ready player one movie review reddit

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, ready player one.

Now streaming on:

Do you know the name of the high school the characters attended in John Hughes ’ movies? Did you play “Pitfall!” on the Atari 2600 when you were a kid? And are you aware of what lurks behind the door of Room 237?

You may be able to answer “yes” to all three of these questions (as I was), and yet still not be able to register much more than a chuckle of recognition in response to the vast majority of voluminous pop-culture references scattered throughout “Ready Player One.” The action is breathless and non-stop, both in the virtual reality and the reality reality, but wallowing in ‘80s nostalgia is only so much fun for so long—even if you’re a child of the era (as I am)—and it only really works when it serves to further the narrative. So much of what constitutes the humor in Steven Spielberg ’s adaptation of Ernest Cline ’s best-selling novel is along the lines of: “Here’s a thing you know from your youth.” And: “Here’s another thing.” And: “Here’s an obscure thing that only an elite few of you will get, which will make you feel super-smart.”

Chucky from the “Child’s Play” movies shares the screen with The Iron Giant and the DeLorean from “ Back to the Future .” A thrilling auto race through the virtual streets of New York finds the characters daring to outrun the T. Rex from “ Jurassic Park ” as well as King Kong. There’s no way to catch it all in one sitting. This is a movie that has a literal Easter egg—and it is indeed a “movie,” not a film, as Spielberg himself pointed out earlier this month during its South by Southwest premiere .

Spielberg would seem to be the ideal director for such a thorough (and overlong) trip down memory lane. This is, after all, the decade he helped define, asserting himself as one of our greatest and most influential filmmakers. “Ready Player One” may have sprung from someone else’s brain originally, but it’s a Spielbergian hero’s journey at its core, complete with lens flares early and often. The young man at its center is an obsessed gamer named Wade Watts who goes by the moniker Parzival in the massive virtual reality everyone inhabits in the movie’s dystopian future. But he’s very much a figure in the same driven, single-minded vein as Henry Thomas in “E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial,” Harrison Ford in the “Indiana Jones” films, Tom Cruise in “ Minority Report ” or Tom Hanks in “ Catch Me If You Can .” The actor who plays Wade Watts, Tye Sheridan (“ Mud ,” “ X-Men: Apocalypse ”), even resembles a “Close Encounters”-era Richard Dreyfuss .

“Ready Player One” is at once familiar in its fabric and forward-thinking in its technology, with a combination of gritty live action and glossy CGI. It’s an ambitious mix that can be thrilling while it lasts, and yet it fails to linger for long afterward, leaving you wondering what its point is beyond validating the insularity of ravenous fandom.

The movie’s copious needle drops drag us deeper into the decade, from Van Halen’s “Jump” and Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” to George Michael’s “Faith” and Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” At times, the selections can be painfully on the nose; the use of New Order’s “Blue  Monday ” to set the tone as we enter a large, laser-filled dance club is absolutely perfect, however.

Somewhere in the middle of all this retro mayhem (which Cline himself co-scripted with Zak Penn ) is an actual story—which itself is a throwback to something that’s never specifically named. This is essentially “ Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ,” complete with a scrappy, crafty underdog attempting to solve a series of challenges posed by a whimsical, mystical genius in hopes of winning a grand prize at the end.

The year is 2045 and the place is Columbus, Ohio. Wade lives, as so many others do, in “The Stacks,” a densely populated cluster of cruddy trailers piled high atop each other and tied together by scaffolding. To escape their dreary lives, Wade and his neighbors strap on their headgear and enter the Oasis, a sprawling virtual reality where everyone spends the bulk of their time. Yes, they’re doing VR in their RVs.

You can be whoever you want to be, go wherever you want to go, do whatever you want to do. You can be a fearsome warrior or a sexy anime vixen. You can gamble in a casino the size of a planet or climb Mount Everest with Batman. Or you can just hang out with your friends—people you’ve never actually met, but you feel like you intimately know—as Wade does when he’s in the Oasis as the chicly rebellious, “Final Fantasy”-styled Parzival. His best buddy is a hulking orc with a heart of gold named Aech ( Lena Waithe ), and he’s smitten with a motorcycle-riding, punk rock badass named Art3mis ( Olivia Cooke ).

“Ready Player One” would have been a far more compelling film with either of these characters at its center, but we’re stuck with Parzival as our bland yet brave conduit. Waithe has a swagger that’s hugely compelling; Cooke doesn’t get nearly as much of a character to work with here as she did in the gripping dark comedy “ Thoroughbreds ,” but at least Art3mis is Parzival’s equal in terms of her smarts and abilities, and she and isn’t simply relegated to being “the girl.”  

They (and everyone else) are searching for the three hidden keys left behind by the late creator of the Oasis: the socially awkward, Steve Jobs-esque James Halliday ( Mark Rylance , a much-needed source of quiet and humanity in this noisy, overwhelming world). These are literally the keys to the kingdom. Whoever finds them becomes the heir to his empire and the ruler of the Oasis. No one has ever gotten close—not even Parzival, despite his encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of Halliday’s life and inspiration. Meanwhile, the greedy corporate villain Nolan Sorrento ( Ben Mendelsohn , chilling as always) has built a massive army of mercenaries to scour the Oasis for the keys so that he can exploit this realm for commercial gain. Which is totally evil, according to this behemoth studio blockbuster.

So much of “Ready Player One” consists of following these characters around as they jump from one challenge to the next, solving one problem before moving on to the next problem, with clues from the movies, music and video games Halliday loved. But this instinct leads to the film’s strongest sequence of all, which finds the characters’ avatars landing right smack in the middle of “ The Shining .” I wouldn’t dream of giving away which elements of Stanley Kubrick ’s film they explore—or which rooms of The Overlook Hotel. But I will say it is the cleverest use of CGI within a live-action setting, and it upends our expectations of a pop-culture phenomenon rather than simply regurgitating something we know and love back to us. It comments on why “The Shining” matters while also giving us the opportunity to see it unexpectedly from a fresh perspective.

More of that kind of multi-layered approach could have elevated “Ready Player One” from a rollicking, name-dropping romp to a substantive tale with something to say about the influences that shape us during our youth and stick with us well into adulthood. Oh, and the answer to that John Hughes question? It’s Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois, 60062.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

Now playing

Unsung Hero

Simon Abrams

The Strangers: Chapter 1

Brian tallerico.

We Grown Now

Peyton robinson, film credits.

Ready Player One (2018)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, partial nudity and language.

140 minutes

Tye Sheridan as Wade Watts / Parzival

Olivia Cooke as Samantha Cook / Art3mis

Ben Mendelsohn as Nolan Sorrento

Simon Pegg as Ogden Morrow

Mark Rylance as James Donovan Halliday / Anorak

Hannah John-Kamen as F'Nale Zandor

T.J. Miller as i-R0k

Win Morisaki as Toshiro Yoshiaki / Daito

Philip Zhao as Akihide Karatsu / Shoto

Susan Lynch as Alice

Ralph Ineson as Rick

Kae Alexander as Reb

Lena Waithe as Aech

• Steven Spielberg

Writer (based on the novel by)

• Ernest Cline

Cinematographer

• Janusz Kaminski
• Sarah Broshar
• Michael Kahn
• Alan Silvestri

Latest blog posts

We Are Lady Parts is TV at its Finest

A Special Kind of Beauty: Viggo Mortenson on The Dead Don't Hurt

Cannes 2024: Normal Normal or Cannes Normal?

Cannes Video #7: Critics Roundtable

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Ready Player One Review: A Thrilling, Empty Ghost of the Better Movies of the Past

By Scott Meslow

Is it possible to enjoy a movie that also fills you with a kind of vague, existential despair? I’ve been thinking a lot about something Steven Spielberg said at the world premiere of Ready Player One . "This is not a film we made,” he told the audience just before the screening began. “This is, I promise you, a movie ."

This is Spielberg’s twinkly-eyed way of promising that Ready Player One is the kind of endlessly entertaining spectacle that has defined roughly half of his career: A Jaws , or a Raiders of the Lost Ark , or a Jurassic Park . The type of blockbuster that might make a lazy critic reach for one of the old cliches: "Get a large popcorn," or "Check your brain at the door."

But there’s a qualitative judgment that’s worth parsing here, too. Spielberg’s recent Best Picture nominee, The Post —a Serious and Important movie, full of Serious and Important Actors, is probably a "film" by Spielberg's standards—but it’s a slapdash and lazy one. And Spielberg established himself as one of Hollywood’s most beloved directors by crafting “movies,” like the ones listed above, with uncommon depth and skill.

Or, to put it another way: Your film can take itself seriously, but that doesn’t make it intelligent—and being a spectacle-laden blockbuster doesn’t need to mean you have nothing to say.

Tye Sheridan's deliberately quiet career is about to go blockbuster status with Steven Spielberg's 'Ready Player One'.

By Rebecca Haithcoat

That brings us to Ready Player One , which arrives in the midst of a mini-cultural battle about Ready Player One . Spielberg’s new blockbuster is adapted from Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel of the same name, which imagines a near-future in which overpopulation and climate change have turned America into a bleak dystopia. Fortunately, technology offers an escape: the OASIS, an immersive virtual-reality world with endless possibilities for anyone who jacks in.

You might think that the ability to look like anyone and do anything would be plenty of adventure. But Ready Player One adds an extra meta-game: Halliday—the deceased, Willy Wonka-ish creator of The OASIS—has buried a secret series of quests in the game, which require an obsessive knowledge of '80s pop-culture to crack. The first person to solve all the puzzles will be granted sole ownership of The OASIS. Our protagonist is a young, dedicated nerd named Wade "Parzival" Watts ( Tye Sheridan ), who is determined to inherit Halliday’s legacy. Over the course of the story, he teams up with a few other similarly devoted gamers and squares off against a shady businessman who wants to win the game so he can pack The OASIS with pop-up ads and make a fortune.

Cline’s novel was reasonably well-received when it was published, but has since drawn a considerable backlash for what detractors describe as a myopic, self-indulgent, and infantile reverence for '80s pop-culture, and also for being sexist and poorly-written. Its defenders are delighted by Ready Player One 's validation and veneration of all that '80s stuff, which they know and love as much as Cline—particularly the heavy emphasis on video game lore, which rarely shows up in fiction.

You might fall into one of those camps, or you might land somewhere in the middle. (For the record: I tried the book and hated it almost instantly, putting it down for good after about 30 pages. But I’m also starting to find Ready Player One ’s many, many vocal detractors as exhausting as I found the book.)

In retrospect, Ready Player One should have been a movie all along. It’s weird that this elaborate tribute to the movies, TV shows, music, and video games of the '80s began life as a book. The story's bottomless references and pop-cultural easter eggs work much better in the visual language of film, which lets you decide whether you want play Where’s Waldo? instead of forcing you to read something like this before you can get to the plot. And Ready Player One certainly improves with the care of one of cinema’s all-time greatest craftsmen. I don’t think anyone—including Ernest Cline—would argue that Ernest Cline is a better storyteller than Steven Spielberg.

The end result is a movie that I don’t particularly like, but is also very, very hard to hate. Ready Player One is a boisterous puppy of a movie, so revved-up and eager to please that it practically jumps onto your lap until you crack a smile. If you have even the tiniest bit of pop-cultural nostalgia, there’s a reference in here for you somewhere. (When I spotted a Battletoad walking around in a crowd shot, my eyes bugged out like… well, like a Battletoad. )

Ready Player One has an explicitly anti-hater ethos, and trust me: It was not fun to be sitting in that movie theater feeling like a hater. But for every genuinely transporting moment, there was something that nagged at me. Why is Ready Player One so half-assed about the details of its dystopian future? Why does it spend so much time on the boring and predictable motivations of Wade, while failing to dig into the full story behind his vastly more interesting best friend, who travels the OASIS as a kind of musclebound cyber-orc? Why, despite a recent and very disturbing sexual assault allegation , does Ready Player One carve out a prominent role for T.J. Miller—particularly in a voice-only role that could easily have been recast without a single reshoot?

