fueled elements of Cline’s story and the nostalgia the story is intended to evoke.

Where Cline’s original story seems to be content to occasionally get mired in its own adoration of the ’80s-era touchstones that inspired it, Spielberg and the  Ready Player One movie’s creative team wisely avoid getting lost in the weeds by keeping the references more subtle. (Granted, subtlety is relative when adapting a story so deeply rooted in obsessive fandom.)

Devotees of the book need not worry, though, as Wade (and his avatar, Parzival) is still prone to rapid-firing ’80s media references at the slightest provocation. These moments, however, are framed as character-developing scenes in the film rather than the extended dissertations on ’80s-culture minutia that the book provided.

The film’s entire cast gives strong performances as both their human and virtual characters, but it’s Mark Rylance’s portrayal of OASIS creator James Halliday that particularly stands out in  Ready Player One . Cline’s novel was ostensibly about Wade discovering Halliday’s deeply personal reasons for creating OASIS, but that aspect of both the character and the story itself is more fully realized in the film due to Rylance’s outstanding performance.

Fans of the novel may be pleasantly surprised by how much they enjoy the film’s willingness to diverge from the source material.

Hardcore loyalists generally don’t have the best reputation when it comes to embracing change — especially when it comes to online discourse — but fans of Cline’s novel may well be pleasantly surprised by how much they enjoy the film’s willingness to diverge from the source material. The script takes Wade, his allies, and his enemies to some places in the pop-culture landscape that weren’t part of the original novel’s narrative, but these alterations end up making the story feel less homogenous in the end.

It was always assumed that the film wouldn’t be able to sample from as many media touchstones as the novel due to the complicated licensing issues that exist for big-screen projects, but  Ready Player One  casts a surprisingly wide net that should offer a little something for everyone — even if the ’80s weren’t your primary cultural touchstone.

That Spielberg is able to take a story as unwieldy as Cline’s original novel and craft it into something as easily digestible and emotionally resonant as  Ready Player One speaks volumes to his still-vibrant talents as a filmmaker.

Ready Player One  doesn’t reach enough heights to be considered a cultural touchstone itself, and it doesn’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Spielberg’s most iconic films, either, but that shouldn’t detract from its many charms.

Spielberg’s latest cinematic adventure is a fantastic, thrilling, and wonderfully fun film that not only pays satisfying homage to the many works that inspired it, but also tells a compelling story on its own about life, creativity, and the profound impact of the choices we make.

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Having seen Tár, though, the truth of Field’s comment is undeniably clear. In order for it to cast any kind of spell, Tár requires a performer with Blanchett’s charismatic, towering presence. It demands someone who can not only disappear into a character, but who can do so and still be able to command every scene partner who has the misfortune of being pitted against her. Blanchett does that and more in Tár.

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Den of Geek

Ready Player One Review

For all of its nerdy nostalgia, Ready Player One has something everyone should be wistful for: the classic Steven Spielberg touch.

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In many ways, Ready Player One is the culmination of the modern pop culture landscape and its soil-rich fields of nostalgia. As media creators continue to mine our past and collective, generational childhoods to entertain adults in the present (and maybe indoctrinate their children), everything old is new again. So perhaps that is why it took one of the most revered maestros behind those cultural touchstones to not just make the Ready Player One movie, but to make it so well. For Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the Ernest Cline novel is a supremely entertaining crowd-pleaser, and a film that brings something to the table everyone should be wistful for: that classic Spielberg touch.

Arguably the most popular film director alive, Spielberg is one of the many 1980s blockbuster auteurs that Cline giddily namechecks in his sci-fi novel about pop culture junkies who worship at the altar of the director’s 20th century output while barely acknowledging his work in the 21st. This is probably because Spielberg has largely eschewed the popcorn populism he helped define. He might still direct an Indiana Jones movie or two, but his heart has seemed to be more in wrestling with America’s past to confront our future . Hence why Ready Player One feels like something of a challenge set by the director for himself: engineer a thrill ride for audiences obsessed with chasing that elusive blend of sentiment and awe that used to be his bread and butter. And in the process, he has made his most enjoyable slice of escapism since the one-two punch of Minority Report and Catch Me if You Can .

Set in a dystopic 2045 where climate change, overpopulation, and a myriad of woes has left a planet to rot, Ready Player One cheerfully sidesteps all of its potential grimness by focusing on its own in-universe escape: a massive virtual reality system called the OASIS. Through the opioid of technology, the entire world populace abandons its problems as folks become whoever they want in a massive interactive game with its own currency. However, the people of 2045 are a lot like audiences of 2018, in that they just want to relive Gen-X and Millennial glory days.

That includes Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), the teenage lead and narrator of our story. In reality Wade lives on the highest level of a leaning tower of trailer parks piled atop one another—in a ghettoized neighborhood called “the Stacks”—but in the OASIS he goes by the username “Parzival,” a play on Percival, the King Arthur knight who found the Holy Grail (and focal point of 1981 cult classic Excalibur ). Like everyone else his age, he is a “Gunter,” an easter egg hunter who is in search for the easter egg hidden somewhere within the OASIS by its creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance).

