Spielberg tries to do a Spielberg-tribute film and can't quite pull it off

Rating: 6/10 (11 July 2018)

Like the TV series Stranger Things, Ready Player One is suffused with nostalgia for the sort of movies Steven Spielberg was making in the 80s; big fun movies with spunky kids and cool special effects.
Set in a dystopian world where people escape the grim real world for an exciting virtual one, the movie resolves around a virtual-world search for keys that will grant ownership of the entire enterprise to the finder. The hunt is undertaken by amateurs like protagonist Wade and by a mega-corporation with hundreds of gamer employees. Who will win out win out, the plucky teen or the resource-heavy corporation? (Hint: it's a Spielberg movie.)
The movie is full of 80s music and movie references, but the movie never makes clear why (it wasn't until I read a plot synopsis of the book that I understood it's because the virtual-world's creator was a big 80s geek) nor , with maybe one exception, makes the 80s integral to the plot.
The script is frustratingly lazy. The first brilliant thing Wade does is the sort of thing someone would have done by then anyway. After a major crime, there's no investigation and no one even calls the police, yet the movie never establishes a world where people would react that way. While the competition between Wade and the corporation is portrayed as of great consequence, the reasons it's so important are vague, forcing the movie to rely on the CEO being horribly evil. In a scene that particularly aggravated me, Wade sends out a call for help to a world even though it's never been established that anyone understands the stakes or even that there are stakes. Spielberg is too experienced to make a movie that simply assumes everyone in the film knows everything the audience does.
Yes, there are exciting special effects, and I probably would have enjoyed this more on a big screen where I could fully appreciate the crazy mix of avatars, but a movie has to be more than it's special effects. And outside of an intriguing performance by Mark Rylance, there's not a lot outside of the effects.
Also, there's just a lack of ... something. One of the film's most notable set pieces takes place in a virtual Overlook Hotel, and while it's cute, it feels a bit wan. I think the actual 1980s Spielberg would have done it so much better.
And that's a lot of the problem. Spielberg is an old man whose best recent movies like Bridge of Spies and War Horse are from a mature director. Spielberg is simply the wrong person to make a Spielberg tribute film.
While I hate movie reviews that talk about the different movie that could have been made, I would have been more interested in a movie that considered the way in which escaping to a virtual world would cause people to let their own real world collapse. It's such an obvious take that it feels like the movie is purposely not pursuing it because they want to keep things light.
And yes, they keep things light. This movie is as light as air. It is pure fluff. For all its grand scale, it is a very slight movie. But a perfectly watchable one.