The movie doesn’t want you to dwell on any of that. It doesn’t want you to dwell on much of anything. It just wants you to nod and smile in recognition at the parade of references on display. Ready Player One is the logical culmination of a culture increasingly pitched toward reboots and re-imaginings and remixes. You can literally watch Ready Player One ’s generational tiers of creators paying homage to their favorites. Steven Spielberg, a lifelong Stanley Kubrick stan , stages a lengthy, shiver-inducing sequence in the second act as an elaborate Stanley Kubrick tribute. Ernest Cline, more than 25 years Spielberg’s junior, relies almost entirely on references to Spielberg and a few of his buddies, whom he idolized when he was growing up. In 20 years, some screenwriter who grew up loving Ready Player One will probably write a movie full of winky homages to Parzival and Art3mis.

By Matthew Roberson

In fits and starts, I was happy to laugh and cheer right along with Ready Player One . Nobody stages a thrilling action sequence like Steven Spielberg. But by the time it got to the third act—a massive, Super Smash Bros. -style pop-culture battle royale, set to Twisted Sister’s "We’re Not Gonna Take It"—the whole thing was starting to feel exhausting, and even a little embarrassing. As I watched the Iron Giant square off against Mechagodzilla, it was hard not to think about how much more rewarding it would be to just watch The Iron Giant . Borrowing an icon from a movie with such a richer, deeper emotional palette just made Ready Player One look cheap, and doubled as a reminder that none of this movie’s original characters can stack up against the best of the pop-cultural icons the movie is borrowing.

And maybe that’s fine with you! Ready Player One absolutely clears the relatively low bar it sets for itself. If you engage with it as much as Steven Spielberg wants you to engage with it—as pure, nostalgia-baiting spectacle—you’ll probably have a blast with it. Remember: It’s a movie, not a film.

But while Ready Player One might not intend to have a moral, that’s ultimately out of Steven Spielberg’s hands. Art is always saying something . A better movie might recognize that there’s something both topical and depressing about a world that has made escapism the lynchpin of day-to-day life, and turned the very specific fixations of a nerdy teenaged boy into society’s predominant organizing principle and sole cultural currency.

Ready Player One ultimately pays a half-assed kind of lip service to the idea that reality is ultimately more important than fantasy—but those tossed-off platitudes are overwhelmed by the rest of the movie, which aims to thrill audiences by asserting the opposite. In Ready Player One , the OASIS really is the avenue to wealth and happiness. Mastery of nerdy trivia is the surest route to power. Haters can’t ever be trusted. And fixating exclusively on the retro shit you loved as a child might actually be the key to unlocking the life of your dreams.

And why not? It worked for Ernest Cline.

Should you see it? Come on, you already know if this movie is for you or not.

Filed under:

Ready Player One review

Spielberg’s film is a spectacle that’s more than just nostalgia

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: Ready Player One review

The biggest question I had going into Ready Player One was, absent any and all pop culture references, could the film stand on its own? After all, the book would spend pages poring over details about the films and video games of the ’80s — and many pivotal plot points would require the characters to have encyclopedic knowledge of that era. Would the movie put us through the same tedium?

Mercifully, no. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is colorful, frenetic and fun. It’s bursting with nods to decades of movies and games, but Spielberg mostly uses them to create the atmosphere of a world obsessed with pop culture. (What could be more realistic than that?) The film takes the broad strokes of the book and adapts them to make nostalgia more of an ambience than a narrative crutch. The result is something that feels like the biggest tribute to escapism; ironically, it’s when we leave the pop culture confinements of the virtual world, however sparingly, that the movie feels less fulfilling.

Ready Player One is unapologetically a commercial action movie designed to put spectacle first. To get there as fast as possible, it front-loads a lot of world-building by way of narration. Within the first five minutes, you know everything you need to know about this world: It’s the year 2045 and everyone — quite literally everyone — escapes the derelict future by plugging into a parallel virtual world called the OASIS. As we watch our hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) — better known by his online handle, Parzival — climb his way down from his home atop a vertical trailer park (“the stacks”) to his hidden VR den, we see a montage of neighbors logged in and miming various tasks that seem to coordinate with whatever their in-world characters are doing. It’s comical, both in execution and in the premise that so many people would be using motion controls. But if you swap VR for mobile phones, it doesn’t feel that far off — and, to be sure, people dancing in VR headsets is way more visually interesting than someone tapping on their iPhone.

The driving force of Ready Player One is to find the Easter egg. On his deathbed, the creator of OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), unveiled a series of challenges and mysteries that exist in the world. Solve three puzzles, collect three keys and unlock the coveted Easter egg, and you’ll win control of the entire OASIS. Parzival — it feels more appropriate to use his avatar’s name, given the majority of screen time is spent in the OASIS — is a “gunter,” short for “egg hunter” (i.e., someone who hunts for the Easter egg). Joining Parzival at the start is his best friend Aech (Lena Waithe), and soon afterward, a chance encounter with famed gunter Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) helps all three of them become the first people ever to solve one of the puzzles.

Watts’ obsessions are less about pop culture writ large and more about the pop culture that Halliday consumed. All his expertise is tied to Halliday in some way, and indeed, where the movie differs most from its source material is in the Big Three Puzzles, which have largely been rewritten. Without giving anything away, it’s knowledge of Halliday as a human that plays a more substantial role here than the pop culture references themselves. It isn’t about knowing the factoids of his favorite movie so much as it is knowing his biggest dreams and regrets at the time he saw it. (Halliday himself gets ample screen time throughout the film, by way of archival footage that Watts watches from part of an all-encompassing James Halliday library within the OASIS.) When the reference does matter, it’s explained in such a way that anyone without prior knowledge will get it, not entirely unlike how Spielberg would treat ancient texts in an Indiana Jones film. (Remember the end of Last Crusade when Indy is trying to get through the temple using his biblical knowledge? It’s kind of like that, but with Atari 2600 games.)

Parzival is racing against Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), CEO of Innovative Online Industries (IOI), which makes VR equipment. IOI is a laughably over-the-top villainous corporation, using armies of players — sometimes against their will — to try and brute-force the puzzle solutions, with the goal of owning and better monetizing OASIS with advertising (among other means). It’s through IOI that the film almost mocks those who harp too much on the nostalgia factor: Mendelsohn tries to relate to Watts through movie references, using a team of “historians” who strive to learn everything about Halliday’s favorite games and films. (As an aside, why anyone would make hardware that lets you accurately feel a virtual kick to the groin is beyond me. Again, this is a very villainous corporation.)

Outside of Watts/Parzival, Halliday and maybe Sorrento, the supporting cast feels like just that — support. Art3mis and Aech in particular feel underwritten and underutilized, especially considering how good their few moments to shine are. And it’s in the real world where things just feel particularly off. For a movie that makes a point to talk about how digital interaction isn’t necessarily meaningful , the real-world chemistry between Parzival and Art3mis feels rushed to the point of unwarranted wish fulfillment. Conversely, their digital connection feels more fleshed out.

But the movie isn’t about the real world. It’s about protecting escapism — which is to say the OASIS — and every scene in the virtual world is a joy to watch. The attention to detail makes even minor moments, like watching characters go through their inventory, oddly engrossing. It’s unsurprising that many players choose to use Street Fighter or Halo characters as their in-world avatars, or that the in-game items reference ’70s and ’80s mainstays like Child’s Play and Monty Python and the Holy Grail . What is surprising is how well it all fits, and how interesting the nonreferential aspects of the universe are.

If there’s a deeper meaning to the movie that Spielberg wants to convey, it’s that we undervalue human interaction and perhaps spend too much time escaping through technology. That doesn’t quite work out when the film makes the virtual look so wondrous and the real so bleak. But Ready Player One , more than anything, is designed for spectacle. And in that, it succeeds.

Advertisement

Supported by

Review: Spielberg’s ‘Ready Player One’ Plays the Nostalgia Game

• Share full article

By A.O. Scott

• March 28, 2018

It isn’t going too far out on a limb to predict that “Ready Player One” will turn out to be one of Steven Spielberg’s more controversial projects. Even before its release, this adaptation of Ernest Cline’s 2011 best seller — what one writer called a “nerdgasm” of a novel — was subjected to an unusual degree of internet pre-hate . That was only to be expected. Mr. Spielberg has tackled contentious topics before — terrorism, slavery, the Pentagon Papers, sharks — but nothing as likely to stir up a hornet’s nest of defensiveness, disdain and indignant “actually”-ing as the subject of this movie, which is video games.

And not only video games. “Ready Player One,” written by Mr. Cline and Zak Penn, dives into the magma of fan zeal, male self-pity and techno-mythology in which those once-innocent pastimes are now embedded. Mr. Spielberg, a digital enthusiast and an old-school cineaste, goes further than most filmmakers in exploring the aesthetic possibilities of a form that is frequently dismissed and misunderstood.

Aided by his usual cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, and by the production designer Adam Stockhausen, he turns a vast virtual landscape of battling avatars into a bustling pop-cultural theme park, an interactive museum of late-20th- and early-21st-century entertainment, a maze of niche tastes, cultish preoccupations and blockbuster callbacks. Mr. Spielberg navigates this warehouse with his usual dexterity, loading every frame with information without losing the clarity and momentum of the story.

Nonetheless, the toy guns of social media and pop-up kulturkritik are locked and loaded. Mr. Spielberg will be accused of taking games and their players too seriously and not seriously enough, of pandering and mocking, of just not getting it and not being able to see beyond it — “it” being the voracious protoplasm that has, over the past three or four decades, swallowed up most of our cultural discourse. Whatever you call it — the revenge of the nerds, the franchising of the universe, the collapse of civilization — it’s a force that is at once emancipatory and authoritarian, innocent and pathological, delightful and corrosive.

Mr. Spielberg and some of his friends helped to create this monster, which grants him a measure of credibility and also opens him up to a degree of suspicion. He is the only person who could have made this movie and the last person who should have been allowed near the material.

That material has issues of its own. Mr. Cline’s book — readable and amusing without being exactly good — is a hodgepodge of cleverness and cliché. Less than a decade after publication, it already feels a bit dated, partly because its dystopian vision seems unduly optimistic and partly because its vision of male geek rebellion has turned stale and sour.

In the film, set in 2045, Wade Watts (a young man played by the agreeably bland, blandly agreeable Tye Sheridan) lives in “the stacks,” a vertical pile of trailers where the poorer residents of Columbus, Ohio (Oklahoma City in the book), cling to hope, dignity and their VR gloves. Humanity has been ravaged by the usual political and ecological disasters (among them “bandwidth riots” referred to in Wade’s introductory voice-over), and most people seek refuge in a digital paradise called the Oasis.

That world — less a game than a Jorge Luis Borges cosmos populated by wizards, robots and racecar drivers — is the creation of James Halliday (Mark Rylance). After Halliday’s death, his avatar revealed the existence of a series of Easter eggs, or secret digital treasures, the discovery of which would win a lucky player control of the Oasis. Wade is a “gunter” — short for “egg hunter” — determined to pursue this quest even after most of the other gamers have tired of it. Among his rivals are a few fellow believers and Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the head of a company called IOI that wants to bring Halliday’s paradise under corporate control.

In the real world, IOI encourages Oasis fans to run up debts that it collects by forcing them into indentured servitude. Sorrento’s villainy sets up a battle on two fronts — clashes in the Oasis mirroring chases through the streets of Columbus — that inspires Mr. Spielberg to feats of crosscutting virtuosity. The action is so swift and engaging that some possibly literal-minded questions may be brushed aside. I, for one, didn’t quite understand why, given the global reach of the Oasis, all the relevant players were so conveniently clustered in Ohio. (If anyone wants to explain, please find me on Twitter so I can mute you.)

‘Ready Player One’ Is a Vintage Pop Bonanza

Here’s a rundown of some of the bigger references you need to know before watching Steven Spielberg’s film.

