Ready Player One Wins

Ready Player One (2018)

I just saw Ready Player One and I loved it. It was immersive, gorgeous, and epic. The two and a half hour run-time zoomed, filling what would be slow moments with grand transitions and nerdy references. When the characters were in the Oasis (the digital world) I felt like I did when I first watched Star Wars, or Indiana Jones, or Jurassic Park. My heart was racing with excitement as I saw flashes of deep cut references and visions of a future within my reach. It was an amazing feeling of retrospection and prospection at the same time and made me feel emotions that movies rarely evoke. The grandeur of the Oasis was tempered by scenes of a bleakly realistic future. The characters felt weaker and the colors were saturated in the real world, which I thought was an excellent directorial choice. But as the story progressed in both worlds, the real world began to creep towards the vision that was the digital world. The music was brilliant as well. Alan Silvestri, best known for Back to the Future's soundtrack, was the perfect choice to bring the movie to life through music, and twinges of Back to the Future are littered throughout the soundtrack. The only problem I had was that you only got true development in four characters, Tye Sheridan's Parzival/Wade, Olivia Cooke's Artemis/Samantha, Ben Mendelsohn's Sorrento, and Mark Rylance's Halladay. It would have been nice to know more about some of the other characters and their motivations to play. The characters that were developed were enough to drive the story, though. On its surface, Ready Player One is a movie just about escaping reality, but at its core, it is a story about finding something worth being real for. It was a love letter to the tools for escape we all have, from video games, to TV, to movies, but no matter how awful things get, we can't just escape and need to face life. Before I give my score, I want to give a couple of disclaimers. First, I never read Ernest Cline's book that the movie is based on. Second, I understand that I am in the bullseye of the target audience. I am a person who grew up through most of the birth of video games and still uses media to escape from my troubles, even if it is only for 2 hours at a shot. I know that seeing at least one movie a week in theaters is not normal, but I still love doing it. Third, I have been hoping for a world like the Oasis in the back of my mind for decades. I am very biased, but I loved this movie. I give it 3 out of 3 keys to the final Easter Egg in the Oasis.