Ready Player One

Based on the book by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One transpires in a future wherein much of the populace primarily lives and works within a virtual world known as the Oasis – with the narrative following a scrappy teenager (Tye Sheridan’s Wade Watts) as he and several other contenders set out to find three well-hidden keys (with the victor ultimately gaining total control of the Oasis). It’s clear almost immediately that filmmaker Steven Spielberg is the absolute wrong choice to helm this adaptation, as the director, working from a script by Cline and Zak Penn, delivers an extremely slick yet hopelessly bloated blockbuster lacking in momentum or compelling characters – with the movie’s consistently mediocre atmosphere perpetuated by a distressingly ugly visual sensibility and an emphasis on long, frenetic action sequences. (There is, in terms of the latter, an entirely computer-generated climactic stretch that’s nothing short of interminable.) The film’s hit-and-miss vibe, which is increasingly more miss than hit, is at least alleviated by a sporadic peppering of effective interludes, with the most obvious example of this a thoroughly entertaining scene set within the world of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. There’s just never a point at which one is wholeheartedly able to root or sympathize with the flat central character, though, and it’s clear, too, that the decision to omit and change large swaths of the source material contributes heavily to the pervasively erratic feel – which does, in the end, confirm Ready Player One‘s place as just another ill-conceived and executed endeavor from a director well past his prime.

** out of ****