“Welcome to the rebellion, Wade.”

Justin’s rating: This entire movie seems predicated on VR ever becoming a thing. Video game companies have been trying and failing miserably at that since the ’90s.

Justin’s review: I’ve been dragging my feet on watching Ready Player One for seven years now, mostly because the book had a low-effort quality to its writing that I didn’t respect.* Plus, the whole thing seemed like ’80s Fan Service: The Book, which I suspected was to be turned into ’80s Fan Service: The Movie and absolutely regurgitate my entire childhood for a cheesy rehashed leftover casserole.

But it’s been a good while since I’ve watched any Steven Spielberg film I haven’t already seen a hundred times over, and I was at least mildly curious at a project that seemed aimed at a much younger Spielberg. You know, the one who directed so many ’80s (and beyond) classics that featured kid power, scifi, and a sense of wonder. So whatever, let’s do this, and we’ll see how it plays out.

It’s a dystopian 2045, where everyone practically lives in a VR world called OASIS to avoid the squalor of real life. Among these people is Wade (a rather dull Tye Sheridan), a teen who absolutely idolizes the creator of OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance) and is — like everyone else — trying to find a very secret Easter egg that Halliday put into his creation before his death. The person who finds it inherits the entire future internet, basically, and the company that runs it.

This means a massive virtual scavenger hunt for the “Gunters” who are following all of the obscure clues, three keys, and ’80s references to reach the prize. Of course, it’s not just random kids looking for the Easter egg; corporations want it too, and one called IOI employs tons of professional “Sixers” to scour the OASIS. This means that it’s not just a race between people to find the egg, but a brewing battle between the Gunters and Sixers to see which side is ultimately triumphant.

So if this sounds like an insane amount of backstory just for the basic premise… it is. The movie opens five years after the challenge begins, and nobody’s made any significant headway until Wade finds something that everyone else has overlooked. From that point on, the race and pressure is truly on, and Wade finds himself allying with a handful of Gunters to outsmart IOI.

I wasn’t wrong about the fan service. This is a movie about ’80s pop culture, and so anything and everything is up for grabs here. There’s RoboCop, the Iron Giant, the bike from Akira, the Back to the Future DeLorean, Mortal Kombat characters, Beetlejuice, Buckaroo Bonzai, and so on. One does wonder about the real world licensing fees that went into this $175 million flick.**

This all becomes a dividing line among viewers. Either you get a dopamine hit by seeing the reprise of some character or object from a famous film, or you feel like these are largely empty references for the sake of pandering. Put a slightly different way, either you think that Ready Player One genuinely reveres the ’80s, or you think that it’s shamelessly borrowing from it without adding any originality of its own.

This is my conflict with the book and movie, because I can appreciate both sides. Probably my biggest sticking point is the unearned adulation of Halliday, this guy who everyone reveres as a “god” but never shows charisma or any real wisdom. He’s just a guy who repackaged the internet with virtual goggles and then had worshippers love what he loved — which is the ’80s. So what?

I’m all for sharing passion for past decades’ pop culture. Heck, that’s practically the mantra for this review site. But the attitude here goes a little beyond that to something that makes my eye twitch a bit. It’s awkward. Not a deal breaker, but awkward.

If I can continue to tap-dance on these dividing lines, let me say that I don’t like how much of this movie is pure CGI. Like, maybe 80 to 85%? Did Spielberg even direct this or just have a programmer whip up a video game for us to watch for a couple hours? Granted, it’s a good-looking and flashy video game, but this is as far from Spielberg’s roots as I can imagine.

Sure, you can play “spot the references” (including some very obscure geeky ones), groove on the ’80s pop hits soundtrack, cringe at the absolutely terrible love story, and take in all of those pretty neon computer sights.

But what’s past all that? At best, Ready Player One is an overly long cartoon that tramples through countless beloved IPs toward a resolution that the Goonies did far better with a fraction of the budget and dozens of times more acting talent.

Huh. Maybe I’m not divided on this as much as I thought.

*A Redditor called the book “Twilight for boys” and I cannot think of a more perfect summation of its style and approach.

**E.T. had a budget of $10.5 million. Jaws was $9 million. Raiders of the Lost Ark $20 million. Jurassic Park $63 million. Just tossing some numbers out there for perspective.

Mike’s rating: Four out of five Galaxy Rangers teaming up with the Centurions to fight the Inhumanoids on Eternia to the tune of “You’ve got the Touch” by Stan Bush

Mike’s review:  There has been a backlash against geek culture in the past couple of years due to the actions of a few reprehensible garbage humans ruining everything for the rest of us who actually *like* to enjoy things. From the cringe-inducing #Gamergate trolls frothing about ethics in gaming journalism (which somehow translated to doxxing female indie creators) to relentless twitter harassment of anyone with the temerity to be in a Star Wars movie while also not being a white male, to the recent ousting of Jessica Price & Peter Fries by entitled Guild Wars jerks, it really does seem for all intents and purposes that geeks are the reason we can’t have any nice things. This in turn has led to a growing number of well-intentioned folks furthering the belief that geek culture needs to die a quick death, as that would solve the problem of people being mean on the internet forever and ever.

