
Hot Take: Ready Player One
Hot Take: This nostalgia stuffed adaptation of Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel can be fun at times but sometimes feels like the movie equivalent of a greatest hits album from one of the best directors of our time. Like a greatest hits album, it’s fun to experience but feels all too familiar to be anything better than good.
The trailer for Ready Player One is enough to tell you if you’re going to enjoy the full-length film. The 2 hour, 19 minute glimpse into a fictional dystopian future where the world has gotten lost inside a virtual world known as the Oasis is also an opportunity for director Steven Spielberg to flex his science fiction muscles which he’s not done much of in recent memory. Expectations for this film were indeed high and, in some ways, it delivered but, overall, Ready Player One falls short of greatness as the pop culture references and not the characters or the plot are what keep you entertained. By the third act, when the characters and the story become what’s most important, Ready Player One‘s shoddy stitching can no longer be hidden underneath all that nostalgic fabric layered over top of what essentially is a generic flick featuring a Mary Sue of a protagonist in Wade Watts and a relatively derivative storyline that not only borrows its references from pop culture but blends up some of the classic storylines we’ve seen in Sci-Fi and serves it up as freshly squeezed. Is that a hint of The Matrix that I taste?Read More →