Ready audience go

Rating: 6/10 (11 April 2018)

"Ready Player One" is the newest work by famous director Steven Spielberg. This 2018 movie is pretty long at 2 hours and 20 minutes, but it never drags and that means quite something. It plays a bit in the future when the world is dominated by a virtual reality video game that is basically another world named Oasis. We follow the main character Wade in there as he tries to find three priceless keys that would make him the ruler of Oasis. On the path to that, he meets many other characters, makes friends and enemies and eventually ends up on a path where he has to make some of the most difficult decisions of his life. The film is a mix of live action and animation and that is nothing new for Spielberg, even if this film takes of course a completely different approach compared to Tintin and Milou a few years ago. The story is really good at times, but the best thing for me is certainly the grand number of film and video game references and I probably only got half of them. My personal favorite was perhaps the Shining reference, also because the character was so funny with not knowing what was gonna happen next as he has never seen the movie. The very brief Ryu Street Fighter reference was gold too of course. And there is so much more. It almost feels like a cyber version of The Goonies or other traditional kids/teenager movies with slightly older characters. Sadly there were also some things I did not like as much. One would be that the love story felt a bit forced and that I felt the two did not have great chemistry. The parallel between the two and the genius and his love interest was a bit cringeworthy at times too. But that should not take away from how stunning Olivia Cooke is or from how memorable her digital self is in here. I have a feeling people 20 years from now will still talk about that character if they talk about anything from the animated parts. And maybe there were a bit too many action sequences at the end (in the last quarter) and a bit more subtlety instead of explosions could have helped. But it wasn't too bad and that is just my subjective opinion. It still takes only very little away from the film's quality and finally one criticism could be that in my opinion there really was not one single moment that really had me hold my breath I must admit.
I am writing this review as somebody who has not read the book by Ernest Cline, but I heard that it is pretty amazing, so I am not too sure if I can be a judge here in terms of how well it was adapted, but it's always nice for me to see the writer of the book also being the one who wrote the screenplay or at least one of several who did. The cast here did a pretty fine job overall, there is not one that made a negative impact, but I think that Oscar winner Mark Rylance really won me over here once again with his excellent performance. He sure made the most of what he was given and is a joy to watch in every scene he is in. What a chameleon. I also spent a great deal of time here wondering about who the other virtual reality characters would be in real life and what they would be like compared to their virtual selves. But as they solved this issue quickly, they made sure that it would not get in the way of the key story here of good vs evil with the bad guy being a bit too much on his own at times and he reminded me of the one in Matrix, only that he may not have been as competent. In general, that huge company was pretty foolish and incompetent really for making it to number 2 in the world. So yeah, the film may have its flaws, but I still think it is closer to a ****/***** than to a **/*****. There is some great charm, many great video game and film references and all this makes it a really enjoyable watch. Maybe it is more the attention to detail and all these references than the core plot that eventually define it, but it doesn't matter anyway, because there is no way I won't give this a thumbs-down and I am genuinely curious where it can make an impact come next awards season. A must-see for all nerds who also enjoyed the likes of Scott Pilgrim etc. I very much recommend checking out Ready Player One and if Spielberg decides one day to make a sequel, then I will probably watch it too hoping it can keep the quality from this one here. I think it's possible as Spielberg is really prolific right now, even if admittedly it felt a bit different to see him make a film like this with how much he focused on politics films recently. That's all now. Why are you still reading? Go watch the film.