Ready Player One – Movie Review
Ready Player One – Keep the Ticket
Today’s film is directed by Steven Spielberg and is based on a book by Ernest Cline set in the year 2045, where people spend their entire lives living to escape to a virtual world instead of the real world. Whoever controls this game world pretty much controls the real one. This movie is Ready Player One.
Ready Player One’s goal is to take us on a journey of awe, wonder, and nostalgia as we follow our people of this world living their entire lives around the virtual world, which is now up for grabs for anyone to take over and inherit A LOT of money if they can find an easter egg hidden in the game. This easter egg can only be unlocked after finding 3 hidden keys in the game world.
Ready Player One looks amazing. It definitely feels like an expansive, spectacular virtual world within the real world based on the visuals and how the movie was shot. The entire time, I was wishing this was actually a real thing and that I could visit the virtual world known as “The Oasis.”
As far as the cast and plot goes, the film was pretty good across the board. Mark Rylance, whom I love more and more every time I see him act, plays the creator of the world extremely believably. Ben Mendelsohn plays a great villain in the film. He’s a big jerk corporate game hater who just wants to find the easter egg for the monetary value, which comes across perfectly. Aside from those two, the main cast of Ready Player One is amazing.
The acting and plot only fails with some of the side characters and side stories. There are a few sub plots which seemed to drag on as they were just kinda boring. Most of these dealt with one side character, and the whole time I was wondering how she even got cast in the movie or, if she’s a character in the book, why they didn’t just write her out of the movie entirely. Her character and her sub plots were just so unbelievably non-intriguing that it felt like literally anything else could’ve gone in those places and the movie would’ve either been better or no different at all, meaning they’re useless and could’ve been dropped.
Aside from those two bigger issues, however, Ready Player One stands tall and had me believing in it. There are a few extra minor gripes I have with the movie, such as how I felt the real world wasn’t really fleshed out and it made me feel like I hated the real world, but that kinda makes sense since we’re supposed to believe the people go to the virtual world, The Oasis, to escape the real one. Overall, though, these extra gripes don’t amount to too much that is substantial for me.
Because of this, I’m going to have to Keep the Ticket for Ready Player One.
As one last point for the movie, there is a pretty big, yet still slightly small twist in the movie that I absolutely loved and did not see coming, which added to the awesomeness for me and some parts of the movie make that much more sense.