Ready Player One (2018)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2018
	Director: Steven Spielberg (E.T., Jaws, Schindler's List, Jurassic Park)
	Actors: Tye Sheridan (X-men: Apocalypse), Olivia Cooke (Me and Earl and the dying Girl), Ben Mendelsohn (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story)
	Country: USA
	Genre: SF
	Conditions of visioning: 08.04.2018, Cineplanet Costanera Xtreme
Synopsis: In a grey Future, the Oasis is the virtual world in which everybody lives. Wade (Tye) competes to win one of the hidden keys left by the creator to be found, and that will give the winner full control of the Oasis.
Review: Steven Spielberg was once renowned for his talent for delivering successively Genre (or in particular SF) blockbusters and (historical) dramas, both of the same quality and both Oscar-worthy.  But it seems to me he had lost touch with the Genre in the past years: The BFG was a fantastic children's tale, The Adventures of Tintin and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull were more Adventure, War of the Worlds was unsuccessful and in fact the last SF movie to be remembered in his filmography was Minority Report in 2002. That's quite a while for the director that had blown my mind with Jurassic Park back in 1993. Needless to say that I had quite some expectations before viewing Ready Player One, especially after watching the energetic trailer. So I chose the cinema with the largest screen I could find, sat quite close to it for immersion and went at an unlikely time to avoid the popcorn-eating crowd. Good conditions to enjoy that great show. And what a show! The movie puts you in the mood with a car chase even more exhilarating than the ones in Speed Racer. But as any good Spielberg, it doesn't forget its characters and has the usual Romance, buddy-friendship, heroism saving the day, small guy against big corporation etc... Let me go back one step: Ready Player One contains two brilliant ideas: 1) as I have been saying for several years, setting a movie in a virtual World is all benefits for a big family production because you can just show anything, and even kill people because it doesn't mater as they can re-spawn, and 2) the pop-culture references which are not light or hidden but displayed in big. I can imagine the legal rights negotiations behind all that, and in fact we see many pop culture references but only ones from the 80's, and ones the movie studio could negotiate. But that's alright: I had a smile on my face all along when watching Back to the Future's DeLorean, hearing three music notes from the theme of that movie, having a Zemeckis cube in the plot and a million other details. And oh my God the final battle!! And the groups of kids running in the streets like their avatars fighting for the good side. Beautiful. The story is quite straight-forward, so it doesn't surprise but doesn't disappoint. Only after leaving the theater did I realize the weak points of that movie: even worst than when the usual American movies identify the entire World with the USA, in Ready Player One it is identified to one City and characters that meet online live five minutes apart in the real world. Also the final battle involves tens of thousands, not billions like it should. Another weak point is that I don't know how the movie will age, as it is surfing on the current wave of 80's nostalgia and contains time references strongly tied to today, like the emergence of Virtual Reality helmets and of drones. I am just trying not to think about that and rather remember the spectacle.
Rating: 8 /10