Ready Player One Review – Spoiler Free
Ready Player One is a film which comes directed by Steven Spielberg who some may know as the director of films such as Jurassic Park (1993) or Minority Report (2004). The film stars Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg and Mark Rylance. The film is about a futuristic world in which everyone is obsessed with a virtual reality video game world known as “the OASIS”.
When the creator of the world dies, he leaves clues for anyone out there playing to discover his Easter eggs and if someone can find them all, then that person will gain the key to his fortune. The challenge begins and all sorts of players are competing for the prize.
Going into the film I was actually quite excited to see how this one would turn out. Being a gamer, I’ve always been quite involved in the continually evolving gaming culture and seeing a film like this pop up where so many characters appear at once for some reason had me interested. Also seeing that Steven Spielberg was involved in the film as its director had me even more curious as to what Ready Player One might be. Characters from famous video games such as Overwatch’s Tracer appear in it (although only super briefly) and pop culture icons like Godzilla or The Iron Giant feature in this film quite a fair bit.
The film is based on a book of the same name released in 2011 that was written by Ernest Cline. As a person who hasn’t read the book at all, I can’t say really how much it follows the true plot of it or anything. But as someone who just went along and saw the film, I thought the plot was actually fairly interesting. While a lot of the video game references are based off gaming in the 1980’s, it was still all fun to see in the film although I would of like some more modern references, but maybe that’s not what the source material did so I don’t know.
Ready Player One is an adventure sci-fi film, with a bit of a love story. It’s got a variety of interesting themes slotted into it, such as gaming in a virtual world for too long and neglecting the real world and finding a balance between the two and you know, “having a life”. Ready Player One isn’t a dark sci-fi film like Blade Runner 2049, it’s light entertaining fun and it’s filled with 1980’s nostalgia. Steven Spielberg intentionally kept the film’s tone light, which made the experience a very entertaining one, it’s a decent pop culture pop corn film.
The actors are all pretty good. I enjoyed the performance from Tye Sheridan and also really liked watching Olivia Cooke who did very well in this film. The characters the actors play are interesting characters to watch because they go into the virtual world as avatars of their own selves, but then we also do get to see them as their true selves in the real world which is interesting. You see the actors act a little different as things are more real and there’s a contrast between their behaviour in the VR world. The love story between Olivia Cooke’s Art3mis and Tye Sheridan’s Parzival was interesting to see play out and I think it made the film an enjoyable experience for me, I didn’t feel that it was an annoying love story to watch at all.
The special effects in this one are the main attraction. With so many characters to animate and an entire virtual world to create, it’s a tough job. There’s also the addition of the virtual characters like Art3mis and Parzival. Much of the film takes place in the virtual world and only a little bit of it in the real one. This means that a lot of the film is purely visual effects and I have to say that I thought the effects were superb. Colours are vibrant, there’s great detail on the characters faces and animations and there’s a wide variety of these characters to see. For any young ones or teenagers that go along to see this, I think they’ll certainly take great joy in watching it all play out. I do wonder if in the future as these visual effects keep improving if we’ll have only generated people on screen more often instead of the actual actors on screen because after watching this I’d certainly say there’s potential for that.
The action scenes in this film are pretty good. There’s a lot of shooting, many hand to hand fight scenes and a lot of car driving too. Explosions are big and even Godzilla gets in on the action at one point. We also get to see The Iron Giant do some pretty insane things too. Don’t really have any complaints about the amount of action you get in this. Although I would of liked a bit more from the world of Overwatch, especially since they used Tracer in the trailers and a lot of the advertising and there wasn’t much more of her in the film really that we didn’t see in the trailers.
Overall this is a fun science fiction adventure film to go out and see. You’ll see a variety of pop culture icons on the big screen all together and in the same film. The highlight of the film for me was seeing the animations of characters like Parzival and Art3mis in the virtual world and watching them try to find all the Easter eggs. The special effects are great and there’s a decent amount of action. Steven Spielberg keeps the tone of the film fairly light and there’s a strong 80’s theme and vibe all throughout Ready Player One. I’m happy to recommend going out to see this, it’s highly likely to entertain a wide variety of audiences and Spielberg did well in keeping it that way. There’s also some good performances from Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke to see too.
