An overall enjoying entertainment unfortunately tarnished by significant weaknesses

Rating: 7/10 (12 April 2018)

Ready Player One's runtime is a quite long 140 minutes, and not a single one of them is boring; the film passes in the blink of the eye. Not only it's a good entertainment containing very spectacular action sequences (and you don't want to blink during them if you don't want to miss one of the gazillions pop culture references), but its thematic is dealt with a certain intelligence that makes it not a dumb fireworks show, but rather a clever, familial show. That is the least you could expect from Steven Spielberg.
That base being covered, I couldn't help myself from finding a list of oddities, disappointments and other narrative weaknesses. First of all, I didn't quite like the appearance of the characters' avatar in the "OASIS". Most of the movie takes place inside this video game, and we therefore watch the characters evolve mostly through their avatar, which is a CGI, fanciful, version of themselves. I found the avatars very childish and lacking elegance. I can understand why they preferred making the official poster with the real-life characters and included none of the avatars, because that would have made it look like a very silly movie, like "Arthur and the Invisibles". To make it worse, one of the theme in the movie is that the main female character doesn't want to be met in real life because she's insecure about her appearance, which she thinks would be disappointing in comparison to her (supposed to be) attractive avatar. This whole subject was a bit ridiculous, because in real-life she's a very cute woman, and absolutely more attractive than her odd alien-looking avatar. I can imagine women playing video games and not having a standard beautiful physical appearance (unlike Olivia Cooke, the actress in Ready Player One) being frustrated with the hypocritical way this thematic is dealt with in the movie.
The sentimental story that is developed between her and the main character is very awkward. It feels like the film was originally 4 hours long and they decided to cut on the love story to make it fit inside a more reasonable runtime. Some scenes are just really, really wrong. In one of them, the main character explains that he's in love with her because they "finish each other's sentences" (the old romcom cliché), but they have just met each other and interacted with each other's in a few scenes, discussing game strategy and logistics! This makes no sense. Later, when they meet each other in real life, and he notices that she hides a birthmark on her face with a strand of hair (which explains the insecurity about her appearance), he proceeds to put the strand of hair aside and stroke her face in an affective gesture. This is such an out-of-place thing to do with a woman he just met, and she seems fine with it, it's all so awkward and weird!
This weak sentimental story is rooted in the fact that the personality of the main character in real life is inconsistent with his personality in the video game. In real life, he's portrayed by a serious-looking Tye Sheridan, whose eyeglasses only add to the apparent maturity. In the game, his avatar is all excited, shy, and at times borderline childish. Now, this looks like this is actually an assumed theme from the movie, the fact that when you play an avatar you don't display your actual self and can communicate emotions you don't want to communicate in real life. It is, in any case, supported by the directing: in the scenes where the character expresses his teenager's emotion-fueled love for the girl, we only see it from inside the video game; but in the scenes where he, with assertiveness and no innocence, confronts the CEO of the evil corporation about his evilness, we see him in real life in his van with the VR goggles on. So this could actually have been a great treatment of the theme, if only it hadn't lead to this contradiction where a character is in a quantum state, both too shy to dare kiss a girl and also visibly too mature to pull out this kind of crap.