Ready Player One (2018)

Ready Player One is a very entertaining ball of fun, abound with clever references (in homage?) to pop culture high and low. I can only imagine the legal nightmare it was to acquire rights to use all of these references. I think there is perhaps a little disconnect with the audience. No one is going to understand all of the references, it simply runs too wide from Citizen Kane to Minecraft.  The book was originally written by a man of a certain time for whom these references were very relevant to his life. A lot of these references were dropped or changed or made anew and now even a man of his age would not understand all of the references. The target audience of children and teens will not understand many of the references that predate their births. And it's a real shame because a lot of the fun is spotting the Easter eggs. I'm almost certain Samantha's birthmark is a reference to something, but I've yet to figure it out (it is otherwise an oddly specific character trait that doesn't really matter to the plot).

The plot is a quest, to acquire the three keys and win the game (quite similar to Spy Kids 3 plus a dystopian future with debtors prison and trailer park cities). From what I understand, the plot was condensed and simplified from the book. And for the most part, it was pretty cohesive. There was not much lag time between discoveries--it's constantly moving forward, but the consequence of that is they figure out the clues too quickly to be believable. Something I really appreciated was the emphasis on research. There is no brute forcing through this game. You have to hunker down at the library and do some good old fashioned research.

The best part of the movie is the middle. The quest for the second key in a recreation of The Shining. I've read a lot of criticism about character development and plot. The most fully developed character is the dead one, Halliday, the tragic Wozniak. The plot of the movie interestingly builds his character as we discover more about him by advancing in the quest, and in that sense the plot is actually quite clever. Though I can understand that we don't know too much about the rest of the characters, including the protagonist. We don't fully understand what drives him other than the purity and sanctity of nerd culture. Oh, and the immersive CGI is pretty cool.