But, of course, Columbus and the Oasis do not represent actual or virtual realities, but rather two different modalities of fantasy. Wade’s avatar, Parzival, collects a posse of fighters: Sho, Daito, Aech and Art3mis, who is also his love interest. When the people attached to these identities meet up in Columbus, they are not exactly as they are in the game. Aech, large and male in the Oasis, is played by Lena Waithe . But the fluidity of online identity remains an underexploited possibility. In and out of the Oasis, Art3mis (also known as Samantha, and portrayed by Olivia Cooke) is a male fantasy of female badassery. Sho (Philip Zhao) and Daito (Win Morisaki) are relegated to sidekick duty. The multiplayer, self-inventing ethos of gaming might have offered a chance for a less conventional division of heroic labor, but the writers and filmmakers lacked the imagination to take advantage of it.

The most fun part of “Ready Player One” is its exuberant and generous handing out of pop-cultural goodies. Tribute is paid to Mr. Spielberg’s departed colleagues John Hughes and Stanley Kubrick. The visual and musical allusions are eclectic enough that nobody is likely to feel left out, and everybody is likely to feel a little lost from time to time.

Nostalgia? Sure, but what really animates the movie is a sense of history. The Easter egg hunt takes Parzival and his crew back into Halliday’s biography — his ill-starred partnership with Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg), his thwarted attempts at romance — and also through the evolution of video games and related pursuits. The history is instructive and also sentimental in familiar ways, positing a struggle for control between idealistic, artistic entrepreneurs (and their legions of fans) and soulless corporate greedheads.

Halliday is a sweet, shaggy nerd with a guileless Northern California drawl and a deeply awkward manner, especially around women. Sorrento is an autocratic bean counter, a would-be master of the universe who doesn’t even like video games. These characters are clichés, but they are also allegorical figures.

In the movie, they represent opposing principles, but in our world, they are pretty much the same guy. A lot of the starry-eyed do-it-yourselfers tinkering in their garages and giving life to their boyish dreams back in the ’70s and ’80s turned out to be harboring superman fantasies of global domination all along. They shared their wondrous creations and played the rest of us for suckers, collecting our admiration, our attention and our data as profit and feudal tribute.

Mr. Spielberg incarnates this duality as perfectly as any man alive. He is the peer of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and a Gandalf for the elves and hobbits who made Google, Facebook and the other components of our present-day Oasis. He has been man-child and mogul, wide-eyed artist and cold-eyed businessman, praised for making so many wonderful things and blamed for ruining everything. His career has been a splendid enactment of the cultural contradictions of capitalism, and at the same time a series of deeply personal meditations on love, loss and imagination. All of that is also true of Halliday’s Oasis. “Ready Player One” is far from a masterpiece, but as the fanboys say, it’s canon.

Ready Player One Rated PG-13. Adolescent language. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Season 49 of “Saturday Night Live” has ended. Here’s a look back at its most memorable monologues, sketches, product parodies and impressions .

“Megalopolis,” the first film from the director Francis Ford Coppola in 13 years, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Here’s what to know .

Why is the “Planet of the Apes” franchise so gripping and effective? Because it doesn’t monkey around, our movie critic writes .

Luke Newton has been in the sexy Netflix hit “Bridgerton” from the start. But a new season will be his first as co-lead — or chief hunk .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga Link to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
• Hit Man Link to Hit Man
• In A Violent Nature Link to In A Violent Nature

New TV Tonight

• Eric: Season 1
• We Are Lady Parts: Season 2
• Geek Girl: Season 1
• The Outlaws: Season 3
• Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted: Season 4
• America's Got Talent: Season 19
• Fiennes: Return to the Wild: Season 1
• The Famous Five: Season 1
• Couples Therapy: Season 4
• Celebrity Family Food Battle: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• Tires: Season 1
• Evil: Season 4
• Outer Range: Season 2
• Dark Matter: Season 1
• The Veil: Season 1
• The Sympathizer: Season 1
• Fallout: Season 1
• Bodkin: Season 1
• Jurassic World: Chaos Theory: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Bridgerton: Season 3 Link to Bridgerton: Season 3
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

25 Most Popular TV Shows Right Now: What to Watch on Streaming

30 Most Popular Movies Right Now: What to Watch In Theaters and Streaming

Asian-American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

10 Post-Apocalyptic Worlds That Won’t Depress You

Poll: Most Anticipated TV and Streaming Shows of June 2024

• Trending on RT
• Vote For the Best Movie of 1999
• Best Horror Movies 2024
• Mad Max Movies Ranked
• TV Premiere Dates

Ready Player One Reviews

While the first half of [Ready Player One] is all trivia is the superior form of geekdom and awkward geekboy somehow managing to get the geekgirl interested the second half shows how you can form real communities online.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jan 21, 2023

Steven Spielberg delivers the ultimate expression of why we digest media, and possibly a glimpse into a world we could all be heading towards.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 3, 2022

With Ready Player One, you can feel director Steven Spielberg pushing to reclaim his status as Hollywood's crowned head of spectacle as he pours his considerable talent into another memorable science-fiction fantasy.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 14, 2022

What Ready Player One does through its story is never quite as interesting as what it means, but its a Spielberg science-fiction pop culture souffle...

Full Review | Feb 11, 2022

An ugly FX monstrosity that misunderstands the misguided message of the book & fails to address its antiquated notions of race, gender and capitalism. Abysmal fan service from Spielberg, who should be able to shoot and edit a climax better than this

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Nov 17, 2021

A heckin fun movie, full of stunning action sequences and laughs and winks at the kids who grew up watching Back to the Future and Jurassic Park and E.T. and Indiana Jones.

Full Review | Aug 27, 2021

Steven Spielberg has basically made the best possible version of this material with the serviceable-at-best script he was given.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Aug 21, 2021

If you go to the movies to watch big blockbusters with big explosions and effects, or to just have an enjoyable time with family and friends, then this is the movie for you.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Aug 14, 2021

It's not nostalgia so much as a hyperactive computer algorithm.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2021

The setting of the film allows for some truly spectacular action set pieces and these are the strongest parts of the film

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5 / 5 | Jun 24, 2021

It's a film to watch and enjoy once, but probably not to return to again and again, like Spielberg's best. It's fixated on easter eggs and it's like an easter egg itself: shiny and pretty, inducing a brief sugar high, but ultimately hollow.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 29, 2021

Pure escapism that begs the question, Will there ever be a video game movie that really works?

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 4, 2021

While the video game preoccupation is adequately and thoroughly visualized, the real world has plenty of missing details.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 7, 2020

A kid at heart until his end, Spielberg's renegade sensibilities turns Ready Player One into a true treasure.

Full Review | Nov 10, 2020

The film asks the viewer to find their purpose in life, like Wade has, so there isn't always this instant urge to run off to a different reality as found in video games, movies, or television.

Full Review | Nov 4, 2020

While Ready Player One is an entertaining thrill ride, its storytelling still feels rather empty.

Full Review | Oct 9, 2020

Most filmmakers fail miserably when trying to meld together both real and fantasy worlds, yet this is truly where Spielberg reminds us of his extraordinary talent.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 21, 2020

Even the most hardened of cynics can appreciate the take-away message: it's important to live in reality because it's the only thing that's real and the only place you can get a decent meal.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 29, 2020

Ready Player One won't be remembered as Spielberg's worst film but it's not his best either. It's a purgatory state of a film that understands the appeal of the book but fails to convey those aspects in a satisfactory manner.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 26, 2020

[I]t's a montage, an audiobook, and a love letter to the art that fuels us. But does it actually emulate the wonder of nostalgia itself? No, not even close.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 24, 2020

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

‘ready player one’: film review | sxsw 2018.

Steven Spielberg adapts 'Ready Player One,' Ernest Cline's pop-culture-soaked novel about a teen's quest to win control over a virtual universe.

By THR Staff

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Send an Email
• Show additional share options
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Pinterest
• Share on Reddit
• Share on Tumblr
• Share on Whats App
• Print the Article
• Post a Comment

A rollicking adventure through worlds both bleak and fantastic, Steven Spielberg ‘s Ready Player One makes big changes to the specifics and structure of Ernest Cline’s best-selling novel but keeps the spirit and level-up thrills intact. With Cline as a screenwriter alongside Zak Penn, it’s not surprising that while some of the book’s dorkier elements are excised — sorry, Rush fans! — their replacements display similar pop-culture obsessiveness while lending themselves more to the cinematic gifts of the man Cline surely dreamed would adapt the book. Gamers are far from the only ones who will respond to this virtual-world-set picture, which strikes an ideal balance between live action and CGI.

The setting is 2045, in the fastest-growing city in the world: Columbus, Ohio. Around the globe, people spend as much of their free time as possible in an online virtual universe called the OASIS, where the focus is as much on living in a fantasy character’s skin as on shooting things and keeping score. You can look like Beetlejuice and drive a Batmobile ( 1960s vintage, please); you can dance in zero gravity with a green-skinned swimsuit model; you can do anything to forget that, beyond your VR goggles, your physical body lives in a slum made of RV trailers stacked perilously high atop each other.

Release date: Mar 29, 2018

The tech-artistic genius who created the place, James Halliday (Mark Rylance ), died not long ago, and left OASIS members with one last game: Whoever can solve a series of clues and missions within the online world will inherit both his vast fortune and total control over what happens in the OASIS.

While mighty corporate interests — like IOI , a proletariat-exploiting company run by Ben Mendelsohn’s Nolan Sorrento — are hiring teams of gamers to find Halliday’s “Easter egg,” hardcore geeks (the egg hunters, or “ gunters “) have the advantage, since the clues draw on every comic book, movie and video game the inventor consumed in his life — not to mention the biographical trivia housed in a vast archive of digitally reassembled memories. (That archive was just a published memoir in the novel; here, it’s an entrancing living museum overseen by a stuffy butler-like robot.)

Wade Watts ( Tye Sheridan), known as Parzival in the OASIS, has been hunting for clues alongside his best friend Aech , a mechanical genius whose avatar is a giant black man with robot parts in his midsection. (The spoiler-averse should avoid looking at the credits to see whose voice is delivering Aech’s lines.) From afar, the two have been admiring the egg-hunting work of Art3mis ( Olivia Cooke ), an anime-styled woman whose online motorcycle has Tron flair, and their paths cross in the movie’s first really thrilling set piece: Gamers trying to solve the first challenge must win a car race whose course is a fast-mutating obstacle course, where wrecking balls or a T-Rex will kill you if the road doesn’t simply uproot itself under your wheels and throw you off. The obstacle just before the finish line is a doozy, but the trick to beating the thing is even more fun. Soon, Parzival beats the first challenge, followed by Aech , Art3mis and a pair of Japanese players, Daito (Win Morisaki ) and Shoto (Philip Zhao).

Uniting these five as a team more quickly than the book did, the film lays the groundwork for a big change that is key to its success as a film: Midway through, it starts bringing them together in the real world, getting them in trouble that gives the action both flesh-and-blood stakes and offers viewers a break from the well-executed but fake-by-design character avatars. Parzival’s crush on Art3mis is vastly more interesting when we watch Sheridan and Cooke share the screen together, and returning to the world of slums and class warfare helps imbue the battle between gunters and IOI the flavor of a rebellion. Though the workings of the megacorp’s debt-enslavement scheme aren’t fleshed out much, it’s clear that if they gain control over the OASIS, the kind of garbage we face on our own internet and social media will enjoy next-generation proliferation there.

Mendelsohn does his usual mustache twirling as Sorrento sends both real-world hit squads and a virtual bounty hunter after our heroes. The latter, a cartoonishly menacing hulk voiced by T.J. Miller, gets most of the film’s laughs. (The lines sound written specifically for, or by, the former Silicon Valley actor.)

Rylance gets to play a few versions of the OASIS’s eccentric inventor, and seems most to enjoy being the space-cadet genius, his jaw slackened and his delivery stoned-sounding. (It costs a hundred dollars-plus to see this wonderful actor create a character on Broadway; please, Hollywood, keep giving us access to him for the price of a movie ticket.)

The movie’s biggest attractions can’t be described here without ruining the fun of mystery-solving and spoiling surprise appearances of characters we treasure from our own childhoods. The trailers reveal the very welcome presence of the Iron Giant, whose role in the climax is sweetly true to the character’s nature. But other guest stars play significant roles in the action as well, and they’re not necessarily the ones fans of the novel will expect.

