PG-13
Movie
140 minutes
Donald De Line Dan Farah Kristie Macosko Krieger Steven Spielberg
Warner Bros. Pictures
Warner Bros. Pictures
PG-13
140 minutes
Adapted from Ernest Cline's novel of the same name, Ready Player One follows Wade Watts, an orphan who desperately wants to win a seemingly-impossible video game competition that would see him win ownership of the OASIS, a sophisticated virtual reality game that had revolutionized modern life. Helped by his friends and racing against time to find the hidden clues before the OASIS is claimed by an evil conglomerate, Wade's love of the game is put to the test.
Parzival / Wade
Aech / Helen
I-R0k (voice)
Sho
An impressive work of technical showmanship, Ready Player One nevertheless falls short of recapturing that old-school Spielberg blockbuster magic.
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Send confirmation emailA bit better than I thought it was going to be, but feels even more cynical than I imagined. A story that exists to remind you how good pop culture used to be. It recycles things and makes them worse. Some fun moments in this but ultimately rings hollow.
Ready Player One suffers from poor scriptwriting and a generic, predictable plot. Although I haven't read the novel on which the movie is based, I heard it completely destroyed the story presented in the book, and after watching the movie, I can certainly believe that claim.
Truly cringey cinema which brought the original book back into public consciousness just long enough to confirm it has aged like milk. Like being trapped inside Elon Musk's daydream.
I think this book and movie were meant to be a celebration of media from the 80s, that many nerds grew up with. Instead, it's become a dark specter of where our entertainment industry is heading: resurrecting IP without understanding what made it good, and regurgitating old facts like they stand in for having a personality. I could forgive the cold capitalism, but turning the Iron Giant into a big weapon when the whole point was that he was not a gun? 10,000 years dungeon.
