One of the common gripes with Ernest Cline`s phenomenally popular novel Ready Player One is that it merely pays lip service to the retro pop culture it endlessly references. Simply listing off things from the `80s that people love is a shallow way to evoke nostalgia, and it fails to capture anything substantive about the movies, music, and video games being referenced. Steven Spielberg`s Ready Player One adaptation tumbles down the same pitfall (ahem), and yet, like the book, it manages to be pretty compelling anyway.Set in 2045, Ready Player One follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and his friends (Olivia Cooke`s Artemis, Lena Waithe`s Aech, Win Morisaki`s Daito, and Philip Zhao`s Sho) on their quest to win control of a virtual world called The Oasis. The concept of a VR app that combines video games with social space is already pretty familiar to us in 2018, and in many ways the movie`s vision of the future lines up with what we might expect this stuff to really look like in a couple of decades.There are omni-directional treadmills, full-body haptic feedback suits, and many more hardware accessories that let people interact with The Oasis. Because basically everyone in the world--regardless of age, gender, race, or any other demographic factors--accesses The Oasis, the differences in the technology poor and wealthy people use is a constant factor throughout the movie. Wade upgrades his gear as soon as he starts accruing cash, while his deadbeat step-uncle blows all their savings on in-game upgrades trying to win a valuable artifact, which he`d hoped would pay for a new house.Within this world, the game`s creator, James Halliday--played by a slightly uncanny-looking Mark Rylance--hid three keys that will unlock his ultimate Easter egg: a series of hidden steps that will grant the winning `Gunter` (egg hunters) total, legal control of The Oasis (making them filthy rich in the process). If you`ll pardon another reference, it becomes the Holy Grail for an entire gene ...
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