Ready Player One 3D
(2018)A better reality awaits.
A billionaire Massively Multiplayer Online game creator posthumously challenges his game's players to find his Easter Egg - his entire fortune - in this pop culture-saturated Spielberg sci-fi thriller, based on the hit novel of the same name. Set in the dystopian society of the year 2045, vast numbers of the planet's population escape the awfulness of reality by entering OASIS, the MMO in which the Easter Egg is hidden. All are able to compete, and it's an eager Wade Watts (Tyler Sheridan) who finds the first clue.
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Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance, Hannah John-Kamen, T.J. Miller, Win Morisaki, Mark Douglas, Philip Zhao
Written by Ernest Cline, Eric Eason, Zak Penn (based on the novel of the same name by Ernest Cline)
Out Now (On-Demand,
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Ready Player One 3D
The Press Reviews
It runs too long and drags a bunch in its final third, but make no mistake: This is Spielberg’s biggest crowdpleaser in years, a CGI ride that wields the technology with an eye for payoff. Full Review
A rollicking adventure through worlds both bleak and fantastic... Full Review
It’s an accomplished and intermittently hypnotic movie. Yet you may feel like you’re occupied more than you are invested. Full Review
Others may want to unplug from the paint-by-number characters and shallow plot. Full Review
This may be the worst film of Spielberg’s career… Full Review
You're left with the overriding sensation of a master playing someone else's greatest hits. Full Review
Its vision of a world fixated on cultural nursery food has a spiky topicality and an occasionally piercing satirical bite. Full Review
Spielberg balances sugar-rush nostalgia with an involving story to create a pure, uncynical, cinematic ride that recaptures the magic of his early films. Full Review
Spielberg gets his game face on with spectacular results. One extended scene - no spoilers! - is as fun as cinema gets. Full Review
Spielberg looks at legacy in virtual tribute to himself. Full Review
A film that's as superficial and hollow as one of the season's chocolate treats, but looks as shiny and welcoming. Full Review
BY Adam Fresco Flicks Writer
Steven Spielberg, master of 1980s pop culture, helms Ernest Cline’s rollicking sci-fi adventure tale, in which young heroes take on big corporation IOI inside the virtual universe of The Oasis, seeking three keys. These lead to the ultimate prize, an Easter egg granting ownership of late trillionaire James Halliday’s (Mark Rylance) magic kingdom in which everything’s a reference. The plot is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Halliday is Willy Wonka, and then there’s the huge array of nods to 1980s pop culture. It’s so meta it’s basically South Park’s taco, within a taco, inside a taco.... More
But deep inside, this taco is empty. With ample opportunity to contrast the virtual utopia with the real world of the impoverished Stacks (towering trailer parks amidst dystopian Wall-E landscapes), Spielberg cuts between realities, with little of the flair of his far superior sci-fi Minority Report. In a virtual realm where your avatar can be literally any thing you like, references to gender or race are reduced to quick gags. The greatest confusion lies in the “real is good” and “big corporations bad” morality, which seems to want to critique the use of entertainment to distract the populace from real world politics and economics, but then says forget that, let’s just have some fun!
Aside from Rylance, the entire cast (even Ben Mendelsohn) struggle with two-dimensional characters and dialogue served with a whopping side-order of cheese. But is it bad writing or sly-satire of clunky 1980s teen movie dialogue? Still, this is Spielberg, and whilst it’s over-puffed, over-stuffed and over-long, he delivers one stand-out sequence, serving up an amazing tribute to Stanley Kubrick, which also plays on how books and films are very different things indeed.
Confused tone, message and target audience (it wants to be a family movie, but has a mature rating, with a few scenes that’ll likely scare little ones, and a smattering of adult language), but the special effects CGI bonanza looks great. No drama or tension, but in terms of bold, brash, unashamed blockbusting popcorn munchers, Ready Player One entertains.Hide
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