In 2011, author Ernest Cline wrote a book titled “Ready Player One.” It was a culmination of a bunch of things from the 1980’s. Everything from “Back to the Future” to “Wargames” is featured in this beautiful book.

SPOILER ALERT: This review is going to be very biased, as you can tell.

The movie was directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Zak Penn. It stars Tie Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelson, and a few other actors whom I cannot recall by name (even if they gave better performances than the cast above.) Now, there are a lot of reviews that will give it nothing but praise…and maybe a 7.5 (I am looking at you IGN.) Regardless, after seeing the movie, and reading the book over seven times, I present a different opinion.

Since this movie is primarily in CGI (Computer Generated Imagery), let us analyze how well they look. Some of the movie looked nice. Anything that was not a character looked fine. However, most of the characters looked rather reptilian (with the exception being Aech, who was the best-looking CG character in the whole movie). The one most guilty of this would be Daito and Sho (who was renamed for some reason…?) with their costumes. Also, the character of Parzival (the main character played by Sheridan) in all the promotional art and merchandise art is guilty of this; but I digress. Other than that, it looks enough.

The next thing to analyze would be the story itself and…*exhales deeply enough that the person across the room can hear me*…this story was generally mediocre. The general premise was the same as the book: teenager Wade Watts goes on an epic quest with his friends in order to win a video game contest after the world is in ruin, and the video game (known as the OASIS) is the only joy anyone ever finds. At the same time, they must combat a capitalistic company (called IOI in both works) bent on ruining the game and making it a playground for the rich.

If that sounds like a mouthful, that is because it is. The basic premise can be boiled down to “poor kid and friends compete in a video game contest.”

While the book decided to keep an interesting balance between the real world and the OASIS, the movie decided to bet all its money (and time…and effort…and Spielberg) towards the OASIS and its fancy motion-capture technology. The real world is but a speck of dust on the weird plant that is the OASIS, and the audience members are but elephants, gazing down on the whole flower instead of the speck of dust, faintly hearing the speck call out to us, as it desperately wanted to be heard. But alas, the real-world segments did not shine so brightly and were very rare.

Meanwhile, the motion capture CG world of the OASIS was at the forefront (of the movie and the advertisements) in all its nostalgic glory. The true heart of the book was that the real world genuinely seemed like a problem as it faded increasingly into a state of irreversible decay. However, the movie barely mentions the real world at all.

Now to address the elephant in the room: the many, many references to pop culture.

This is where the movie gets most of its praise. The movie uses pop culture references to no end, from the movie Akira to the Iron Giant to The Shining to Overwatch, they are all there. Meanwhile, the book uses its references sparingly and limits the references to the 70’s and 80’s. The book uses this to meld the world together by having everything revolve around the contest itself. The movie, on the other hand, takes any and all moments to shower its audience with pop culture references. At one point in the movie, it feels like the references were the whole movie. However, there were a few moments that genuinely made looking for references fun.

BRIEF SPOILER ALERT!

My favorite references in the movie were when Daito called up the original Gundam (from 1979) and the original Mobile Suit Gundam logo could be seen on his VR goggles. Then later, a poster for Rush’s 2112 album (from 1976) could be seen on the ceiling of James Halliday’s (the creator of the OASIS and the hunt) old room, then a few minutes later, the character Aech (her human counterpart, who in the movie did not receive a name, so I will refer to her as Helen, the name given by the book) had the exact same image…only on her shirt. It was the little things that made the movie more enjoyable than it actually was.

SPOILER ALERT HATH NOW FADED AWAY…

All and all, it was a good-looking movie, but it did not have the heart that the book had. And despite what the Internet may lead you to believe (and be ostracized for believing differently) the book had a heart. The book was a warning as to what was to come in the near future. It was a dire warning towards escapist fantasy. The movie… the movie was a melting pot of references. However, who am I to judge? If you want to go see it, then please, be my guest. But, if you refuse to take my word for it, then please watch this review by Jim Grisel, who puts it into much better words than I could ever do. If this were an IGN review, I would give this movie a 7.5/10. But I am (thankfully) not IGN, so I will give it two Iron Giants out of five. You will have a much better time watching Rampage, which came out on 4/13/18, or the upcoming Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War, which comes out on 4/27/18.