Ready Player One

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Multiple Personality Movie Reviews
Ready Player One is a total adrenaline rush of action and pop culture references that whizzes past you at 100 miles per hour. The film is set in 2045 where everyone spends all of their time in a virtual reality world called the Oasis. The creator of the Oasis left behind an easter egg and if you're the first person to find it, you gain total control of the Oasis, fame, and fortune.
The main characters Wade, or as he's known in the Oasis Parzival, and Samantha, or as she's known Artemis, are the top players in the game and they follow the standard action movie plot points as they unlock the secrets to winning.
There's added danger at every step of the way because Sorrento, the leader of an evil organization called I-O-I, wants to win control of the Oasis for himself and will stop at nothing to defeat Wade and Samantha. Sorrento is played by Ben Mendelsohn who was also Orson Krennic in Rogue One. So, I think he's got the role of evil villain nailed down.
Right from the very beginning we get a huge battle scene on Planet Doom and immediately after that, we get an awesome car race through a digital New York City where obstacles appear out of nowhere. One of the obstacles is King friggin' Kong. This movie has to have set the record for most pop culture references in a two hour movie.
My favorite sequence in the entire movie is when the characters are searching for clues in the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. The creepy twin girls. The blood elevators. Room 237. It's all there and it's all amazing. I wish more of the movie was like that sequence.
After a while though, the pop culture references started to feel like a crutch. Something director Steven Spielberg could throw in to distract the audience from the predictable story line or cliche movie elements.
I'm also not normally one to care about these things, but the film is a little bit sexist. Samantha's character is given a better backstory than Wade and should be the true protagonist, but she is ultimately relegated to damsel in distress. There is also a lot of build up to Wade and Samantha meeting in real life, since they don't know each other outside of the Oasis. Yet, all of the focus is on if Wade will find Samantha attractive. No one cares what Samantha will think of Wade at all.
Overall, his movie will keep you entertained from start to finish, offering a little something for everyone, especially nostalgic pop culture fans. There's non stop action, suspense, humor, and of course the pop culture references. Even if you don't get all 100% of the references, you'll still be able to enjoy the overall story. You should definitely see this on the big screen to appreciate the cinematic wonder that Spielberg has created.
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Raven73's Avatar
Boldly going.
I like your review, WhoseReview, but I have to disagree about Samantha being a "damsel in distress".
WARNING: "spoilers" spoilers below
Wade would not have been able to win without Samantha. It was a team effort, and Wade recognized that - he split the winnings with her. Also, she didn't fall head-over-heals for Wade right away; as a matter of fact, she rejected Wade's declaration of love for half the movie. He had to earn her love.



I like watching movies , I love learning from them
Great Review! I just wanted to add that the message/lesson that the creator of the Oasis gives to Wade is very important in our era : However beautiful games, the internet and virtual reality may be, we ought to live in the real world. Because this is the only real one
Ready Player One is a total adrenaline rush of action and pop culture references that whizzes past you at 100 miles per hour. The film is set in 2045 where everyone spends all of their time in a virtual reality world called the Oasis. The creator of the Oasis left behind an easter egg and if you're the first person to find it, you gain total control of the Oasis, fame, and fortune.
The main characters Wade, or as he's known in the Oasis Parzival, and Samantha, or as she's known Artemis, are the top players in the game and they follow the standard action movie plot points as they unlock the secrets to winning.
There's added danger at every step of the way because Sorrento, the leader of an evil organization called I-O-I, wants to win control of the Oasis for himself and will stop at nothing to defeat Wade and Samantha. Sorrento is played by Ben Mendelsohn who was also Orson Krennic in Rogue One. So, I think he's got the role of evil villain nailed down.
Right from the very beginning we get a huge battle scene on Planet Doom and immediately after that, we get an awesome car race through a digital New York City where obstacles appear out of nowhere. One of the obstacles is King friggin' Kong. This movie has to have set the record for most pop culture references in a two hour movie.
My favorite sequence in the entire movie is when the characters are searching for clues in the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. The creepy twin girls. The blood elevators. Room 237. It's all there and it's all amazing. I wish more of the movie was like that sequence.
After a while though, the pop culture references started to feel like a crutch. Something director Steven Spielberg could throw in to distract the audience from the predictable story line or cliche movie elements.
I'm also not normally one to care about these things, but the film is a little bit sexist. Samantha's character is given a better backstory than Wade and should be the true protagonist, but she is ultimately relegated to damsel in distress. There is also a lot of build up to Wade and Samantha meeting in real life, since they don't know each other outside of the Oasis. Yet, all of the focus is on if Wade will find Samantha attractive. No one cares what Samantha will think of Wade at all.
Overall, his movie will keep you entertained from start to finish, offering a little something for everyone, especially nostalgic pop culture fans. There's non stop action, suspense, humor, and of course the pop culture references. Even if you don't get all 100% of the references, you'll still be able to enjoy the overall story. You should definitely see this on the big screen to appreciate the cinematic wonder that Spielberg has created.



