Steven Spielberg + Ernest Cline = Pure Pop Culture Fun! Wanna Play?

Rating: 9/10 (31 March 2018)

For someone who has grown up with some of Steven Spielberg's films whether it's suspenseful and intense ("Minority Report", "Jaws"), shocking heart-grabbers ("Saving Private Ryan", "Schindler's List"), made from the heart stories ("E.T.", "Hook", "The Color Purple", "The BFG") and of course, purely fun spectacles ("Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World: Jurassic Park", the "Indiana Jones" films), It's safe to say that Spielberg is the master of filmmaking. So imagine my delightful surprise when I found out that he decided to take on Ernest Cline's pop culture bonanza "Ready Player One". As it turns out, after seeing Spielberg taking on real-world dramas like "Bridge of Spies" and "The Post", the movie version of "Ready Player One" is Spielberg's return to the fun, good-hearted blockbusters we all know him do so well and he has managed to craft an even better adaptation of the book that I would've expected, imagined and thought of. Set in Columbus, Ohio in the year 2045, the story is about Wade Watts (the appealing Tye Sheridan), a timid young kid who hides from his trailer home known as "the Stacks" (In which trailers that stacked from the ground upwards one after the other) and enter into the virtual reality world known as the OASIS. A world created by the late James Donovan Halliday (the excellent Oscar-winner Mark Rylance, one of Spielberg's regulars) and Ogden Morrow (a terrific Simon Pegg) where you can be anyone you want and do anything you want. Before he died, Halliday created an Easter egg in the game in which the winner will win his entire fortune of half-a-trillion dollars and control of the OASIS. So, Wade, known as Parzival in the OASIS, along with his best friend Aech (Lena Waithe) and his first crush, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Art3mis (the feisty and energetic Olivia Cooke) goes on a extraordinary quest to look for the egg once they have to pass three missions and collect three magical keys. But there are other people, like the IOI (Innovative Online Industries) and its ruthless leader Nolan Sorrento (a appropriately slimy Ben Mendelsohn), his sinister sidekick F'nale Zandor (Hannah John-Kamen, a wowzer) and bounty hunter i-rOk (an comically smarmy T.J. Miller) would do anything--really, anything-- to get to the egg first so they can control the future for their own sake. It's a lot to take in, but Spieiberg knows what he's doing in terms of delivering an visually exciting adventure on such a grand scale with a lot of Easter eggs that we need to keep more than an lookout on. There's some clever nudge-nudge, wink-wink's to "Back to the Future", "Alien", "Gremlins", video games that we used to play or currently being played and there's even a sequence set to Kubrick's "The Shining" that is a dazzler to experience, even in 3D. What's even more impressive about "Ready Player One" splits the line between the virtual-reality world (which was done with Motion-Capture Animation) and the real world. Screenwriters Zak Penn and Mr. Ernest Cline himself manages to keep the spirit and the heart of the book intact, but also creates some genuinely exhilarating sequences, cool surprises, warm human moments and slyly quirky humor that it's hard to resist the moment you step into the world of the OASIS. Even some of the characters including Daito (Win Morisaki) and Sho (Philip Zhao) gets some dimensionality than we expect. "Ready Player One" is pop-culture fun from start to finish. Much like the book, a lot of people will love it, some will hate it. But the real amazing thing of this film is that audiences will get to experience Spielberg make movie magic again and much like Halliday's Anorak, he lures us into this world as if he is the creator of the OASIS himself. It's awesome seeing the man at work and the movie rocks because of that. Game on, Gunters! Game on.