REVIEW: Ready Player One

REVIEW: Ready Player One

The Reports Of Spielberg's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

For my money, I don't know if there's a better director at creating worlds of wonder and adventure than Steven Spielberg. He has the uncanny ability to transform grown men and women into wide eyed children for two hours at a time. Jurassic Park remains the only movie that I've ever seen in a theater where I just stayed in the theater to watch the next showing immediately. I'd never seen anything like it before. Spielberg is a master at showing you things you didn't think were possible. Ready Player One, based on the novel by Ernest Cline, was long thought to be unfilmable. Once again, Spielberg rose to the task.

For those unfamiliar with the source material, Ready Player One is essentially Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory meets The Matrix meets every 80s reference you can imagine. The year is 2045, and in order to escape the depressing dystopian hellscape the earth has become, society as a whole straps on virtual reality helmets to spend the vast majority of their time in an online world called The Oasis where literally anything is possible. Street racing in the DeLorean alongside monster truck Bigfoot whilst avoiding the advances of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and King Kong? Just a normal Sunday morning in The Oasis.

James Halliday(a great Mark Rylance), the beloved creator of The Oasis, has died and left behind an easter egg hidden deep within his universe. The first player who is able to complete Halliday's challenges and puzzles riddled with 80s pop culture lore will inherit his massive fortune and control of The Oasis. Wade Watts(Tye Sheridan), a young man living in a dilapidated stack of trailers in decrepit Ohio is obsessed with the challenge. As one of the biggest Halliday nerds in existence, he seems to have the edge over the sinister IOI corporation led by the villainous Nolan Sorrento(Ben Mendelsohn) who hopes to litter The Oasis with advertisements. After joining with rival Art3mis(Olivia Cooke) and his best friend, the hunt is on!

One of the biggest hurdles that Ready Player One faced was that there was absolutely no way to cram everything in. If you found yourself loving all the little nods to films, series, and games of your youth, you owe it to yourself to read the book. Luckily, Warner Bros. has a hearty library of titles to pull from and throw on screen to keep licensing fees from getting too outrageous. I won't spoil them for you, but you'd probably have to watch this film frame by frame and actually study it to catch the thousands of references flying by.

This was a hell of a lot of fun. It has been far too long since we've seen Steven Spielberg play with toys. He's been focused on making films for a while now, and it was damn great to see him make a MOVIE again. The visuals are absurdly exciting and frenetic. They look amazing. I will add, however, that if you have sensitive eyes, be warned. As an owner of new glasses, the blinding neon colors zipping and slashing all over the screen at breakneck speed had me feeling like someone was holding a lit match up to my eyes. All in all, though, it was a blast. It was not as good as the book by any stretch, but I don't think that that version of the film could even be made. Hell of an effort though, Steven

7.5/10