It’s a little twisted, at a time in which much of what is soul-sucking in our world was created or enabled by the internet, to cheer for humans who risk their lives to remain in a digital reality. In a film and novel full of nostalgia, perhaps the deepest throwback is to the spirit of those early home-computer adopters — many of them trained on Dungeons & Dragons world-building — who deeply believed that wondrous things could spring from the primitive programs they were learning to write. If today’s digital citizens could step back from their newsfeed troughs and think about a web they’d actually like to be caught in, maybe there’s an oasis worth fighting for somewhere out there.

Production company: Amblin Entertainment Distributor: Warner Bros. Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Lena Waithe , Ben Mendelsohn , Mark Rylance , T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg , Win Morisaki , Philip Zhao, Hannah John-Kamen Director: Steven Spielberg Screenwriters: Zak Penn, Ernest Cline Producers: Donald De Line, Dan Farah, Kristie Macosko Krieger , Steven Spielberg Executive producers: Bruce Berman, Christopher DeFaria , Daniel Lupi , Adam Somner Director of photography: Janusz Kaminski Production designer: Adam Stockhausen Costume designer: Kasia Walicka-Maimone Editors: Sarah Broshar , Michael Kahn Composer: Alan Silvestri Casting directors: Lucy Bevan, Ellen Lewis Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Headliners)

Rated PG-13, 140 minutes

Related Stories

'ready player one': first reactions from the premiere, thr newsletters.

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Kevin macdonald to direct john lennon, yoko ono documentary (exclusive), whoopi goldberg accepted her role in tony goldwyn’s ‘ezra’ without reading the script, ‘immaculate’ director addresses criticism of film’s dark visuals on streaming: “it’s a real problem”, ‘knives out 3’ adds andrew scott to cast, ‘black dog’ review: man bites dog, becomes his best friend in gorgeously offbeat canine caper from china, caa sets lineup, dates for ninth moebius film festival.

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

• Backchannel
• Newsletters
• WIRED Insider
• WIRED Consulting

Victoria Turk James Temperton

We need to talk about everything that's wrong with Ready Player One

Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is, at its core, a classic teenage hero quest flick. With a budget of $175 million and some great geek culture material to work with, it’s also one of the most hyped and eagerly-anticipated films of the year.

But it’s not without its problems. How faithful is it to the book? Why can’t big-budget action films have believable female characters? And is The Oasis the best on-screen depiction of our virtual reality future? WIRED's Vicki Turk and James Temperton sat down to express some strong opinions ...

Warning: contains major spoilers for the film and book of Ready Player One .

James Temperton: Okay, be honest: what did you make of the film?

Vicki Turk: I was really disappointed. I read the book shortly before seeing the film and got really into the story and the worlds depicted (real and virtual), so I was looking forward to Spielberg's take on the whole thing. But for me the film didn't deliver: I thought the story didn't come across very well, the changes to the plot were for the worse, and I just didn't feel anything for any of the characters.

I liked some of the bits set in the real world of 2045, like the opening scene that shows people living in The Stacks and shutting themselves off from reality to live in The Oasis , but towards the end the whole thing descended into Transformers . And then there was all the sentimental mush. I think I was actually rolling my eyes in the cinema at the most cringeworthy moments.

JT: So... you weren't impressed? My main issue with the film is that it was very Spielberg-ey. Yes, I get that this is part of the point: it's a big homage to 80s and 90s geek culture, but the whole film felt like – visuals aside – it could have been released in 1994.

The casting, the group of kids against the world dynamic, the score. Oh god the score. Close your eyes and you could almost be watching E.T. and Elliott cavorting around on a bicycle. I also couldn't work out if it wanted to be a film for adults or kids. The plot screams kids film. But you'd need to be 30 or older to get most of the references. But then the plot is so fluffy and docile you'll get bored after an hour.

**VT:**Actually the soundtrack was one of my favourite things about it, but maybe that says more about me (I do love E.T. ). The "kids against the world" dynamic is an interesting point, because this is one of the core differences between the film and the book. In the book, the characters don't meet IRL until the very last scene, but in the film they meet much earlier. I guess this was a necessary change, because it wouldn't be much fun to watch one person the whole time, but for me it really upturned the characters of Wade Watts and his friends. They're supposed to be these isolated, obsessive, probably quite socially-awkward geeks who live their lives on the internet, which I think is one of the reasons people find the book so relatable. Having them be buddies in real life all along changes that.

By Kim Zetter

By Will Knight

By Aarian Marshall

By Nena Farrell

JT: That's a neat segue on to how the film handles geek culture. Which is a bit of a mixed bag. I know you have strong opinions about this. But, broadly, I found it a bit tiresome. Yes, the ability to secure the rights for everything from Halo to Worms is impressive, but that doesn't really add a whole lot to the film. Lobbing more well-known characters into a fight scene soon becomes tedious. Ready Player One really shines when it uses geek culture as a major plot device. The scene set in the world of The Shining (weird zombie ballroom dancing aside), for example, is one of the best in the film.

VT: Yeah, I quite liked all the references (though that end battle, oh god please just get it over with, I don't care about yet another mech/weapon/character). You know, one of my problems was that the characters didn't really have to do anything that impressively geeky in any of the challenges (except maybe knowing that Adventure easter egg in the last one). Like the first challenge – "go backwards"? That's it?! And you're right, the second challenge with The Shining was cool, but the actual key to winning it – well, you know I have very strong feelings about this.

I found it a real problem that the secret to winning the challenges was not about knowing the videogames and movies that James Halliday loved to the same obsessively geeky level as he did, but instead about knowing Halliday's personal life in intimate detail. Like the whole thing somehow hinges on this one time Halliday didn't kiss a girl he fancied? What? Don't even get me started on the gender issues here.

JT: No no, let's get started on the gender issues.

VT: Okay, well let's start with Kira. She was the wife of Halliday's partner Ogden Morrow, but we learn that he had a thing for her before they got together, and they even went on one date. But the date wasn't successful, and we're led to believe that's because Halliday didn't do the right thing – he was too awkward to take her dancing, too shy to make a move.

The second challenge in the film is kind of rectifying that: the characters have to find Kira, dance with her, et cetera. I hate this so much. Mainly because we get no sense that Kira actually liked Halliday in that way, or that she was at all unhappy in her relationship with Morrow. But we're led to believe that if Halliday had just played it differently, of course things would have turned out otherwise. It's this tired trope that denies women agency and instead presents them as a trophy to be won: if Halliday had just played the right cheat codes at the right time, he would have got Kira as his prize. (Going off-tangent a bit now, but it's kind of the same idea that drives pick-up artists.) What did you make of Art3mis?

JT: Art3mis is an interesting one. She's great... until they meet in real-life, at which point she becomes inconsistent. So we're meant to believe that she is a member of the almighty and principled resistance, fighting to ensure The Oasis doesn't fall into the hands of an evil corporation. But what she really needs is to be saved by a man. This really isn't what a celebration of geek culture should be about. You are your avatar and anyone can be a hero. Once the 'real' Art3mis is revealed, the film falls into trite, tired representations of teenage romance. But she was great up until that.

VT: Yeah, I liked that she had more of a role to play than in the book, but the relationship just doesn't work. I would have preferred it so much if they didn't kiss at the end. I mean, I guess it's supposed to be referencing 1980s teen movies, where the guy would always get the girl, but it comes so close to potentially subverting that trope, when Art3mis initially pushes Parzival away...

JT: Okay, so what about how it handles our glorious virtual reality future? This was the book that couldn't possibly be turned into a film (except it was optioned before it was even written). It's not meant to be possible to show this kind of world. But Ready Player One gives it a bloody good go. How well did it do?

VT: Now this is what I liked – I genuinely thought it did a great job of showing The Oasis in all its VR glory. The segues between real life and virtual life were handled well, the different avatars were neat, the various Oasis worlds were cool. I liked the tech the film imagined too, like the haptic body suits. The negative aspects of the technology were also handled well, like the over-reliance on VR to escape from the shitty world humans have destroyed, and the problems of letting such a widely-used technology fall into the control of a corporation motivated only by profit.

JT: At times it reminded me a little too much of watching a very long cutscene from Final Fantasy (or, more accurately 2001 cinema bore-fest Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within ). But that would be unkind. Visually, Ready Player One is spectacular. And it could have been so bland and cold. The animation is superb and the virtual world is ludicrously busy. I saw it in IMAX, which is definitely the format it was made for. There's so much detail to take in and some clever jokes that almost get lost in the visual richness. All that said, I wanted to spend more time in The Stacks. That opening scene where Wade clambers down the tower of static caravans and the camera pans out... it looks spectacular. But it never really delivers on that again.

Read more: Ready Player One author Ernest Cline: 'It seemed impossible to make this into a movie'

VT: Do you think The Oasis was an accurate representation of what VR could be?

JT: It's a bit Mark Zuckerberg-y. Remember when he stood on-stage in 2017 and said he wanted to get one billion people into VR? Well, good luck with that. A VR version of Second Life seemed like a logical end-game a couple of years ago ( heck, we even wrote about it ) but I don't think this is where VR is headed, at least not in the short-to-medium term. The hidden major plot point in Ready Player One is that the real world has pretty much collapsed. That's a bit pessimistic for my liking. Augmented reality, or at least technology that adds an interactive layer to the real world (hello, Pokémon Go ) is where the industry is headed. So that's basically augmented reality. But an augmented reality version of The Oasis ? Sure, I'd be up for that.

VT: I'd be totally up for a VR Oasis , especially if it was actually as good as in Ready Player One . But that's a big if – I'm yet to try any attempts at "social VR" that actually pull it off (least of all Zuck's). But that's why I'm inclined to agree with you that AR is probably a more likely path – because at least you can actually still talk to the person next to you.

So final thoughts - would you recommend people go see the film?

JT: Yes. But with all the above caveats. And go and see it in IMAX. And maybe bring your kids. And don't expect too much.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

Angela Watercutter

Eric Ravenscraft

Jennifer M. Wood

Marah Eakin

Ready Player One is a fun romp that’s even more dystopian than it realizes

Why are we supposed to be rooting for the real world’s destruction?

by Alissa Wilkinson

Ready Player One , both the 2011 novel and the new film adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg, are all about pop culture nostalgia , specifically the sort that regards the 1980s as the apex of awesome.

So in one sense, I’m definitely not its target audience. I was indeed born in the early ’80s but grew up in a virtually pop culture-free world . If the fun most people derive from Ready Player One comes from recognizing the references , then I’m excluded by default.

But then again, Ready Player One is a big-budget dystopian adventure blockbuster — a genre I love — so it definitely is for me. I went in cold on purpose, without catching myself up on the book, so I could experience it as a movie without knowing where it was going. Judging by the reactions from the crowd around me at my screening, I missed a lot of the references; the movie played largely like a straight-ahead adventure film to me.

And for most of the movie, I was into it. Ready Player One can be a lot of fun, especially since its world building is skillful — and it has a lot of worlds to build. Seeing how the filmmakers — including the novel’s author, Ernest Cline, who co-wrote the screenplay with Zak Penn — conceived of this dystopian future and the simulacrum of a life into which everyone escapes was engaging. Sometimes adventure movies become so bloated with action scenes that the story stops being interesting, but Ready Player One resists that impulse for most of its runtime.

• The Ready Player One backlash, explained

But about three-quarters of the way into the movie, I started to feel extremely uncomfortable, and that discomfort only increased as the movie skidded toward its conclusion. The movie was asking me to root for the heroes — but I wanted nothing more than for them to fail in their quest. And while that could work in a satirical film, Ready Player One is far from satirical. On the contrary, it seemed blithely unaware of how disturbing it was.

Ready Player One is set in a dystopian future. But it seems to have no idea how dystopian it really is.

Ready Player One is about a quest to save the (virtual) world

The year is 2045, and the world has gone to shit. It’s gotten so bad that most people prefer to spend their time in a massive video game called the OASIS, where they engage as characters in various worlds and collect coin, the in-game currency.

