Perfectly Good Movie

Rating: 7/10 (10 May 2019)

This movie does a perfect job of taking itself only as seriously as it needs to in order to maintain its status as a movie worth seeing, and I love that. The actors know that the plot and lines are all atrociously cheesy and gimmicky, and they embrace that, and that's why the movie was enjoyable to watch.
The world, too, helps make the film worth seeing; both the "real world" and the Oasis are beautifully developed and designed. The fact that the Oasis is in a video game makes all the CGI (which I usually hate) palatable without destroying my suspension of disbelief-especially with the "real world" scenes being, for the most part, filmed in our real world, with actual sets and props. That distinction keeps the separation between the "real world" and the Oasis clear, and without it the movie would not have been as enjoyable-which, despite its many technical flaws, it was.
Though most of the film is outlandish and ridiculous (not to mention as I said before cheesy as all hell), it works. A perfectly serviceable movie night watch-especially as someone who hasn't read the book and can't seethe over all the things they got wrong. Many people's problems with the movie seem to stem from their love of the book, and I don't doubt that if I had read the book, I'd have enjoyed this movie a lot less. But without that expectation, the movie was-while not brilliant, and not my favorite-perfectly fine. Not even "bad" enough to be considered a good bad movie. It's just a movie, no big themes to worry about or introspection to be incited or earth-shattering revelations to be had. It's a dumb movie about the good guys beating the bad guys, with a lot of shiny guns and cringey puns.
I laughed at a lot of the jokes, (even some of the ones they made on purpose); I shuddered with secondhand embarrassment; I smiled obligingly at the onslaught of pop-culture references, and, overall, I had a good time watching this. If that doesn't make a good movie, I'm not sure what does.