Ready Player One

 

Ready Player One

The pitch of Spielberg's latest movie is appealing: in a not-so-different-from-our-present future, most people spend hours a day if not more inside an immersive VR world called The Oasis. The now dead designer of The Oasis left an easter egg in there to decide who will inherit his creation. This Willy Wonka like setup unfortunately fails to deliver the emotional depth of Roald Dahl's story (or even its movie adaptations). For that matter, it fails to deliver any kind of depth, in stark contrast with Spielberg's 80s stories in the same vein. Ready Player One has cardboard cutout characters, plot holes the size of Vesuvius' crater and a world that seems promising on the outside but is largely incoherent once you start seeing more of it. Oh and the least believable vilain ever. That being said, I went in expecting nothing more than from the average Marvel action-fest, and that's about what I got. The avalanche of geek culture references are fun to spot, and it's well-paced. Not a movie I'll ever want to see again though.