Ready Player One: Is It Game On Or Game Over?

I remember writing in my review of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets that every so often a trailer comes out and you love it. You can watch it over and over again, and it never gets old. Back in July (I was actually getting ready to see Valerian that day), the trailer for Ready Player One dropped at Comic-Con. I watched it and was immediately blown away. It was full of so many iconic characters and vehicles. To top it all off, "Tom Sawyer" by Rush was playing in the background. I was pumped. That trailer got me more excited for this movie than any of the marketing for The Last Jedi. The only question that remains is if it was a good movie or not. That's what I'm here to tell you.

Ready Player One is directed by God himself, Steven Spielberg and stars Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, and Lena Waithe. The year is 2045 and the world isn't that great. The only time people truly feel alive is when they are in the OASIS, a gigantic virtual universe. Its creator, James Halliday (played brilliantly by Mark Rylance) created a contest to find the hidden Easter Egg. Whoever wins gets full access to the OASIS. Years later, Wade Watts (Sheridan) starts to find clues that can win him the competition. With that out of the way, let's dive into the review.

I'll just come out and say it, I loved this film. I haven't had this much fun watching a movie in a very long time. What I love the most, I think, is that this is a return to form for Steven Spielberg. Don't get me wrong, I will watch anything he puts out, but I love the fact that with this movie he is going back to his roots. The cast is great here. Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke have great chemistry with each other. Ben Mendelsohn does a great job as Sorrento, the CEO of IOI, a company trying to gain full access to the OASIS for their own purposes. Speaking of the OASIS, it's amazing. There are so many characters in this movie that it must have been a nightmare to get permission to use all of them. One scene has the T-Rex from Jurassic Park tearing cars apart and another scene has Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beating the crap out of a bunch of guys. When the Blu-Ray comes out, you can bet that I will pause the movie every second to see if I can find more little references. The cool thing about all of the cameos is that they never take away from the story. It's not like the movie stops and says, "Hey, look at the Iron Giant!" It feels organic. Only Spielberg could pull this off. The visuals are impressive too. What makes it interesting is that they're not hyper-realistic. This makes sense though because it's in a video game. Graphics aren't meant to be photo-realistic. I was a little worried that when the movie switched from the OASIS to the real world, I wouldn't be as interested. Thankfully I was wrong. I cared just as much about what was happening in real life as I was in the OASIS. The action is great too. Most of the commercials have shown the race that takes place at the beginning of the movie. It's a phenomenal sequence. So much is going on but not to the point where it's confusing. My mouth was on the floor the whole time. I loved it. The music was awesome too. The movie opens with Jump by Van Halen, so you know the rest of the songs are gonna be great. Sadly, I gotta talk about the things I didn't like now.

Even though I loved this movie, there are some things that I didn't like. In some scenes the characters will be in one place and in the next they'll be in a completely different spot. Granted they're in a video game world, but I'd like to know how they got there. There are some spots of the movie that drag on a little bit too, particularly in the middle just a tiny bit. There's a scene in here that reminded me of Star Wars: A New Hope because something tragic happens to Wade and he really doesn't react that much to it, like Luke. There are some characters I wished we spent a little more time with too. Again, these are very tiny nitpicks in an otherwise great film.

To some things up, Ready Player One is a great movie. It has a great cast with great performances, awesome references, breathtaking action sequences, mesmerizing visuals, stellar music, and it balances the real world drama with the stuff going on in the OASIS. There are some places that drag on a bit and I did want to see how characters got to certain spots, but these are very tiny complaints in an awesome movie. I'm so glad Spielberg made this film. It's fun and a perfect escape for two hours. If I were to rate it, I'd give Ready Player One an 8.5-9/10. Yes, it did get the bad taste of Pacific Rim: Uprising out of my mouth.