Virtual Easter Egg hunters hunting Easter Eggs virtually

Rating: 7/10 (31 January 2019)

It's 2045, the future is one where people spend more time living in a virtual reality simulation (called Oasis), than they do witnessing the real world around them. The creator of the Oasis, James Halliday (Mark Rylance) dies, but before doing so, leaves a challenge for players within the Oasis. The challenge is to find 3 hidden Easter eggs - keys, which would award the successful player with control of the Oasis and the fortune built up from the majority shares that Halliday had. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is one of the players and a massive fan of Halliday, he figures out how to get the first key. Sharing the information with his friends, they all embark on a virtual adventure to try and get the other keys before a megalomaniacal corporation IOI get them and ruin the Oasis for their own wealth and benefit.
This Spielberg film is epic, both visually appealing and a decent (albeit cliché and predictable) story. It combines a lot of pop culture mediums into one movie; from video games, to films, from board games to music - if youth culture has embraced something, a nod to it is featured in this film. I asked myself though, do the references to different pop-cultures alienate some of the audience - I'm a mega nerd but there were some things in the film that got passed me. Thankfully, despite its visual complexity, the story was almost formulaic for a Spielberg film (even if the film was based on a book). Even if you don't get the references you can still follow the story and get some enjoyment from it.
The cast were all decent, but they only evoked the same level of emotions from me as an audience member, as they portrayed on screen - which wasn't a massive array of emotions to say the least. At times in fact, some of the acting was almost wooden.
I can only give this 7 out of 10 I'm afraid, and that's purely for the nostalgia is occasionally invoked and the beautiful scenery imagined. Sure the film was decent, but the fact that I wrote decent and not amazing tells me that I have seen better and I have seen worse. All in all, an average film which looked good but was a little undeveloped on brains and emotions.