READY PLAYER ONE
Based on Ernest Cline's 2011 fanboy-tastic book, Ready Player One tells the story of a virtual utopia called The Oasis, created by a Steve Jobs-type visionary named James Halliday (Mark Rylance from The BFG and Bridge of Spies). The Oasis is made up of many different worlds and in it, your avatar can accumulate wealth and weapons and if/when your avatar dies, you then have to restart the game with nothing - it's called 'cashing out'. Halliday dies a few years before the film starts and our story opens with the fervent masses searching his online world for three hidden keys that Halliday has hidden there, and will, in Wonka-esque fashion, earn the winner ownership of The Oasis - and half a trillion dollars. Individuals forming a 'tribe' or syndicate, play the game to find the keys but corporate interests exist in The Oasis as well and a company called Innovative Online Industries, headed by a greasy corporate villain named Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) will stop at nothing to find the keys and hand the control of The Oasis to evil corporate overlords. One game player, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and his group of online friends - who he's never actually met in reality - decide to find the keys themselves, leading to their successes making them targets for the corporate interests seeking to discover Halliday's trillion dollar fortune. So the race is on, in what is essentially 'Geek Fan versus corporate schill'.
The book is unashamedly geeky and features characters who are obsessed with their own pop culture trivia prowess. This is focused on quite a lot in the film, including one scene where Wade tries to catch Sorrento out in a trivia error - as if to signal that the villain isn't REALLY a good person because he doesn't know his Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club trivia. He isn't ONE OF US. It's this condescending tone that makes trivia quoting geeks so frustrating to be around (being one myself). There are so many visual references to other franchises it's overwhelming. including a breathtaking race through one of the great horror movie masterworks of the 20th century - there's also visual checks to Star Trek, 2001, The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Chucky, Activision/Blizzard gaming characters, Japanese anime characters - it's really a world that ONLY Spielberg's clout with IP rights and legal wrangling, could have pulled together. Composer Alan Silvestri even cannibalises his own soundtracks for Back to the Future and Spielberg's collaborations with John Williams (in other films) for the musical cues that feature throughout the film.
YES - there are plot holes in the story, big enough for a T-Rex to fit through. YES - there has been a lot of online discussion about some of the stereotypes and clunky script decisions that seem less than advisable in this post-gamergate world. YES - there's saccharine character moments and the plot is really just a combination of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World . Here's the thing: I LOVED this film. I was swept up in the sheer popcorn, over-the-top craziness of it. It's SO overwhelmingly Spielberg, it wove its spell and carried me away with it. It's the first really popcorn escapist movie that he's made in at least a decade that seems to directly connect with the Spielberg films of my youth. Fun, flawed but insanely good fun.