Review of Ready Player One (2018) by Mike L — 14 Aug 2018

The 80's references, especially the self referential ones, lured me in. The tepid plot and uninteresting characters chased me away. Mark Ryland is outstanding while its always welcome to see Simon Pegg and Ben Mendelsohn, but this is one long exercise "punched up" with some good sequences in the morass.

Our young protagonist's solutions for the three Easter egg challenges seems too easy, his love interest's escape from captivity is too easy and the epic battle toward the end is too drawn out.

There's also a scene where hundreds of people are murdered by Mendelsohn's character and nothing is made of that monstrous outrage and the character remains portrayed as a buffoon. Watching this movie I felt Spielberg's age.

He's excited about avatars and his video game world while much of what he's talking about is either happening now or in the past. Its like your grandfather or grandmother being impressed with an early iPod in 2018, it comes off as several steps behind the times.

That's a shame because Spielberg is one of my favorite directors and I count several of his films as my favorites as well. This one doesn't rank among them. The film has a standout callback to Kubrick's The Shining that was outstanding but that and Rylance's performance aren't worth wading through the throwback mediocrity.

I'd rather listen to Rush's Tom Sawyer than wait for the two seconds it plays in this otherwise lackluster effort.