Multiple Personality Movie Reviews
They could have just as easily made Samantha the protagonist and reversed the roles.
WARNING: "spoilers" spoilers below
Samantha has better justification for wanting to take down IOI to begin with because of her family history. Wade just wants to win because it would be cool. He only jumps on board when Samantha, playing the manic pixie dream girl and actually looking kind of like a pixie, convinces him to go against IOI. After Wade jumps on the bandwagon, she is then relegated to getting captured and saved by Wade. First, he saves her from the loyalty center. Second, he saves her from being captured by Sorrento when he shoots her out of the game.
At first he doesn't earn her love, he just has to convince her that HE thinks she's pretty. Then when she gets upset with him, he has to convince her that he's taken up HER cause to fight the IOI. She becomes a character that NEEDS Wade to do all of these things for her, when she was perfectly capable of doing all of these things before he showed up.

But I know the target audience of the film is male, so obviously how they have it works better for them. And in the end, it really doesn't matter because I still enjoyed the movie.


I like your review, WhoseReview, but I have to disagree about Samantha being a "damsel in distress".
WARNING: "spoilers" spoilers below
Wade would not have been able to win without Samantha. It was a team effort, and Wade recognized that - he split the winnings with her. Also, she didn't fall head-over-heals for Wade right away; as a matter of fact, she rejected Wade's declaration of love for half the movie. He had to earn her love.



Raven73's Avatar
Boldly going.
Wade was motivated too -
WARNING: "spoiler" spoilers below
his home was targeted and destroyed by IOI.


The movie could have been bolder, for sure.
WARNING: "spoiler" spoilers below
If Artemis had turned out to be H, for example, or if Artemis turned out to be a guy. But Ready Player One isn't social satire or even a bold social statement - it's a fun movie, and there's nothing wrong with that.



Haven't seen this yet, and I admit it looks amazing in the trailers...


But the marketing has been awful.
I never knew about it until about 2 weeks ago... and a friend of mine I mentioned it to yesterday, still hasn't seen any trailers for it.


Poor marketing is gonna hurt this movie I reckon.



Registered User
The virtual reality adventure sacrifices depth for chaotic genre pleasures

Based on Ernest Cline’s 2011 sci-fi bestseller, Steven Spielberg’s busy adaptation is metatextual in its fascination with the limits, loopholes and crossover points of the self-contained universes artists create. The year is 2045, and in the Stacks, a greying junkyard in Columbus, Ohio, humans reside in trailers but live in the Oasis, a fantastically detailed Technicolor virtual reality accessed through headsets and haptic suits. Before he died, its creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), planted an Easter egg in his virtual world. The first person to reach it – after finding three hidden keys and their clues – would inherit his fortune, as well as the Oasis itself. Leading the race is gamer geek Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) via his avatar Parzival, alongside his virtual friends, the orc-like Aech (whose real-world reveal I won’t spoil here) and Olivia Cooke’s Art3mis, a spiky, sexy redhead whom Wade begins to fall for.

The denseness of the film’s pop culture references is both a pleasure and a distraction, though a set piece involving Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and a librarian called The Curator – who looks suspiciously like 90s search engine avatar Ask Jeeves – are very funny. More interesting, though, is Rylance’s Halliday, a powerful but desperately sad and lonely genius who we learn about through the Halliday Journals, a virtual archive of his memories.

For all the complexity of the film’s chaotic visual world, its central ideas (“A creator who hates his creation”, posits one of Halliday’s clues; the track Everybody Wants to Rule the World underscores a flashback) are simplistic. This is hardly Spielberg’s most creative genre work – but helped along by Back to the Future composer Alan Silvestri, whose score mimics the director’s John Williams collaborations, it does speak to the joyful, unapologetic classicism of his film-making style. If you’re susceptible to that (and I am), this should still deliver a dopamine hit.



“Sugar is the most important thing in my life…”
I haven't even made it through the first 100 pages and I can say this would have been better on tv.



“Sugar is the most important thing in my life…”
Yeah... They didn't even address it. It just was.

The Copper Key trial in the movie was good, but the book version was so much better.



Also answers to Jabba
How did they power their gear in the van while driving?
Some sort of battery probably. Wade powered the whole cargo box from which he connected to Oasis the same way at the beginning of the film.



Kinda in the same boat tbh.


Something about the poor marketing, to me at least, smacked of failure... so I waited for the DVD.


Not bad, but for a Spielberg movie, a lot of it felt cashed in.
The special effects were solid though.
.


Which reminds me, need to add this to my Seen Log too.



Welcome to the human race...
I went in with low expectations, gave it a
, and still can't shake the feeling that I'm being way too easy on it.
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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0



Ok so, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind... Spielberg could get license to use anything from the movie to appear as a cameo in Ready Player One?

Check this out at 1hr 11 minutes...
I've taken this as a screenshot directly from the DVD as there is literally NOTHING online about it...

Nobody has noticed this...



See it?



Welcome to the human race...
My guess was that the pattern on the wall in the background resembled the wall of lights that was set up at the end of Close Encounters.



The trick is not minding
My guess was that the pattern on the wall in the background resembled the wall of lights that was set up at the end of Close Encounters.
That’s my take on it as well. Nice Easter egg, if intentional



Yeah the dirty windows in the background look like the light panel

I've looked online for it but nobody seems to have noticed it.