We learn all this in voiceover from Wade ( Tye Sheridan ), a teenage orphan who lives with his aunt in a trailer park and plays in the OASIS as an avatar called Parzival. Wade loves the OASIS. It’s where he’s met his friends and where he spends his days. And no wonder — the real world is a wreck, and everyone in it spends all their time in the OASIS too.

The OASIS was created by a pair of men named James Halliday ( Mark Rylance ) and Ogden Morrow ( Simon Pegg ), and its success made them incredibly wealthy. It’s also, predictably, become the site of entrepreneurial pursuits, including those from a company called IOI, headed by the sinister Nolan Sorrento ( Ben Mendelsohn ).

IOI’s goal is to control the OASIS, a task it hopes to accomplish partly by offering repayment of in-world debts to people who enter into what’s essentially indentured servitude.

IOI will control the OASIS if it manages to crack a quest that Halliday left behind when he died: Players need to collect three keys from the OASIS, guided by clues that Halliday left behind that have something to do with the key to Halliday’s past — his Rosebud, so to speak. Whoever collects the keys will find the golden Easter egg at the game’s center, become the owner of the OASIS, and inherit a vast fortune.

But of course everyone wants to control the OASIS, including Wade, its biggest fan, who’s devoted himself completely to the quest. Like everyone else chasing Halliday’s egg, he’s had little luck — until he meets a fellow egg hunter (or “gunter”) named Art3mis ( Olivia Cooke ), with whom he promptly falls in love. They start cracking Halliday’s code together, partly through recognizing various pop culture references and partly through good old-fashioned detective work.

These quests on which Art3mis and Wade (as Parzival) embark are where the film shines. How they unfold is often unexpected and funny, and the way various pop culture references are deployed feels less like name-checking and more like remixing. (One in particular, which takes place in the world of a famous film, is especially fun.)

And it’s just enjoyable to see how the story unfolds. The characters are not all that interesting — thinly written and at times unbelievable — but the ways they crack clues and navigate the world of the OASIS, all while staying a step or two ahead of IOI, are the best, most enjoyable kind of puzzle. The surface-level pleasures of Ready Player One are abundant and crowd-pleasing, and Art3mis and Wade’s journey is good, clean fun that nonetheless has big implications for the future of the OASIS.

Why does Ready Player One want us to root for the real world’s ultimate destruction?

That’s important to restate: The quest has big implications for the future of the OASIS .

It’s pretty common for heroes in adventure movies (and, not coincidentally, in video games) to discover that the fate of the world rests on their shoulders. But in this case, it’s not the fate of the real world; that world, the story suggests, is already broken beyond repair. The only thing worth saving is the OASIS, and that is the end goal.

Here’s the thing: To buy into this entire premise, you have to believe, as Wade does, that the OASIS is good. There are two reasons it seems good to him. First, it provides a place to escape from his dismal surroundings. And second, it’s a place where he makes friends — all of whom are real-world people also playing in the OASIS.

An early shot in the movie pans across the trailer park where Wade lives, trailers stacked high. Inside each trailer is a person wearing VR goggles and looking kind of ridiculous, because they are in the OASIS, playing games or fighting or whatever.

It’s one of the more frightening things I’ve ever seen in a movie, largely because it’s only a few notches past the world we inhabit now. It’s like a scene from Black Mirror : a world of people so distracted by their shiny technology that they have entirely neglected the stuff of human life. They’d rather just escape into another world, created by a couple of programmers.

To me, that seems transparently dystopian — not that the world is bad, but that nobody cares anymore about fixing it.

But Ready Player One has a different idea. There’s no sense in the film that anyone really should be paying attention to what’s brought their civilization to this place. (Which, for all its described evils, still has the wealth and technology available to deliver piping hot pizzas via drones.)

It sounds overly pedantic to say this, and it probably is, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what was going on in the world outside the OASIS. Were people starving? Or fearing for their lives? Can everyone afford to have headsets, or does this neglected world include people who have to live in the dystopic ruins without escape? What kind of unrest has driven them into this dystopic state? And why doesn’t anyone think it can be fixed? Isn’t it horrifying that they’ve just left it all behind altogether?

This would be some pretty salient Black Mirror -style warning about technology and bad social systems if it were just left there. The solution would be to see the OASIS destroyed so that people are plunged back into the real world and resolve to change it.

But Ready Player One presents itself as a story about a gang of brave, scrappy heroes who are motivated to save the world — but only the virtual world, the one that keeps them from engaging with what’s really going on in the physical world.

And the movie applauds this. It very obviously wants us to cheer for our heroes as they try to save the OASIS from destruction. I sat watching this all unfold, disturbed by the implication here: that we out in the audience are supposed to be on the side of escape. In fact, we are on its side, engaging in a movie that functions as an escapist fantasy itself.

It’s a little hard not to feel like the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.

By the end of the film, the only concession to this weird dissonance comes in a sort-of statement that it’s probably good to take off the headset and actually interact with the real world now and then. Not to think about how the in-world injustices might map onto real-world injustices, or to fix problems.

Of course, Ready Player One has always played like a gamer’s fantasy. So this very adolescent view of the world makes a limited amount of sense. But it stands in pretty stark contrast to the spate of YA fiction in which the brave teenagers actually go fix things the adults messed up.

And even if this is the story it chose to tell, from a teenage boy’s perspective, it’s still pretty hard to get around the fact that the storytelling itself wants us to root for the preservation of the Black Mirror -like scenario — not for it to be fixed. This isn’t satirical, and it’s no warning bell. It’s a hero’s quest. And what’s at the end of the quest hasn’t fixed anything at all. In fact, it may spell ultimate doom for the civilization.

I’m well aware that this perspective probably makes me some kind of joyless spoilsport. Why can’t I just escape into the movie and have fun for a couple hours without analyzing and dissecting it?

So be it. If the dystopian future looks like people disconnecting from what’s real to escape into fantasy, then I’d at least like to be paying attention when it happens.

Ready Player One opens in theaters on March 29.

Most Popular

The obscure federal intelligence bureau that got vietnam, iraq, and ukraine right, your favorite brand no longer cares about being woke, what’s really happening to grocery prices right now, why israel can't destroy hamas, your guide to 2024’s rare cicadapocalypse, today, explained.

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

More in Culture

Leaked video reveals the lie of Miss Universe’s empowerment promise

The Sympathizer takes on Hollywood’s Vietnam War stories

The NCAA’s proposal to pay college athletes is fair. That's the problem.

The WNBA’s meteoric rise in popularity, in one chart

Red Lobster’s mistakes go beyond endless shrimp

How to care for people in your life with intellectual disabilities

The bizarre link between rising sea levels and complications in pregnancy

Expecting worse: Giving birth on a planet in crisis 

Heat waves increase the number of risky, premature births

Why pregnancy triples your chances of getting severe malaria

They spent years trying for a baby. Then the hurricane hit.

Ready Player One Review

Roughly halfway through Ready Player One , our scrappy, young heroes find themselves running through a warehouse as a group of armed, uniformed soldiers comes crashing through all of the doors to take them into custody. The music swells, and a game of cat and mouse ensues. At this point, it becomes apparent that we haven't seen this type of pure escapist adventure at the movies in a long time, and it invokes a degree of nostalgia that feels tailor-made for a film designed as an ode to 1980s pop culture. Ready Player One works best when it embraces that classic Steven Spielberg sense of spectacle, and while it feels somewhat rushed and less character-driven than his best movies, it's still a fun romp that reinforces his reputation as a master of his craft.

The whole thing begins with a history lesson. Wade "Parzival" Watts ( Tye Sheridan ) tells us that an odd-yet-brilliant genius named James Halliday (Mark Rylance) fundamentally changed the world with the creation of the OASIS -- a massive, virtual landscape not bound by the laws of physics or reality. The OASIS serves as the only source of comfort for a world largely engulfed in environmental and economic turmoil, and many choose to live their lives exclusively within its boundaries. However, the sudden death of an aging Halliday reveals a brand-new game: the search to find an "Easter egg" hidden in the OASIS that will grant its owner full control of the simulation and the entirety of Halliday's half-trillion-dollar fortune.

What follows is a race against time and the evil forces of a malevolent tech giant run by Nolan Sorrento ( Ben Mendelsohn ) as Wade, Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Aech (Lena Waithe) and others engage in a bitter battle to find the egg. Think Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory meets It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World . Along the way, they're put to the test as they go through a wringer of trials (designed by Halliday) to gauge their knowledge of 1980s pop culture and determine their worthiness to run the OASIS and determine the future of the world.

Out of the gates, we need to address Ready Player One 's polarizing use of pop culture touchstones to fill out its story. That's a fundamental element of Ernest Cline's original book, and it has become a divisive storytelling technique, with some praising the intermingling of film, television, and video game characters in one landscape and others criticizing it as a ploy to capitalize on the current wave of nostalgia that has a vice grip on Hollywood. Despite the fervor from both camps, Ready Player One proves both of them right. The film mostly blends its various pieces of intellectual property to create genuinely enthralling landscapes that any nerd would kill to exist in (the world-building here is top notch), but it also sometimes features scenes that go overboard in the number of winks and nods that they force into the story.

For example, Wade Watts using a Delorean from Back to the Future as his go-to car makes sense and feels natural for the world. On the other hand, a montage of his avatar trying on different movie-themed skins to wear to a party, or using a gadget called the Zemeckis Cube (which, as you may have guessed, has time-bending abilities) feels somewhat forced. That said, Spielberg mostly toes the line and makes it work, streamlining Ernest Cline's source material and making a dense novel seem digestible as a film.

Speaking of which, we should note that the best thing that we can say about Ready Player One is the fact that it finds an emotional core not present in the book. In the book, James Halliday is a mythic figure who mainly exists in the past, but Spielberg finds genuinely innovative ways to give Mark Rylance (seemingly his good luck charm these days) far more to dig into with the role. As a result, Ready Player One 's basic premise feels stronger than it did in the novel, the Halliday character offers some great heart and humor that feel ripped straight from Spielberg's best movies.

On the other hand, the emphasis on an examination of James Halliday as a real character in the story also has the unintended consequence of short-changing other characters in the Ready Player One ensemble. Tye Sheridan brings a strong sense of humanity and naivety to Wade Watts (who can be a real nightmare in the novel), and Olivia Cooke is arguably the standout among the entire ensemble as Art3mis, the beating heart of the story and the impetus for Wade's turn from selfish kid to full-blown hero. The problem is that's about as far as things go for interesting characters, and the other members of the quintet of heroes (known as the "High Five") don't get nearly as much room to grow and develop as they do in the source material, so their connections to Wade never feels quite as strong as the friendships seen in the most beloved Spielberg films.

Even more underserved are the villainous roles in Ready Player One . Following his work in films like The Dark Knight Rises and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story , Ben Mendelsohn continues to be underutilized by blockbuster films, instead forced to play a bumbling, bureaucrat once again. Similarly bland is Hannah John-Kamen as Nolan Sorrento's loyal henchwoman, which mostly feels like she's playing Luv from Blade Runner 2049 . The only villain in the movie with a shred of genuine personality is T.J. Miller as i-R0k, but at a certain point, even he merely feels like he's playing the T.J. Miller character seen in Deadpool or Silicon Valley .

Of course, without the airtight characterizations of Steven Spielberg's other films, Ready Player One still manages to wow on a technical level. The man behind Jurassic Park and Jaws exhibits a shocking ability to adapt and evolve with the progression of filmmaking technology that has taken place over the course of his lengthy career, and Ready Player One is no exception. The enormous battle scenes are top notch (Spielberg's eye for camerawork is as keen as ever), and the sound design in the OASIS' biggest sequences feels second-to-none. Make no mistake; there are legitimately jaw-dropping action set pieces in Ready Player One that rival anything seen in even the most impressive blockbuster franchises, and they leave a lasting impression. Think about it; how often do you get to see a massive death match featuring a series of fan-favorites from the DC lore, horror movie icons, Halo 's Spartans, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (just to name a few)? That question was rhetorical.

