Surprisingly Really Good

Rating: 8/10 (10 April 2018)

When I saw the promo material for this, I immediately thought it was going to be a nerdfest with all of these Spielberg things thrown in my face the whole movie; thankfully, I was very wrong. While it does have tons of pop culture and video game references, they're more to the point that they're just there and you have to find them yourself, outside of the bigger ones like Kong, the DeLorean, Chucky, and The Shining. It's visually stunning, the CGI was done perfectly. It was surprisingly pretty funny, there were a couple of moments where the entire theater just busted out laughing. I didn't think the character buildup was equal between the main characters though. While Sam/Artemis got a ton of buildup, Parzival/Wade really didn't get much buildup, and neither did the antagonist, Nolan Sorrento. However, that could've been by choice to let the viewers determine why Wade and Sorrento really wanted to control the Oasis. I really didn't like the ending that much, the entire film is built on this idea of experiencing life through VR/AR, but after Wade, who spent days upon days in the Oasis, wins the challenge, he shuts the Oasis down on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I found that to be kinda hypocritical. Another thing I wasn't too fond of was how The Shining and race challenges were so much better than the final videogame challenge. If these challenges were going to be this awesome, I would've preferred maybe a whole film dedicated to each challenge; if not, then at least make the final challenge better like a boss fight or something. All in all though, the good outweighed the bad by a lot. I'll definitely be getting this one on blue ray so I can go through and see all the little easter eggs throughout the film because there's tons of them throughout.