READY PLAYER ONE – A Review by Hollywood Hernandez
Ready Player One is a futuristic fantasy directed by Steven Spielberg. The movie, although set in the year 2045, is an homage to 80's video games. In the movie a game developer dies and releases a video challenge to all players of his reality game, Oasis, to find an "egg" inside the virtual world of the game. The player who finds the "egg" will be entitled to his billion dollar fortune.
Most of the movie is set in virtual reality, with the real players playing as avatars inside the game. By winning gold coins you can be whoever you want to be inside the game; however, if you "get killed" in the game you lose all of your credits and have to start all over again from scratch. This causes a great deal of stress for the real people who are playing the game and trying to win the video game makers fortune.
Spielberg was looking for unknown actors to play the roles in Ready Player One. Wade aka Parzival (Tye Sheridan who played Cyclops in X-Men Apocalypse) is the game's top player. He has a best friend, who he's never met in real life, inside the game, and he even has a girlfriend Art3mis (Olivia Cooke, an almost unknown British actress).
When Parzival starts to figure out that the secret to the game, which is not necessarily to win but to just enjoy the challenge of the games; he becomes known to a giant corporation named as IOI. The company designs games for the Oasis system and their plan is to increase their profits by selling more gameware with the hopes that no one ever figures out the game.
When Parzival gets close to beating the system and finding the "egg", the game suddenly spills over into the real world, from the virtual world, as the giant company tries to find him and shut him down.
Director Steven Spielberg uses his team from Industrial Light and Magic and Digital Domain to create a stunning world on the big screen, both inside the virtual reality world and in the real world that is set in the future.
The movie uses pop icons from the 80's like a DeLorean car, that Parvival drives in the video game, and video characters in the games like Batman and Beetlejuice. The movie takes you back to "the good old days" when kids went down to the local video arcade at the local mall with a pocket full of quarters. I loved it!
The movie is based on a bestselling novel and some hardcore fans of that book may not be pleased with some of the things that have been omitted from the movie, but as a casual fan, I found Ready Player One to be a very entertaining movie. The movie is rated PG-13 and has a run time of 2 hours and 20 minutes. On my "Hollywood Popcorn Scale" it gets a JUMBO.
Movie Site: readyplayeronemovie.com