Somewhat less impressive are the non-OASIS sections of the movie. The VR landscape that makes up the majority of the film's runtime absolutely dazzles, but the sequences of Wade and the rest of his comrades fighting for survival in the real world never quite match the intensity or inventiveness of the OASIS. With that said, Ready Player One definitely wants to reach its highest heights in the endlessly imaginative (and continuously referential) landscape of the OASIS, and that's where it shines.

While not quite peak Spielberg, Ready Player One is a fun exploration of pop culture with a fantastic sense of spectacle that mostly makes up for some weak plotting. It might not tug at your heartstrings like Jurassic Park or E.T. did when they debuted, but it will almost certainly make you want to throw on some Van Halen and dust off your VHS collection.

Originally from Connecticut, Conner grew up in San Diego and graduated from Chapman University in 2014. He now lives in Los Angeles working in and around the entertainment industry and can mostly be found binging horror movies and chugging coffee.

'Of Course I Fell Down The Stairs': Emma Watson Tells The Story Behind Her Extreme Discomfort During One Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire Scene

Anya Taylor-Joy Recalls Key Scene From The Witch She Asked The Director To Change, And I’m Glad She Spoke Up

What The Big Bang Theory’s Kaley Cuoco Does When She Needs A Buffer From Hollywood

Most Popular

Ready Player One (2018)

• User Reviews

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews

• User Ratings
• External Reviews
• Metacritic Reviews
• Full Cast and Crew
• Release Dates
• Official Sites
• Company Credits
• Filming & Production
• Technical Specs
• Plot Summary
• Plot Keywords
• Parents Guide

Did You Know?

• Crazy Credits
• Alternate Versions
• Connections
• Soundtracks

Photo & Video

• Photo Gallery
• Trailers and Videos

Related Items

• External Sites

Related lists from IMDb users

Recently Viewed

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Get the app
• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

Real-Life Heroes on YouTube for Tweens and Teens

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Celebrating Black History Month

Movies and TV Shows with Arab Leads

Celebrate Hip-Hop's 50th Anniversary

Ready player one, common sense media reviewers.

Intense virtual reality adventure will dazzle '80s fans.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Ultimate message is that games, movies, TV shows,

Wade/Parzival triumphs in the Oasis despite disadv

Many action-packed battle/fight/destruction scenes

Virtual flirting, dancing, touching, including a m

Many uses of "s--t," plus the occasional

Nonstop references to movies, video games, directo

Empty/half-filled wine glasses in a post-office pa

Parents need to know that Ready Player One is director Steven Spielberg's much-anticipated adaptation of Ernest Cline's near-future sci-fi adventure novel about an avid gamer (Tye Sheridan) who spends most of his time in the Oasis, a virtual reality universe/multi-user game. Expect both virtual (i.e.,…

Positive Messages

Ultimate message is that games, movies, TV shows, other forms of popular culture definitely matter, but consuming them shouldn't be more important than connecting with people, fostering friendships, finding love in the real world. The Oasis -- a symbol for various forms of online culture -- is both a blessing and a curse; it's a powerful tool, but it can also isolate people. Also promotes teamwork and perseverance, taking calculated risks, researching, practicing, and studying to become an expert/skilled in a particular field.

Positive Role Models

Wade/Parzival triumphs in the Oasis despite disadvantaged upbringing, thanks to his discipline in studying Halliday's life and interests. He's quick thinking, focused, and friendly in the virtual world. Women/girls can play and participate in and succeed in the Oasis as well as men/boys, and Art3mis is intelligent, proactive, committed, and hardworking (though she also defers to Wade in some areas where she doesn't really need to). Aech is a skilled fighter and a loyal friend to Parzival. Avatars come in every shape, size, and color in the Oasis; real-life characters also show a range of representations.

Violence & Scariness

Many action-packed battle/fight/destruction scenes in the Oasis, a few in real life. In the Oasis, Parzival and friends must survive enemy attacks in the form of dinosaurs, King Kong, and other players targeting them with arsenals of virtual weapons (from guns and swords to grenades and world-leveling bombs). Scary re-creation of a horror film includes a literal flood of blood, ax attacks, frightening/gross zombies. Intense car chases/crashes. Characters die frequently in the Oasis (often brutally), breaking apart and turning into coins, which "zeroes out" their avatars. In the real word, an evil corporation sends assassins to kill and/or arrest people, put them in debtors' prisons, blow up their homes, pursue them in armored vehicles, and shoot at them. Gun threats. Creature from alien pops out of an avatar's stomach in a jump-scare moment.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Virtual flirting, dancing, touching, including a moment when Art3mis touches Parzival seductively (in his crotch region) and asks whether he can feel it in real life with his high-tech suit (the corresponding area of his suit glows red); he says of her "she's hot." A few big kisses. Brief innuendo about the kinds of things you can do in the Oasis; some avatars wear pretty skimpy outfits. During one of the key challenges, a naked woman gets out of a bath and approaches a character's avatar; her bare back/top of her buttocks is shown. A woman mimes pole dancing while plugged into the Oasis.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Many uses of "s--t," plus the occasional "a--hole," "bitch," "dickweed," "douche bag," "balls," "hell," "damn," "goddamn," "oh my God," "pissed," "ghetto trash," "noob," etc. And there's one momentous use of the word "f---ing."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Nonstop references to movies, video games, directors, and '80s pop culture. The movies The Shining and Back to the Future play a pivotal role, and there are glimpses/mentions of Atari, Dell, Apple, Minecraft , Firestone tires, Batman, Iron Giant, Robert Zemeckis, John Hughes films, Tab cola, Pizza Hut, and more.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Empty/half-filled wine glasses in a post-office party flashback scene. An avatar has a cigar.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Ready Player One is director Steven Spielberg 's much-anticipated adaptation of Ernest Cline's near-future sci-fi adventure novel about an avid gamer ( Tye Sheridan ) who spends most of his time in the Oasis, a virtual reality universe/multi-user game. Expect both virtual (i.e., in the Oasis) and real-life violence, although the movie's real-world violence isn't quite as traumatic as the book's. The in-game action can get pretty intense (especially when seen in 3D) and includes over-the-top shoot-outs (with every kind of weapon imaginable), all-out attacks, large-scale battles, destructive car chases, giant monsters, and a frightening re-creation of a gory horror film that includes ax attacks, zombies, and more. Outside the Oasis, there are assassination attempts, an explosion that kills civilians and destroys homes, forced labor, a car chase, and gun threats. Characters also flirt, kiss, and touch each other suggestively, and there's quite a bit of swearing (mostly "s--t," though there's a memorable use of "f---ing"). Although fans of the book, gamers, and Gen Xers with '80s nostalgia are the most obvious audience, you don't need to have read the book to understand or appreciate the story (in fact, if you haven't read it, you're less likely to be distracted by the massive story changes made for the movie...) and its themes of teamwork, perseverance, and valuing real-life connections. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (69)
• Kids say (184)

Based on 69 parent reviews

BEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME MUST WATCH!!!

Colourfully animated thrill ride, what's the story.

Based on Ernest Cline's best-selling 2011 sci-fi novel , READY PLAYER ONE takes place in a dismal 2045, where most people live in squalor, choosing to spend most of their time online in a virtual universe called the Oasis. Wade Watts ( Tye Sheridan ) lives in the "Stacks" of Columbus, Ohio -- a tower of mobile homes -- and spends every spare moment logged in. For the past five years, Wade and millions of other dedicated gamers have been hunting obsessively for an elusive Easter egg left hidden in the game's code by its late creator, James Halliday ( Mark Rylance ). To find the egg, gamers must find three keys and pass through three gates, where their skills will be tested. The winner will receive the entirety of Halliday's trillion-dollar fortune, including his controlling share in the Oasis' parent company. Halliday was an eccentric genius obsessed with the decade he grew up in -- the 1980s -- so Wade and his fellow egg hunters ("gunters" for short) have all become experts in '80s pop culture themselves, from early video games to chart-topping music, movies, and TV shows. When Wade's avatar, Parzival, finds the first key -- followed quickly by four other top gunters he considers friends -- he's quickly threatened by IOI, a global corporation that hires professional gamers (called "Sixers") to work on their behalf in the hunt. With the stakes so high, can Wade and the other "High Five" gunters -- Art3mis ( Olivia Cooke ), Aech, ( Lena Waithe ), Daito (Win Morisaki), and Sho (Philip Zhao) -- keep Halliday's egg out of IOI's hands ... and not get killed in the process?

Is It Any Good?

Although the many story changes might be hard for book purists to accept, Steven Spielberg has lovingly captured the zeitgeist of '80s nostalgia in this adventure. Plus, he brings his own spectacular style to the visuals. Those expecting a faithful or pure adaptation should prepare themselves for key departures from the novel; some of the changes are understandable, while others are initially a bit disappointing. The first challenge is completely different; there's no high school, Oklahoma, Joust , WarGames , or Rush; and the High Five's meeting/collaboration is completely sped up (and that's just a few of the changes). Of course, screenwriters Zak Penn and Cline couldn't depict all of Parzival's '80s trivia-dropping, game playing, and theory-obsessing in the film -- what works on paper doesn't always translate to the screen. What is on screen is pure Spielberg: an epic quest, young people banding together, and a love of the decade when he himself (as well as fellow filmmakers like Robert Zemeckis and James Cameron) reigned supreme in popular culture. The movie, like Halliday's hunt, is filled with Easter eggs for movie buffs and nostalgic enthusiasts. Multiple viewings may be in order to catch them all, because some are fleeting, while others are more overt. (Chances are if the audience is laughing and you aren't, you just missed a visual tribute to an '80s movie, fictional character, cartoon, or game.)

The movie is most impressive when the action is taking place in the Oasis. Spielberg immerses viewers in the sort of virtual reality it would be easy to get lost in, particularly when real life is so bleak. And that, if there's one thing that keeps a very good movie from being extraordinary, is the problem. The virtual scenes dazzle and inspire, while the real-world plot is slightly less interesting. An action sequence between geared-up avatars inside a game is naturally more colorful and imaginative than the grim reality of car chases and debtors' prison. The actors all do a fine job with their roles, even though two of them are far off the ages of their book counterparts. Cooke (who was so wonderful in Thoroughbreds ) is believably passionate, if for some reason not quite as much of a genius as she is in the book ("book Art3mis" is even smarter about all things Halliday than Parzival). Rylance (who's become one of Spielberg's most frequent collaborators) is excellent as the nearly mythical Halliday, and Ben Mendelsohn is perfectly smarmy as IOI's greedy (and evil) executive, Nolan Sorrento. Alan Silvestri's score, along with the many '80s jams, is wholly evocative of the decade -- which is only to be expected, considering that his previous scores include the Back to the Future trilogy, which is heavily referenced in this film. Considering the Herculean task of translating Cline's epic novel onto the screen, Spielberg has kept the wonder and the nostalgia; ultimately's that's what will enchant viewers.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Ready Player One 's role models . How do they display teamwork and perseverance ? If you were part of their team, which character would you want to work with? Why?

How did you feel about the video game-like violence in the Oasis vs. the violent scenes in the real world? Which had more impact ? Why?

What's the story's message about screen time /virtual life? Why is it important to step away and live in the real world?

How do the movie's real-life characters compare to their Oasis avatars? What's the appeal of changing your appearance online or in virtual space? Is Art3mis right when she tells Parzival that "you don't know me"?

Fans of the book: What do you think of the page-to-screen changes in the story's plot details and characterizations? Why do you think they decided to make them? Which differences do you appreciate? Was there anything from the book you missed seeing on-screen?

Movie Details

• In theaters : March 29, 2018
• On DVD or streaming : July 24, 2018
• Cast : Tye Sheridan , Olivia Cooke , Ben Mendelsohn
• Director : Steven Spielberg
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Adventures
• Character Strengths : Perseverance , Teamwork
• Run time : 140 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : sequences of sci-fi action violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, nudity and language
• Last updated : May 12, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

Back to the Future

Best Action Movies for Kids

Excellent adventure movies for family fun, related topics.

• Perseverance

Want suggestions based on your streaming services? Get personalized recommendations

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Screen Rant

Ready player one is becoming a reality in the metaverse - and people are confused.

