Ready Player One - Film Review

Set in the year 2045, Ready Player One takes place in a world where everyone uses a virtual reality system called 'OASIS' to escape the mediocrity of their impoverished lives. The creator of OASIS, James Halliday, has died recently and left behind the biggest easter egg hunt in gaming history, the winner of which will become the new owner of OASIS and essentially control everyone's lives moving forward. Our protagonist and his group of allies must find the easter eggs first lest OASIS fall into the hands of a soulless corporation and it's maniacal CEO Nolan Sorrento, a bastard in a suit!

Ready Player One's directed by Steven Spielberg and based on the novel of the same name written by Ernest Cline who co-wrote the film alongside Zack Penn. I enjoyed this film, it's not a great film by any means but it's a solid good and it's a lot of fun! It's a film for gamers, if you've ever spent any time searching for an easter egg in a game then you're in the know enough to be able to enjoy this film which itself is full of easter eggs, it felt like every single scene had about 50 references to anything pop culture in it! It's a big dumb movie and I was expecting to hate it, but I actually liked it.

It's definitely not a film with an airtight narrative and it feels a little sloppy in places, it also obviously heavily relies on CGI and it's not the best CGI I've seen but it's all completely sufficient, there's certainly a case of too much happening on screen at once to care about anything in the background but it stays focused enough on our main characters to follow what's important and I was engaged! The film could probably do with being trimmed down by about 20/30 minutes, the scene where Parzival and Art3mis dance to Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees should be the first thing to go!

The biggest problem with Ready Player One though is it's characters, our protagonist Wade for example, they couldn't have picked an actor with less charisma to play him, he seems void of emotion and the expression on his face is blank for the entire running time of the film, I was more invested in his fucking avatar than him! I also thought the antagonist Nolan Sorrento, our villain, was one dimensional and uninteresting, he's just another bastard in a suit, there's nothing memorable about him at all and it's much the same for all of the characters, they're boring, uninspired and forgettable!

The first half of Ready Player One was definitely better than it's second, I enjoyed the build and world exploration much more than the conclusion and it's around that Bee Gees scene when it switches from one to the other. It's also not an emotionally impactful film, for example there's a scene where some characters die and it's just completely breezed over and never dealt with again! There's no chemistry between these characters and there's no history to them, there's a blandness to it, ironically it's like this film about virtual reality is missing a human heart to it, but it pretends to have one though!

All in all I think despite it's many flaws, the sloppy predictable narrative and one dimension characters, it's still worth a watch, especially if you're a gamer! I'd recommend it to the casual fans easily and to the hardcore fans with less gusto, it's big, it's dumb, it's a lot of CGI and it's film that, at the end of the day, is made for children, so if you are going to watch it then just have that in mind going in, but yes I'd recommend it on that basis to the hardcore film fans as well. I didn't love it but I enjoyed it on a surface level, it was kinda fun, I'm gonna give Ready Player One a solid 7/10, do you remember stuff?

What did you think of Ready Player One?