Ready Player One
I didn't quite know what to make of the movie from the trailers. At first glance it looks like a dystopian film as the future is so bleak everyone escapes to an online game for relief. Unfortunately though this future world where corporations can force people into online work camps and/or murder you is never really fleshed out so we can only really guess as to the extent of societys degradation. I also thought the film might be about the evils of online addiction. They do touch on this briefly in the movie but it never feels like a main focus. Also, even though the main characters spend most of their time in a virtual game they seem fairly normal in real life.. at least they are healthy and well-groomed. I guess showing gaunt pale game addicts eating pizza rolls and pissing in empty mountain dew bottles wouldn't go over well so they decided not to go that route either.
So what is it about? It's about 30 minutes too long (zing!) No, seriously it's mostly an action movie set in the virtual "oasis" world. As such a good portion of the movie really feels more like a cartoon than anything else. This isn't to say the visuals are bad.. most of them are quite good and a few of the actions scenes are well done. Unfortunately though the plot itself is somewhat predictable and does drag in a few spots. The big elephant in the room here though are the 80's references and man.. there's a lot. Too many in fact. About 30 minutes in I was noticing the lead character had a han solo belt with a thundercats belt buckle and I just kinda tuned out.. it was simply too much. Once you get into literally hundreds of references delivered non-stop most of them no longer feel special and it just kinda becomes noise.. or at best a big screen version of 'where's waldo' but with pop culture minutia.
I sound down on it but it's not all bad. There's still a good portion of fun to be had here and a few references at the finale are neat.. (but I still wish they only referenced something when it truly mattered instead of throwing 1000 of them at the wall). The story is simply OK. Lots of people compare it to Willy Wonka which is definitely true but surprisingly it also borrows a lot from that forgettable Bruce Willis SCI-FI flick from about 10 years ago called Surrogates. Kinda strange..
Bottom line.. it's a mostly fun CGI-Fest of a popcorn movie that is watchable but is unfortunately nowhere near as good as the vast majority of films it references. Spielberg's direction keeps it from ever going completely off the rails but I don't think this movie will be remembered as one of his best works. If you are looking for a 140 minute nostalgia kick to the nuts though.. you could do worse.