too much of a good thing

Rating: 5/10 (30 March 2018)

"Ready Player One" is a science fiction action-adventure directed and produced by Oscar winner Steven Spielberg and written by Zak Penn ("The Avengers"), Eric Eason ("A Better Life") and Ernest Cline, based on Cline's own 2011 debut novel of the same name. The movie is heralded as the "E.T." director's return to his sci-fi and youth-centered movie roots after a series of historically-based projects. The plot and its various other elements, make "Ready Player One" feel like a frenetic, 1980s-inspired, youth-obsessed combination of "Tron", "Avatar", "Guardians of the Galaxy" & "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory".
The main character is Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), an orphaned teen who lives in "the stacks", towers of mobile homes on stilts in Columbus, Ohio, the most populous city in the severely over-populated country. Like Wade, it seems that everyone escapes the depressing and dilapidated world around them by spending most of their days in a virtual reality world known as the OASIS. The OASIS was created by tech genius James Halliday (Oscar winner Mark Rylance) as an escape from his own crippling shyness.
As the movie opens, Halliday is deceased, but before he died, he created a game within the OASIS, which offers any user the opportunity to unravel a complex set of clues and accumulate three keys which would give that person complete control of the OASIS and control of Halliday's company - and its assets. Of course, winning this game is the goal of everyone - individuals and corporations. Innovative Online Industries (IOI), headquartered in Columbus and led by the obsessive CEO Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), has hired a virtual army of tech experts & online gamers to ensure IOI comes out on top.
Wade is as obsessed with Halliday as Sorrento is with gaining control of the OASIS, but like Sorrento, Wade won't be able to win this high-stakes game alone. In the game, Wade is known as Parzival, an avatar which, like that of most other people, is better-looking, more confident, more able and more powerful than Wade is in real life. Early in his quest, Parzival meets and becomes attracted to Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), who likes him too, but has even more personal reasons for wanting to win the contest.
The two end up becoming part of the "High Five", which also includes Sho (Philip Zhao), Daito (Win Morisaki) and Wade's best friend in the game, Aech (Lena Waithe). While simultaneously competing against each other and working together, this scrappy group must navigate a maze of clues based on Halliday's personal life, including his former partnership with Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg) - and a seemingly infinite stream of 1980s pop culture references (music, fictional characters and movies like "Back to the Future" - to beat Sorrento and his main henchman, i-R0k (T.J. Miller) to the ultimate prize.
"Ready Player One" is fun, exciting, creative... and mind-numbing. The CGI's impressive... in a sensory overload way. The plot's good but can be hard to follow for non-gamers. Too much of a good thing. "B-"