A future family favourite

Rating: 8/10 (4 April 2018)

Growing up in the eighties, there were plenty of movies which I watched with my friends and an assortment of parents. These began at the cinema and gradually found their way to the small screen where we continued to enjoy them on those lazy Sunday afternoons we all had during our childhoods. Now, several years later we look back on those films with a sense of nostalgia. Now we can see they're not perfect, but we love them anyway.
'Ready Player One' is like that and, perhaps more importantly, will be like that. As an adult, I can say that it's far from a perfect film, but there are undoubtedly millions of youngsters all over the world who would disagree with me and tell you that it's the best film ever made. And it probably is to them. To me, it's a fun little outing that I enjoyed, despite its flaws.
Stephen Spielberg is possibly also enjoying this resurgence of nostalgia, as he seems to have gone back to his hey-day and given us a family-friendly adventure-romp with a more modern day spin. It's set in a broken world where the population practically lives in a virtual reality-style world called 'The Oasis.' It's basically like the internet meets VR. However, one large corporation wants total dominance over this cyber world and will stop at nothing to achieve this. Lucky we have some plucky youngsters on hand to thwart these terrible 'suits.'
The VR world naturally lends itself to some fantastic visuals and, for once, it's impossible to complain about the overuse of computer-effects because 75% of the movie is set inside a computer simulation. The youth of today will enjoy watching their peers 'stick it to the man,' but there's also plenty of things to enjoy for us 'oldies.' This film possibly contains the most 'pop culture' references from yesteryear since that episode of South Park called 'Imaginationland.' You can't go more than thirty seconds without spotting a reference to things you loved from the seventies, eighties and nineties.
The young cast do well. Sometimes, when a film rests heavily on inexperienced actors' shoulders, it can sometimes fail, but I didn't find any of them annoying. The only flaw I really saw was that it's a bit drawn out in some places. I would have cut about ten minutes out of the middle section and then massively edited the ending by about fifteen minutes (it's one of those films that has - what you think is - an ending, only for it to start up again. And again).
But that's a minor gripe. I will be buying it on DVD and doing my best to spot yet even more references to my childhood (watch various YouTube videos to find out the full list of everything in there), but I may skip the odd chapter here and there - especially towards the end!)