The much anticipated and hugely hyped latest directorial offering from cinematic wunderkind Steven Spielberg is visually stunning, set substantially in a fantastical virtual world of 2045 called the OASIS. An early visit to the OASIS involves a race and the experience is genuinely thrilling. The movie is also visually rich with an unbelievable number of allusions to (mainly 1970s and 1980s) pop culture – by some estimates around 300 so-called Easter eggs. It seems that every scene, every wall, every item of clothing features some (often subtle, even opaque) reference.<\/p>\n
This is an enormous artifice to place on the shoulders of a largely young and under-known cast, notably Tye Sheridan as Parzival\/Wade and Olivia Cooke as Art3mis\/Samantha and the only stars in the work are British actors Mark Rylance and Simon Pegg who are hardly recognisable in their roles. Above all, this is a film which needs a more engaging plot as the discovery of three keys is just so, well, like a video game.<\/p>\n
The problem could be that I’m not in the demographic at whom the movie is pitched and with whom it is doing so well: I’ve never played a video game and a lot of the pop culture appearances simply passed me by (for instance, I haven’t see “The Shining” and don’t want to). The clue is in the source material, since the movie is based on a young adult novel by Ernest Cline. But I acknowledge that for many cinemagoers – especially younger ones – “Ready Player One” is going to be a smash that will need to be seen several times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The much anticipated and hugely hyped latest directorial offering from cinematic wunderkind Steven Spielberg is visually stunning, set substantially in a fantastical virtual world of 2045 called the OASIS. An early visit to the OASIS involves a race and the experience is genuinely thrilling. The movie is also visually rich with an unbelievable number of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22861"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22868,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22861\/revisions\/22868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}