A movie like Ready Player One can only exist in the modern age love and reverence for pop culture. The book and the movie are riding this wave of obsession with pop culture and nostalgia for the 1980s that we’re currently in with shows like Stranger Things and movies like It (it’s a shame that J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 came out a few years too early). The book written by Ernest Cline was written with that type of affinity for the pop culture that Spielberg help foster and create in the 1980s. The movie adaptation of Ready Player One I’ve been told is somewhat different than the book but maintains that type of spirit.
Ready Player One is Steven Spielberg attempting to turn the clock back into the filmmaker he was back in the 80s and early 90s. Ready Player One needs that type of Spielberg and it has been a while since he has been able to pull that off successfully. Even movies like Minority Report, while a big Sci-Fi action flick, are the product of a filmmaker at a different point in life. Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a recent attempt by Spielberg to turn the clock back to that era of filmography and was rather unsuccessful at it. Ready Player One is vintage Spielberg.

Ready Player One is a movie told through the eyes of a teenage named Wade (Tye Sheridan). Wade lives in a place called the stacks, a sprawling city of stacked up trailer houses. In the year 2045, an invention called the OASIS, a virtual reality where anyone can be anyone and be anything. The OASIS is the ultimate world in gaming. The creator of the OASIS, James Holiday (Mark Rylance), has passed and has left a great quest for everyone in the OASIS to complete several challenges in order to find the golden Easter Egg. The winner of the Golden Egg would have complete control of the OASIS. Everyone is on the lookout for it but so too is another corporation who seeks to exploit the OASIS for their own benefit.
Ready Player One is science fiction that doesn’t feel that too far-fetched given our own technology and experimentation with virtual reality. Spielberg is no stranger to science fiction with movies like aforementioned Minority Report and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, if you’re going into Ready Player One expecting to see the side of Spielberg that has a lot to say on a particular topic or looking for a sci-fi movie with the depth of other science fiction films he has made you won’t really find that here either. Spielberg does have thoughts on the topic but he saves that for the very end (where he admittedly does stumble a bit trying to tie everything together). Ready Player One is more like Hook than Close Encounters. Is there anything wrong with that? I don’t think so. Especially when the movie is this damn fun.
The movie spends a lot of time in the OASIS which is brought to life with a look that is very video game-like but still very cinematic. On a rough guess, I would venture and say Ready Player One is about 75 percent animated. The animation isn’t photo-realistic, instead, it is very stylized, colorful and feels like a nice blend between the trailer cinematics that Blizzard and Bioware have put out for their World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic properties and Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tin-Tin. This really is a gorgeous spectacle.
As I’ve mentioned throughout this review, this movie isn’t perfect. The characters while weaker are none the less passable. The screenplay could have used a bit more polish. The dialogue can be a little rough and exposition heavy from time to time. There is also a few key beats in the story that needed more impact or a little more development. These flaws don’t break the movie but there are significant enough to warrant a mention.
For those that are going to write and complain about how this movie is heavy on pop culture references, I must ask, what movie did you think you were going to get? Ready Player One is a love letter to pop culture, geek culture and gaming culture, of course, it’s going to have a lot of references to other works! The story never diverts for the references to happen, they all come through organically. You can be anything you want in the OASIS, of course, someone is going to be Mercy from Overwatch. There is one major reference to Stanley Kubrick/Stephan King that absolutely blew me away. If you’re a fan of The Shinning you’re really going to dig a section of this film.