Your changes have been saved

Email Is sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Cillian Murphy's 28 Years Later Return Was Perfectly Set Up By This Story 15 Years Ago

10 harsh realities of rewatching happy gilmore, 28 years later, 8 reasons reviews for kevin costner's new western are so bad.

• Readyverse Studios and Warner Bros. Discovery are partnering to bring the OASIS from Ready Player One to the metaverse.
• This will be a "multi-world, multi-IP, interoperable open metaverse experience."
• Fans have mixed reactions about whether making the OASIS a reality is a good idea.

Ready Player One is coming to real life, and not everyone is on board. The 2011 sci-fi novel, which was adapted into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 2018, follows a young man named Wade Watts who lives in a dystopian America in 2045, where humanity seeks escape from a resource-depleted planet via a virtual reality platform called the OASIS. OASIS is a place where users can create their own worlds, many of which are inspired by popular movies and video games from the 1980s.

Per Variety , the company Futureverse announced that the newly formed Readyverse Studios (co-founded by Ready Player One author Ernest Cline and producer Dan Farah) is partnering with Warner Bros. Discovery to bring a version of the OASIS to the metaverse in 2024. While details about the intellectual properties and logistics involved are unknown, the company is describing it as " a multi-world, multi-IP, interoperable open metaverse experience ." However, fans online disagree about whether making the OASIS a reality is a good idea. Check out various social media fan reactions below:

RJ Palmer tweeted, " I wish we had a word significantly stronger than 'stupid' for these kinds of people. "

Shoot the Sh*t concurred, saying, " It’s like making Jurassic Park. Someone clearly missed the dystopian lesson… "

Sebastian expressed a similar concern, saying, " Wasn’t Ready Player One a warning??? Lmao. "

Erik Davis was less concerned, saying that " as long as I get to drive the DeLorean from Back to the Future, I'm in. "

Skyla also shared concerns, saying, " The way no one would play this because it’s so black mirror coded ."

hassan was more mixed, saying, " Lowkey dope as hell but did we not learn from the movie tho ."

Socrateej shared a popular meme presenting a script saying " Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale, Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus "

Ready Player One's OASIS Is Complicated

One possible reason that there is debate over the validity of introducing a version of the OASIS is the fact that its position in the narrative is complicated. Like any potentially dangerous technology, the OASIS is a tool that can be used for both good and evil. Both the book and the Steven Spielberg movie reveal good sides to the OASIS, including a program that allows students to attend school virtually. However, the end of the story includes themes about embracing one's true identity and fostering interpersonal connections in the real world rather than burying oneself in pop culture.

Despite this underlying theme, Ready Player One also portrays the OASIS as a world full of fun adventures that brings classic pop culture to life in a new way. In the book's sequel Ready Player Two , this gets even more complicated. The story follows the arrival of new developments that intertwines humanity even closer with technology in ways that the book is less interested in flatly denouncing.

Challenges that Wade must overcome in different versions of Ready Player One include visiting an interactive scene from The Shining and fighting through a real-life version of the Dungeons & Dragons module Tomb of Horrors .

Ultimately, this real-life version of Ready Player One likely won't have the same dangerous potential. Whether users think it challenges the story's themes on principle, it will be impossible for the books' OASIS to come to life to its fullest extent. For one thing, users won't have nearly as much access to the world of pop culture as the actual OASIS, given the fact that the company doesn't have an infinite budget with which to license intellectual property. The metaverse's technological limitations will also make it less wholly engrossing than the OASIS, though that could always change in the future.

Source: Variety & Various (see above)

Ready Player One

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.   

• Ready Player One (2018)

20 Movies Like Ready Player One Everyone Should See

• Ready Player One captures the immersive world and video game adventure similar to Spielberg's movies.
• Various movies influenced Spielberg's Ready Player One or explored similar technological ideas.
• The film references classic movies and video games, exploring themes of escapism and virtual reality.

While it is hard to ever match Steven Spielberg, movies like Ready Player One capture the similar immersive sci-fi world and engrossing video game adventure of his movie. Adapted from Ernest Cline's best-selling novel of the same name, the movie is jam-packed with action, humor, and romance all set around a video game scavenger hunt. There are many aspects to the movie to enjoy, like the nostalgic references and idea of living among them, the young rebel heroes fighting against the corrupt powers, and the concept of escaping the real world through a new reality.

Ready Player One is, by virtue of its core themes and source material, informed by a great many movies both legendary and underrated. There are so many examples of movies that either directly influenced Spielberg's Ready Player One or similarly explored the ideas of the technology of this world. Those looking for similarly fun and thought-provoking stories, whether they may be light and colorful adventures, darker and violent action movies, or deeply detailed documentaries, will have plenty of options to choose from.

Ready Player Two: Will It Happen? Everything We Know

Will Ready Player Two ever happen? Ready Player One was a hit with viewers, but the poorly reviewed sequel book by Ernest Cline raised some eyebrows.

The Last Starfighter (1984)

A young video gamer discovers the game he beats was a test for a greater adventure.

Ready Player One was far from the first movie to incorporate video games into a sci-fi fantasy story and it bears several similarities to the cult favorite space adventure The Last Starfighter . With Ready Player One 's adoration of cult movies, it would make sense if it served as an inspiration in some ways.

Both movies feature protagonists who escape their dead-end lives in trailer parks with their gaming skills , only to find that they might be their ticket out of there. The movie follows a young teenager named Alex (Lance Guest) who is recruited by an alien civilization to be their savior in a war with their intergalactic enemies.

While The Last Starfighter is clearly influenced by Star Wars , its effects were ambitious back in the mid-80s even if they don't hold up today, and is much more influential than it's often given credit for.

Rent on Apple TV.

Life 2.0 (2010)

A documentary about people creating new virtual lives.

Given the wild futuristic adventure that Ready Player One takes audiences on, it might seem strange that a documentary captures some similar vibes. However, Second Life is an exploration of technology that proved to be ahead of its time.

This enveloping documentary follows the lives of several people who develop new lives in the online world of Second Life , a virtual world that offers its users opportunities that range from financial to romantic. Spielberg's Ready Player One explores both the escapism elements of the virtual reality world and the idea of it taking away from real life.

The documentary is similarly an even-handed study of what draws people to virtual spaces and then keeps them there , examining how and why games can become preferable to people's actual realities. Given how huge these kinds of immersive online worlds have evolved since then, Second Life would be an interesting movie to revisit.

The King Of Kong (2007)

A documentary about two men battling for the top score in donkey kong.

There is a love of video games that permeates Ready Player One and that passion is found in this unique documentary as well. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters delves into the strange and fascinating world of arcade game high scores , specifically the competition surrounding the record for the classic game Donkey Kong .

As unlikely as it may seem, the movie finds a larger-than-life hero and villain in the endearing outsider Steve Wiebe and the overconfident champion Billy Mitchell, respectively. The movie is a surprisingly thrilling ride with an entertaining narrative of a true underdog story.

It is also a reminder of how much people can get attached to these worlds though the movie never judges these people who have dedicated so much time to the world of arcades. Though a small-scale documentary, it packs as many thrills as Ready Player One.

Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971)

An eccentric chocolatier opens his mysterious factory to the public, willy wonka and the chocolate factory.

Release Date June 30, 1971

Director Mel Stuart

Cast Denise Nickerson, Julie Dawn Cole, Gene Wilder, Jack Albertson, Peter Ostrum

Runtime 100 minutes

While 2023's Wonka surprised many people, the best Willy Wonka movie is still considered to be the first one. This classic adaptation of author Roald Dahl's beloved children's book brought the titular character to life in an unforgettable way with Gene Wilder's performance as the eccentric chocolatier. The story follows a young boy who is among the lucky few guests who are welcomed inside Wonka's secret factory where the wonderous world he's created is revealed.

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is referenced throughout Ready Player One as one of its most fundamental pop-culture influences, each story sharing the central concept of a reclusive genius presenting the public with a rare opportunity to understand and profit from the imaginative world that they've created . It's certainly not an action movie but the comedy and adventure are still unbeatable even today.

The Matrix (1999)

A man realizes his world is a simulation.

The Wachowskis' iconic sci-fi mind-bender injected modern philosophical concepts like transforming identities in a predominantly digital future with dazzling action and effects, drawing inspiration from a vast legacy of popular culture from across the world.

The story of a nobody who discovers that his life is merely a simulation remains a landmark of both genre filmmaking and discussions about virtual reality, with the conversations between the characters proving as stimulating to audiences as its meticulous fight choreography.

While Ready Player One explored the thrill of jumping into a fantasy world of this virtual reality existence, The Matrix was a thought-provoking look at what it would be like if the entire human race were unknowingly trapped as part of that simulation. Though the franchise continued, the sequels failed to capture the special feeling of The Matrix .

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (2010)

A video game-inspired action love story, scott pilgrim vs. the world.

Release Date August 12, 2010

Director Edgar Wright

Cast Mark Webber, Kieran Culkin, Alison Pill, Ellen Wong, Michael Cera, Johnny Simmons

Runtime 113 minutes

Edgar Wright's adaptation of Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel series is bursting with colorfully creative action and all the adolescent kicks that a movie fan's heart could possibly desire. In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World , Michael Cera plays the eponymous bass player who must battle a woman's evil exes in order to win her heart and the movie's video-game-inspired quest is one of the greatest marriages of the mediums ever made.

Just as Ready Player One celebrates the world of movies, games, and nostalgic pop culture, Scott Pilgrim is a love letter to so many areas of the "geek world." The movie is also full of fun references to nostalgic video games , from the 9-bit opening title sequence to the fact that defeated characters turn into a pile of coins. The Scott Pilgrim cast recently returned for the animated series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

A world where cartoon characters are real.

Release Date June 22, 1988

Director Robert Zemeckis

Cast Charles Fleischer, Amy Irving, Kathleen Turner, Christopher Lloyd, Bob Hoskins

Runtime 104 minutes

One of the many filmmakers that are frequently referenced throughout Ready Player One is Robert Zemeckis, who made many strides in the field of integrating animation with live-action in feature films. There are many movies that show Zemeckis' development of Ready Player One 's most essential technologies but his classic cartoon mystery adventure is still arguably his magnum opus.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a hugely inventive live-action and animation hybrid starring Bob Hoskins as a grizzled detective who attempts to prove cartoon character Roger Rabbit has been framed for murder. While it is fun to see the characters of Ready Player One walk around in a world inhabited by iconic characters like The Iron Giant and Chucky , it feels like an homage to the world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit where icons like Mickey Mouse and Bug Bunny inhabit the same space.

Gamer (2009)

Convicts are used as real-life video game avatars.

Release Date September 4, 2009

Director Brian Taylor, Mark Neveldine

Cast Jade Ramsey, Jonathan Chase, Ariana Scott, Mimi Michaels, Gerard Butler, Ashley Rickards, Milo Ventimiglia, John Leguizamo, Terry Crews, Keith David, Aaron Yoo, Alison Lohman, Amber Valletta, Michael C. Hall, Zoe Bell, Ludacris, logan lerman, Kyra Sedgwick

Runtime 94 minutes

While Ready Player One has a lot of fun with its characters entering into video game worlds, Gamer is a wild action movie that imagines if the real world was used as a canvas for gamers to play using real people as their avatars. Gerard Butler stars as a death row inmate who's forced to become a real-world avatar that's controlled by gamers in a deadly gladiator game not too dissimilar to Ready Player One 's virtual reality world, "the Oasis."

Michael C. Hall is the megalomaniacal creator of the futuristic tech that allows all of this to happen and Logan Lerman is the young player who teams up with Butler's action hero to take his empire down. The idea of real people being used as video game characters is a clever one and allows for some fun examinations of video game quirks and concepts.

Brigsby Bear (2017)

A young man recreates the television show from his childhood to give it an ending, brigsby bear.

