'Ready Player One'

When playing a game, the players either win or lose, games are winner/loser situations.

When seeing Ready Player One, the moviegoer becomes a player. If you go to see this film with the idea of:

1) Seeing a high quality Spielberg film, you win. He has managed to artfully blend touches from the past, peeks at the present, with looks into the future. The compelling story appeals to all audiences and never becomes tedious or trite.

2) Enjoying Academy Award performances by actors, you lose. The actors spend little time as real people. They are “Avatar-ized” into creatures of the future, flying around virtual reality landscapes bearing little relationship to real human beings or places.

3) Seeing new and inventive special effects, you win. The creative departments have imagined highly original sets and designed things and images not seen before. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, something new and wondrous appears on the screen.

4) Finding a story with an original into-the-future video game to play, you win. The film is based on the highly original, 2010 Ernest Cline book of the same name - another look into what the future might be in 2045.

Anorak/Halliday (Mark Rylance) is the creator of virtual reality video games. For his final video game, he creates a virtual universe utopia called OASIS. On his death, this final game is released to the world. The goal of the game is to find the Easter Egg. The winning player must first find three keys to unlock the egg. This accomplished, the winner then becomes heir to the Anorak/Halliday fortune and complete access and control of OASIS. Parzival/Wade (Tye Sheridan) lives in the improvised world of 2045 in a community known as The Stacks, a suburb of the world’s largest city – Cincinnati, Ohio. Rather than face the bleak, real-life world in and around the Stacks, he wakes up in the morning and dons his virtual-reality headset and travels to better places.

He is intrigued by the OASIS challenge and after much work, discovers the first of three keys that will unlock the Easter Egg and all the power and riches it holds. During his search for the next key he encounters Art3mis/Samantha (Olivia Cooke) who has also accepted the egg challenge. Working closely together, they achieve that goal and while doing so he falls in love with her.

They enlist the help of three additional players. This newly formed group of video game players call themselves the High Five. As they search for the third key, they encounter the evil forces of 101, a sinister organization whose goal is the same as theirs, to find the egg, and thereby gain financial and political control of OASIS – only for more pernicious reasons.

Directed by Steven Spielberg, this “should see” movie runs 140 Minutes.

johan@beachcomber.news