Groundbreaking and clichee at the same time

Rating: 8/10 (2 April 2018)

The best future fantasy stories maintain a anchor in the present (or past) reality of the audience's universe. "Hey Jude" playing in the background as Roland stalks through Midworld. Micky and Bugs skydiving in a "Toon Town" world full on novel characters crafted from the blank page to star in a live-animation watershed film. Ready Player One abounds with these side-bars to pop culture's past great moments. Atari 2600 references. Holy Grail references. Magazine covers shared with Stever Jobs. Orcs. Halo Master Chiefs. Bitcoin analogues. Debtor prison analogues. From Excalibur to the Rubic's Cube, it's pretty much all there. Even the 70s make an appearance with a hackneyed disco number you can probably guess.
We are provided these connections to overcome a natural disbelief in a 21st century with a virtual reality world that is so jacked that players will don interactive skins for the thrill of experiencing the receiving end of the nut-shot. Having done that, the film can get about the business of being less spectacle and more "universal story" .
The story is not that new. The forces of evil are aligned with corporatism, debt collection, megalomania, greed and power. The forces of good are checking the boxes of innocence, principles, righteousness, equity, diversity, and having really interesting hair. But the bits of soul searching are sprinkled in with just the right amount of visual eye candy, action sequences, and character development (I won't say they have much acr, but the structure of the film gives the writers a freebee as supporting virtual CGI avatars "grow" into their revealed true-world life-action counterparts.
And this is where RPO is truly groundbreaking. The film is a 50-50 of live action and stylized CGI "realistic" animation. "Gamer", a film with a similar premise, simply swaps between one live-action "player" and another live-action "avatar". But here we get a full blown animated virtual avatar world that the story jumps into and out of that eventually by the end we don't even raise an eyebrow when the deceased creator of that world shows up as a very real looking human talking to a 3-D rendering of Cloud Strife 2.0 .
I liked the film generally, although I found the ending relied on a dues ex machina (arrival of heretofore non-existant police)] more than I would have liked. I would have like to see the main "real" villain done in by one of the "in-game" villains. I also thought that in-game, out-of-game link up's between the five good-guys was more than a little implausible. As was the fact that an entire mob of people from the hood simply parted like the red sea once a single handgun appeared. Perhaps that was a subtle way of suggesting that the 2nd amendment will have gone the way of the dodo by the time this virtual tech appears.
This film is not for kids. In fact, it's going to be mainly wasted on anyone under the age of 25. But nerds over 40 -- this is the film for you!