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As it turns out, Halliday was a bit of an eccentric, and is wryly underplayed to perfection by Rylance as some bizarre amalgamation of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Willy Wonka. Before Halliday’s death, he hid an easter egg and the three keys needed to find it at different points inside his OASIS. And whoever is the first to get them all will inherit his company, control of the OASIS, and $500 billion in equity. Needless to say this has spurred a little competition, especially between kids like Wade and the avatar he’s smitten with, Olivia Cooke’s Artemis. Every teenager has immersed themselves in the 1980s staples that Halliday unhealthily clung to… as has his corporate rival Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who’s hired a literal army of faceless avatar drones in the hopes of taking over Halliday’s company, and privatizing and data-mining the OASIS faster than you can say Ajit Pai. So the race is already tense, even before Parzival becomes the first player to find one of the hidden keys.

It’s fair to say that Ready Player One is exposition and plot heavy, especially in its first act where the screenplay earnestly labors (and struggles) to cram in as much world-building as possible. Yet even if that is where Cline’s interests lie, at least beyond the buckets of nostalgia, Spielberg is much happier to revel in the experience of being in this world than he is in making you understand each one-and-zero shout-out to nerd culture.

To be sure, the hook of Ready Player One is its attempt to include every pop culture reference imaginable in a brisk 370 pages, and the movie duplicates a good deal of it in just under two and a half hours. Old school video games, movies, and television shows all get name-checked or snuck into the background by digital wizards at ILM—albeit they’re largely more mainstream than the esoteric geekiness of the novel. However, these callbacks are more about an affectation than they are the point of the film, as the picture is clearly intended to be a theme park spectacle. As a result, some of the supporting characters and many of the intricacies of the book’s sprawling, and often unfocused, vision of the future fall by the wayside. Nevertheless, everything within the OASIS sparkles.

This will probably frustrate some fans of Cline’s bestseller, even if Cline himself is one of the screenwriters on the film. But like Spielberg’s adaptations of Jurassic Park and Jaws , the director uses a popular framework to make a precisely tuned cinematic delight. And as the movie returns to that familiar sensibility, its attention to detail and patient narrative construction is a reminder that manipulating the audience is as much a talent as knowing how to compose a frame—as well as an art lost in most big budget diversions from this decade. In contrast with typical modern blockbusters, there is a visual dexterity that can be at times dazzling, such as when Parzival and Artemis share a zero-gravity dance at a VR club, and at other moments unexpectedly rousing, like Ready Player One ’s entire third act, which builds to a crescendo of audience-baiting applause.

Through the conceit of this being a video game world, Spielberg is allowed to embrace computer-generated imagery that does not need to look photorealistic, which in turn allows his set-pieces to be something other than obligatory; they’re grounded in an elegant design, even when they don’t have gravity, which becomes invigorating instead of exhausting. The director also uses the appeal of the OASIS to reference some of his personal cinematic forget-me-nots that are outside of Cline’s bowling alley arcade aesthetic, including nods to Orson Welles, Merian C. Cooper, and Stanley Kubrick.

When coupled with a talented cast that includes winsome charisma from Sheridan and Cooke—whose verbal banter puts just enough heart and sincerity at the core of Ready Player One to make its climax mean something—the result is what will probably be one of the most enjoyable moviegoing experiences of 2018. There is likely a more post-modernist take on this material out there in the multiverse, and certainly one that would be far more critical of a world stuck in the past, but most audiences will count themselves lucky to be living in the one where all of Ready Player One ’s hermetically sealed nostalgia is inexplicably fresh and, most of all, fun.

This review was first published on March 12, 2018.

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David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

Screen Rant

Ready player one review: spielberg goes back to the future past.

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58-year-old historical movie is deemed the most accurate depiction of tudor family by expert, 10 things from the star wars original trilogy that haven't aged well, an impressive work of technical showmanship, ready player one nevertheless falls short of recapturing that old-school spielberg blockbuster magic..

Adapted from the novel by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One  is another deep dive into the well of motion-capture filmmaking for legendary director Steven Spielberg. Like his mo-cap animated The Adventures of Tintin and mo-cap heavy The BFG adaptation before it, Ready Player One allows Spielberg to revel in the freedom that the technology affords him, when it comes to visualizing fantastical worlds and characters on the big screen. The film struggles in the same way that those movies did too, even as it attempts to infuse its pop literary source material and shiny visuals with a heavy dose of Spielbergian heart. An impressive work of technical showmanship, Ready Player One nevertheless falls short of recapturing that old-school Spielberg blockbuster magic.

RELATED:  Ready Player One's Complete Easter Egg & Cameo Guide

Set in the year 2045, Ready Player One takes place in a dystopian future where much of the world is a mess due to issues such as overpopulation, environmental degradation, and rampant corporatization. People thus spend the vast majority of their time interacting and otherwise living in the OASIS, a virtual reality world created by the late James Halliday (Mark Rylance) and his partner Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg). The OASIS is also heavily informed by Halliday's obsession with pop culture of the late 20th and early 21st century, and allows its users to create avatars of their own design - as they either compete in games with others, work for a living, or simply explore the limits of their imagination in a VR world.

