Idyllic, biased towards the '80s, but still a worthy concept

Rating: 7/10 (8 April 2018)

I think it is fair to say many went to see this movie because of the director. And they were not disappointed. Ready Player One is a Spielberg movie, with all that it entails. The first shot shows a landscape of piles of trailers held up by rusty scaffolding, and Wade climbing over them, peeking through windows revealing people addicted to VR. It never really presents it as dystopian. The music is upbeat pop. Not upbeat enough to seem ironic, just plainly wholesome.
This film plays a lot of its tropes straight. The evil drones are red, companies are bad, the Willie Wonka-like figure at the centre of it all is good. Consequences of mistakes are tame or tamely presented.
What this movie does surprisingly right is celebrate gamer culture. For a director born during WWII, that is a feat we should not take for granted. It is not simply a pile of references; it uses online elements like clans, avatars, combat, culture, the way they are supposed to be used in a Spielberg film.
Ready Player One does not go for depth everywhere it could, and the cultural references (geek trivia plays a big role in the story) have a bias towards a certain decade.
All in all, I think it deserves a sequel more than anything. One that explores more modern cultural elements, one that goes for a bit more depth, one that does not need to make every part of it wholesome. This is a well-constructed world; a good concept, but I think it needs more than Spielberg.