Cool Special Effects but lack of story

Rating: 6/10 (30 March 2018)

This is a fun popcorn flick. Great visual effetcs, great action pieces. If you're a nerd you're gonna love trying to find all the references. But at the end of the day, thats all it really is. A popcorn flick. It doesnt transcend the genre in any way. The plot is kind of simple. They rely on a lot of narration (especially at the beginning) to world build. There's cliches and there are a lot of convenient moments too. I certainly didnt hate this film but I wish it did more to explain and expand more on.
They dont really explain how Halliday built the Oasis or how he was able to upload memories. Maybe thats not super important to the story, but I wish I had more background on the mechanics of this world itself. I wish they had expanded more on the challenges or maybe shown more trial and error. After the first car race scene, Parzival goes to the memory museum (or whatever it was called) and the VERY FIRST memory he decides to watch gives him the answer. How lucky was it, that he chose that one? And for the second challenge, again they go to the memory museum and again the first memory they choose to watch provides them with an answer. And of course Parzival knows the movie Halliday watched was The Shining. And he knows this because The Shining was his 11th favourite horror film. Like, what? The guy was obsessed with pop culture, Im sure he also liked Say Anything a lot. And for the third challenge, our heroes dont even discover it themselves. Parzival (as well as we the audience) get told in a line of a dialogue that the sixers have already found the third challenge. Like, they dont even show us HOW the sixers discovered it, we literally just get told. It felt really lazy. It never felt like the heroes really deserved it. They basically got really lucky and stumbled into the right answers.
The acting was fine. Ben Mendelsohn was a little hammy at times, but overall there was nothing to hate. Nothing really to love either. But it was serviceable. I think the movie's strongest points are the special effects and the cool action. I give it a 6 because I personally needed a bit more story.