'Ready Player One' Review Roundup: Sweet Pop-Culture Experience That Only Spielberg Can Deliver
"Ready Player One" is Steven Spielberg's take on the New York Times bestselling book by Ernest Cline, and like anything the director has had a hand in, the movie adaptation is as lavish as anything in its portrayal of the virtual world of OASIS. What do the critics think of Spielberg's latest production?
The promotion effort for "Ready Player One" has proudly included Rotten Tomatoes' "Certified Fresh" rating in their materials, but the actual numbers on the review aggregation website still leave room for improvement. The movie is currently at a passable 74 percent with an average rating of 6.9 out of ten, which might be seen as middling for an extravagant production like this.
The site summed up the 308 reviews and counting, including 228 "Fresh" reviews and 80 "Rotten" ones, on a mainly positive note. As the consensus would have it, "Ready Player One" is a "sweetly nostalgic" cinema experience, one that adds another title that easily belongs to Spielberg's outstanding film work.
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It's a movie that showcases his strengths, after all, especially in delivering a heartwarming story in a setting that's anything but sweet.
"Ready Player One" is set in the near future, the year 2045, where cities are overgrown and the world is heading to disaster. It's also a world where people have sought solace in the OASIS virtual reality world to escape the hardships of what can only be described as a harsh and dismal cityscape.
"OASIS creator James Halliday left his immense fortune and control of the Oasis to the winner of a contest designed to find a worthy heir. When unlikely hero Wade Watts conquers the first challenge of the reality-bending treasure hunt, he and his friends - known as the High Five - are hurled into a fantastical universe of discovery and danger to save the OASIS and their world," the plot synopsis of "Ready Player One" neatly summed up the story.
Cinema Blend's Conner Schwerdtfege pointed out how the plot is not the strong point of the movie at all. Instead, it's the technical execution alongside Spielberg's knack for finding emotion in the source material that made it all work. It's not peak Spielberg, though, which marks it a 3.5 out of five.
Entertainment Weekly's Chris Nashawaty agrees, noting that "Ready Player One" is as Spielberg as it gets with the kid triumphing over adult greed and a cynical world, at least until it overstays its welcome for quite a bit near the end.
The Hollywood Reporter's John DeFore was a fan of the movie as well, particularly when it comes to the changes Spielberg and the "Ready Player One" production team made to the source material. The result is something that's as obsessed with pop culture as the original but updated for this year and more.
"Ready Player One" is well into its first week, having come out on March 29 to theaters everywhere.