Following his death, it is revealed that Halliday created one final game in the OASIS known as Anorak's Quest. The mission calls for players to track down three keys through a series of smaller quests, in order to find Halliday's last Easter Egg - an item that will grant them full control and ownership of the OASIS and its assets (real world and VR alike). When a young man named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), who goes by Parzival in the OASIS, becomes the first person to complete one of these three mini-quests, he becomes a celebrity in his own right and draws the attention of a famous player known as Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) in the process. Wade also inadvertently makes himself a target for the Innovative Online Industries CEO Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who is determined to gain control of the OASIS at any cost.

The OASIS is the true star of Ready Player One and to their credit, Spielberg and his collaborators - including, his longtime cinematographer Janusz Kamiński and the many VFX artists of Industrial Light & Magic - do a bang-up job of bringing the VR setting to cinematic life. As he did with Adventures of Tintin in particular, Spielberg takes advantage of the mobility that comes with a digitally rendered universe populated by mo-cap characters; shooting  Ready Player One 's OASIS-based action sequences (most notably, those that involve finding Halliday's three keys) in ways that are physically impossible in the real world. Ready Player One is similarly top notch when it comes to world-building and succeeds in making the OASIS feel massive, even as the film explores but a fraction of the pop culture-informed VR landscapes that it has to offer. As for the much-discussed pop cultural elements themselves, they by and large work together to create a cohesive mythology that stands on its own, regardless of how familiar (or not familiar) viewers are with the pop culture being referenced.

Where Ready Player One struggles is with respect to its storyline and characters. The adapted screenplay by Cline and Zak Penn ( The Avengers ) changes and improves upon the plot of the original novel, yet still ends up being a frustratingly regressive take on the hero's journey narrative. Ready Player One similarly takes steps to make the character of Art3mis more fully-developed and complicated than the archetypical female love interest, but doesn't go far enough to break the mold in that respect. It feels as though a more deconstructive approach would have better served Ready Player One overall, from the way that it fleshes out its human players to the way that it explores what the OASIS means to them and how they choose to express themselves with their avatars. Instead of wrestling with this often messy relationship between pop culture and fandoms, Ready Player One goes for easy but over-simplified messages about corporate greed and the importance of not losing sight of what the real world has to offer.

That said, Spielberg does find a self-reflective quality in the James Halliday character, as Rylance once again thrives in a role that allows the director to meditate on his own legacy as a storyteller (similar to what Rylance and Spielberg did with The BFG ). Ready Player One similarly begins to find it heart when it pairs Wade Watts - who, despite a fine performance by Sheridan, is something of a bland and two dimensional protagonist - together with his friends in the OASIS, including his good buddy Aech ( Master of None 's Lena Waithe) and the siblings Sho and Daito (Philip Zhao and Win Morisaki). The scenes in which this ragtag group of players join forces are easily the movie's best and the moments where Ready Player One  comes closest to recapturing that old Spielberg sense of adventure, but with a modern twist (see how Wade is, refreshingly, the one white male in the group). Waithe is especially fun here and her character, to be frank, is much more charismatic than Wade, with a more intriguing backstory to boot.

Ready Player One  further does a solid job of handling heavy amounts of voiceover exposition and maintains a steady pace throughout its first two-thirds, culminating with a set piece in the OASIS that allows Spielberg to playfully pay his respects to a fellow filmmaker and friend. The third act unfortunately drags by comparison as more of the action shifts to the real world and the threat posed by the soulless IOI. Ready Player One 's vision of the future is simply less innovative than the OASIS, even with Wade's trailer park home in Columbus, Ohio (known as The Stacks) providing a visually striking backdrop. The IOI is likewise something of an overly cartoonish evil futuristic corporation, in spite of Mendelsohn's best efforts to make Sorrento a memorably offbeat villain in the same vein as his previous antagonist roles (most notably, Orson Krennic from Rogue One ).

While Ready Player One had the potential to be a fascinating examination of Spielberg's place in pop culture history through the lens of a sci-fi/fantasy adventure, the final result is slick and technically daring yet makes for a hollow CGI-and-mo-cap fueled offering from the filmmaker. Fans of Cline's original book will probably enjoy Ready Player One  the most - in spite of (and possibly even thanks to) the noticeable changes that it makes to its source novel - as will those who are new to the property, but have found the film's trailer marketing to be promising. As for those who didn't like the book and/or have been put off by the movie's previews: you might be better off revisiting some of Spielberg's classic movies and the pop culture that inspired Ready Player One instead, if you really want to be reminded of what made you love them in the first place.

Ready Player One  is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 140 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, partial nudity and language.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

Ready Player One

Adapted from Ernest Cline's novel of the same name, Ready Player One follows Wade Watts, an orphan who desperately wants to win a seemingly-impossible video game competition that would see him win ownership of the OASIS, a sophisticated virtual reality game that had revolutionized modern life. Helped by his friends and racing against time to find the hidden clues before the OASIS is claimed by an evil conglomerate, Wade's love of the game is put to the test.   

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