Are you ready to enter the Oasis?
Ready Player One is a great Steven Spielberg fantasy movie set in the near future. Most of the population of the planet spends the majority of their time in a virtual world called the Oasis. People spend more time in the oasis then in the real one. In fact you can pretty much live your entire life in there. And why wouldn’t you want to? The real world in our movie is rife with poverty and despair. The Oasis is the perfect escape from reality. The big news is that the creator of the Oasis has died, but not before leaving a message that whoever solves a series of trials left in the virtual world will get to own the entire Oasis. This sets off a series of events involving our hero Wade who aims to get to the final puzzle, before the evil corporation IOI gets there first. This is all handled in stellar fashion by Spielberg as you would expect. But the real fun comes from eyeing the hundreds of game and movie characters cameos placed all through the movie. The book its based on while a classic is n not the best written novel ever. Luckily the screenplay manages to work away some of the shallowness of the novel and give us a more satisfying version of Cline's book.
It is true however that film and indeed books biggest strength could put off certain audience members. Some of the references are so referential, a lot of the mainstream audience may not get a lot of them. This could be off putting to some people and because half the fun of the movie is spotting different characters in the background, if they don't get a lot of them, a lot of the fun of the various cameos will be lost.
There are a lot of characters from lots of different types of media in this film. Batman, Ninja turtles, Freddy and Chucky are just of big IP's that make an appearance. However unlike the book, Spielberg has no access to any Disney properties. Not having any Marvel, Star Wars or any Disney characters at all feels really odd considering some of them feature so prominently in the book. It just makes the world seem a bit smaller than it does in the book.
With that all said its still a really fun adventure that will make the nerd inside you ecstatic.
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