Do I even have to assert that I think this is overly simplistic, erroneous and counter-productive?

All this backlash is predicated on the presupposition that Geek culture has become “troublesome” for the more diplomatic, and “toxic” to those less interested in tact. The only problem with this line of thinking is that it takes a remarkably diverse, intelligent and yes, inclusive subculture and categorizes all of them with the same broad strokes–based on the actions of an infinitesimal minority of entitled professional victims drunk on the power of assumed anonymity. The end result of which is that sites like io9, who couldn’t stop praising Ernest Cline’s scifi novel Ready Player One at the time of its release are now pontificating on how “problematic” it is and decrying the practice of referencing past properties and franchises as somehow a portent of the death of originality in storytelling. This is all well and good, but means that Ready Player One is almost certain to get trashed more than it deserves due to people mindlessly jumping on the “Fanboys are toxic” bandwagon. This is a shame because Ready Player One is a terrific film featuring some amazing effects, great performances, an engaging story, Steven Spielberg operating at peak E.T. level, and a genuinely astonishing sequence involving one of the most iconic horror movies of all time.

It’s 2045 and the world has degraded almost to the point of needing a Thanos-style infinity snap. Pollution, energy shortages and over-population have driven society to the brink. Most people get away from it all by retreating into the virtual universe known as the Oasis, where a contest set by the game’s deceased creator in his last will and testament offers his mega-fortune and control of his gaming company to whoever can find an Easter egg hidden somewhere in the game’s massive universe of code. Wade Watts, known by his gamer tag “Parzival”, is one of the many egg hunters (truncated to “gunters”) obsessively searching for the egg. He could use the money as he lives in a vertically-piled trailer park slum known as the “the Stacks” with his aunt and her abusive boyfriend.  When he figures out how to clear the first challenge Parzival becomes a celebrity, and a target for IOI, an unscrupulous multinational telecommunications corporation (I know, I know: oxymoron) determined to win the contest and monetize the Oasis to the detriment of its users. To win, Wade will have to stay one step ahead of IOI and their CEO Nolan Sorrento, utilize his knowledge of Halliday’s life and interests, clan up with some of his online peeps and face the real world he’s been so desperate to escape all his life.

About 60% of the movie is CGI and motion-capture, taking place in the virtual Reality of the Oasis, while the remaining 40% is relegated to the real world. The scenes in the Oasis are photo-realistic enough to get into the action while still being fantastical enough to give the viewer the feeling of being immersed in a video game. At one point our heroes are transported into a perfect recreation of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece The Shining and the result is one of the most astonishing, technically masterful set-pieces in modern cinema. The whole cast do a great job walking the tight rope between live-action and motion capture performances. Ben Mendelsohn dials the smarm to unheard-of levels as Sorrento and his ongoing association/rivalry with Hannah John Kamen’s ruthless fixer F’nale is always fun to watch. The real MVP award though goes to Mark Rylance. As the eccentric “Bill Gates by way of Willy Wonka” game creator James Halliday, Rylance exhibits masterful scene thievery whenever he’s on screen. And of course Simon Pegg is always a sure thing.

There are some gripes. The bleak state of the real world is mostly left to the imagination, and at times I felt like a few scenes depicting the wasteland referred to in the novel would have brought the story up a notch. It feels like a wasted opportunity to not show the contrast between the movie’s attractive illusion and harsh reality.  Also, some of the novel’s storylines tend to strain credulity once they’ve been streamlined to fit within the movie’s two-hour runtime. The character’s Daito and Sho (Shoto in the novel) get shelved pretty hard. And yes, some of the dialog does approach cringe-worthy.

Critics of this movie have been more than vocal about what they view as a convoluted moral and the utilization of pop-culture references in lieu of storytelling, which is kind of missing the forest for the trees. Suggesting that the movie flip-flops between depicting the Oasis as a wonderful communications tool at some points and a dangerous distraction from the real world crumbling around you at others (an obvious stand-in for the internet itself) suggests that in reality it has to be one way or another. This is overly simplistic and beneath a filmmaker like Spielberg, who instead wisely posits the amazing possibilities of VR while still issuing a warning that it can be taken too far. Fantasy and storytelling is a way of connecting, and helping us understand ourselves as human beings, but you can’t live in it. Meanwhile, while the pop culture sci-fi, fantasy, comic book, music and movie references come fast and steady, they never threaten to overwhelm the overall plot. They’re more like seasoning, adding to the overall flavor without overpowering it. At its heart, Ready Player One is ultimately a wish-fulfillment fantasy, but when you’ve got Spielberg at the helm, pushing the boundaries of movie technology, is that really such a bad thing?

Intermission!