Release Date July 27, 2017

Director Dave McCary

Cast Christopher Sullivan, Chris Provost, Andy Samberg, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Kyle Mooney, Michaela Watkins, Ryan Simpkins, Mark Hamill, Greg Kinnear, Claire Danes

One of the most interesting themes of Ready Player One is society's growing inability to grow beyond the stage of childhood and there are few movies that tackle the difficult subject in as heartfelt and unique a way as Brigsby Bear . Through a comedic approach, this quirky story explores how people learn to move on from those nostalgic treasures.

The story follows a grown man who was raised in an isolated facility with only his parents and an educational children's TV show made by his father for a company. When he is freed and told that he was abducted as a child, he attempts to adjust to reality by creating his own movie to finish the story of his fake father's creation and forms lasting bonds of friendship through the process, finding meaning through the collaborative creative process.

Room 237 (2012)

A documentary about the obsession over the shining's biggest mysteries.

Another interesting concept at the heart of Ready Player One is the obsessive quality of fans' fascination with the work of their favorite artists and creators , constantly looking for meaning and hidden secrets within their back catalogs.

Spielberg chose his contemporary Stanley Kubrick as the next biggest influence running throughout the adaptation. The Shining itself makes up one of the most memorable scenes of Ready Player One .

The documentary Room 237 explores the way people have latched onto that movie and built elaborate theories about its meaning, references, and allegories, specifically the mystery of The Shining 's Room 237 . Fans of The Shining will know that there is a lot to unpack in the iconic horror movie, but this documentary examines just how much people have invested in exploring the unanswered questions and endless possibilities of this movie.

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

Impressive cgi filmmaking brings a cyborg warrior to life, alita: battle angel.

Release Date February 14, 2019

Director Robert Rodriguez

Cast Jackie Earle Haley, Lana Condor, Eiza Gonzalez, Mahershala Ali, Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz

Runtime 122minutes

Steven Spielberg is a filmmaker known for impressing people with practical effects that still hold up decades later, like the shark in Jaws or the T-Rex in Jurassic Park . However, Spielberg embraced the CGI of modern filmmaking, including creating entirely animated characters, for Ready Player One .

That's in line with Alita: Battle Angel, which tells the story of a scrapped cyborg who, after being revived, can't remember anything about who she is, embarking on a quest to find out. The movie is full of action but it also has the video game vibes of Ready Player One.

Alita herself is an animated character in a real environment, which makes her and her deadly mechanical opponents very similar to the virtual creations of the Oasis . The movie is a collaboration between James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez, resulting in an exciting example of the imaginative nature of these two filmmakers.

Tron: Legacy (2010)

A young man enters a video game in search of his missing father, tron: legacy.

Release Date December 7, 2010

Director Joseph Kosinski

Cast Jeff Bridges, Olivia Wilde, Garrett Hedlund

Runtime 2h 5m

Tron was the original and ground-breaking movie that capitalized on the growing popularity of video games and imagining what would happen if someone found themselves inside one of these games. This belated sequel to the classic brings so much more modern technology and action.

In Tron: Legacy , the son of a virtual world designer searches for his father but ends up in the deadly reality that he created. The movie is a giant video game where the story's main players are tasked to compete against each other on "the Grid."

With a tale of family, self-discovery, and incredible technology , it's a visually striking splendor that immerses the viewers in a video game world with the added thrill of seeing original star Jeff Bridges return. Fans will have the chance to return to the world in the upcoming Tron: Ares .

Pacific Rim (2013)

Giant robots defend the world from kaiju, pacific rim.

Release Date July 12, 2013

Director Guillermo del Toro

Cast Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Clifton Collins Jr., Charlie Day

Some of the best scenes in Ready Player One involve the beloved animated hero Iron Giant being brought in as one of the good guys to battle the villain's army. It is a crowd-pleasing moment that feels similar to the vibe of Pacific Rim . Starring Idris Elba and Charlie Hunnam, this sci-fi adventure movie revolves around a war between humankind and the monstrous kaijus that emerge from the sea.

An original concept derived by Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro from numerous pop-culture sources, this movie is full of friendship, huge battles, even huger robots, and terrifying creatures. Like many of del Toro's movies, the filmmaker's love of these kinds of stories can be felt throughout, making Pacific Rim far better than just a monsters vs robots movie. Of course, it does certainly deliver on that premise.

Ender's Game (2013)

A sci-fi film with rising stars, ender's game.

Release Date November 1, 2013

Director Gavin Hood

Cast Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Hailee Steinfeld, Viola Davis, Harrison Ford, Abigail Breslin

Runtime 114minutes

While the adaptation of this young adult novel was lost in the era of many movies of this genre, such as Divergent and Mortal Engines , it remains a far more interesting story than those movies. Starring Asa Butterfield as the titular Ender Wiggin, Ender's Game is an adaptation of Orson Scott Card's popular novel of the same name and follows a young boy recruited by a military group in the future to fight a technologically superior alien race.

Through budding friendships, bullies, and training, Ender is tested to become a fighter in hopes of saving his world and the effects-driven battles. The movie draws interesting parallels to the video game world with the simulated war training of the main character having shocking real-world implications. The film also features some strong supporting players, such as Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld, and Viola Davis.

Divergent (2014)

A resistance forms against a society that splits people into factions.

Release Date March 14, 2014

Director Neil Burger

Cast Kate Winslet, Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley, Jai Courtney, Theo James, Maggie Q, Ashley Judd

Runtime 2h 19m

While the nostalgic fun of Ready Player One is alluring, it is also a story of a resistance fighting against oppressors . In that way, it feels like one of the young adult movie adaptations that became popular in Hollywood for a time, with specific similarities to Divergent .

This action-adventure series takes place in a dystopian future depicting a world divided into factions. Tris (Shailene Woodley) learns that she is Divergent, fitting into none of the factions and soon finds out the leadership is trying to destroy them all.

This first adaptation in a series of movies based on author Veronica Roth's trilogy is perfect for fans of teen action dramas. The franchise failed to become the next Hunger Games as the hope had been, but this first movie is an interesting premise that is elevated by its talented cast.

Assassin's Creed (2016)

A prisoner is sent into a virtual reality world as a hired killer, assassin's creed.

Release Date December 21, 2016

Director Justin Kurzel

Cast Jeremy Irons, Marion Cotillard, Michael Fassbender

Runtime 1h 55m

Ready Player One draws from the love of video games, but that doesn't mean all video game adaptations have a similar feel to Spielberg's movie. However, Assassin's Creed is an exception as it follows Michael Fassbender's prisoner who must become a master assassin through a virtual reality technology that sends him to the past in hopes of taking on a powerful secret society to control the world.

While the movie was not warmly received by critics, there is an interesting meta element to a video game movie in which the main character basically enters the video game viewers have played . It set up what could have been a perfect premise to kickstart a great movie franchise that would take the story to all kinds of different battlefields. Although no sequel ever spawned, the original is still a strong watch for fans of the video games.

Dune (1984)

The son of a noble house must lead an army against those who betrayed his family.

While there are a lot of differences between 1984's Dune and 2021's version , there are many who love David Lynch's ambitious early adaptation. In the distant future, warring families fight across the stars for control of a coveted commodity and a Duke's son leads an army of desert warriors against the galactic emperor in an attempt to free themselves from his rule.

Another adaptation of a seminal science-fiction novel, Dune is a weird mind-bending journey and one of the many references scattered throughout Ready Player One . Though the movie was a box office bomb when it was initially released, it is not hard to see why it has maintained a such a cult following over the years. Lynch's ambitious approach may not ultimately work but it is one of the most interesting blockbusters of the era.

Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle (2017)

Four heroes must escape a video game, jumanji: welcome to the jungle.

Release Date December 5, 2017

Director Jake Kasdan

Cast Kevin Hart, Bobby Cannavale, Karen Gillan, Ser'darius Blain, Madison Iseman, Morgan Turner, Alex Wolff, Jack Black, Dwayne Johnson, Nick Jonas

Runtime 119 Minutes

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a fun action-adventure movie reboot of the classic film starring Robin Williams. Of course, this one is much more modern and tells the story of four teenagers who are sucked into a magical video game rather than a board game coming to life. Trapped in a jungle, the only way out is to finish the game.

Starring Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, and Jack Black, this movie has all the adventure and humor of Ready Player One, but in a simpler setting. The movie has a lot of fun with the fact that these young kids with a variety of personalities are randomly implanted into these video game character avatars that add a new dynamic to each of their characters. With Johnson playing a meek young boy and Black playing a self-centered girl, it adds a hilarious element to the story.

Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets (2017)

A space station is home to countless alien races, valerian and the city of a thousand planets.

Release Date July 21, 2017

Director Luc Besson

Cast Cara Delevingne, Rutger Hauer, Dane DeHaan, John Goodman, Clive Owen, Ethan Hawke, Kris Wu, Rihanna, Sam Spruell

Runtime 2h 17m

Adapted from a French comic series , Valerian and the City Of a Thousand Planets is one of the big bold sci-fi movies that are not seen as often in Hollywood anymore. This fantasy adventure takes place mostly on a giant space station that's home to a melting pot of alien societies.

When a dark force threatens the stability of the metropolis, special operatives Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) must find the menace and save their titular city of a thousand planets.

The movie comes from The Fifth Element director Luc Besson and features a similar outrageous sci-fi adventure. With tons of alien species, a vast galaxy of planets, and some futuristic weaponry and gadgets, it is a stylish and inventive story. Entering this vibrant and interesting sci-fi world is similar to the Ready Player One sequences that take the audience inside the Oasis .

Mortal Engines (2018)

An underrated sci-fi gem, mortal engines.

Release Date December 14, 2018

Director Christian Rivers

Cast Robbie Sheehan, Ronan Raftery, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Lang, Frankie Adams, Jihae, Hera Hilmar, Colin Salmon

Runtime 128minutes

Mortal Engines is one of the forgotten YA adaptations that came out in the wake of the success of The Hunger Games but failed to get the same attention. However, it is another intriguing futuristic world with a band of young heroes fighting against oppressors.

This film also takes place in a post-apocalyptic universe, where a giant roaming predator city seeks to take everything in its path. A mysterious young woman, an outcast boy, and a dangerous outlaw join forces to stop the destruction.

The screenplay was adapted by Lord of the Rings movie ringleaders Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson from Philip Reeve's young adult novel of the same name and the movie is brimming with wild designs and huge computer-generated battles. It captures the same sci-fi world-building mixed with the fight against corruption at the center of Ready Player One.

Ready Player One

Summary: When the creator of a virtual reality world called the OASIS dies, he releases a video in which he challenges all OASIS users to find his Easter Egg, which will give the finder his fortune. Wade Watts finds the first clue and starts a race for the Egg.The latest film from legendary director Steven Spielberg, Ready Player One is based on Ernest Cline's novel of the same name. The book was originally published in 2011 and received much acclaim, taking home an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association and the Prometheus Award in 2012. Critics enjoyed its nostalgic and heartfelt elements, with many feeling it has a fun and engaging narrative.Its story is noteworthy for making references to 1980s pop culture, including several movies Spielberg was involved with earlier in his career. Ready Player One 's OASIS virtual reality also inspired the real-life Oculus system.The film is set to have some clear differences from its source material. Spielberg has mentioned he is going to tone down the '80s references (though there are plenty in the trailer), and Ben Mendelsohn said his character in the movie is not loyal to the version from the novel. The intent appears to be crafting a story that maintains the spirit of Ready Player One , but has the leeway to go off in its own directions if need be.Want to know more about Ready Player One ?

Watch the Ready Player One Trailer

Every easter egg in the ready player one trailer, ben mendelsohn's ready player one character different from book.

Release Date: 2018-03-29

Cast: T.J. Miller, Hannah John-Kamen, Lena Waithe, Mark Rylance, Mckenna Grace, Letitia Wright, Ben Mendelsohn, Ralph Ineson, Simon Pegg, Olivia Cooke, Tye Sheridan

Director: Steven Spielberg

Genres: Sci-Fi, Thriller, Action

Rating: PG-13

Writers: Eric Eason, Zak Penn, Ernest Cline

Runtime: 2h 20m

Budget: 155175 million

Studio(s): Warner Bros. Pictures

Distributor(s): Warner Bros. Pictures