Ready Player One (2018) ***

I don't see movies in the cinema all that often. When I do, I like to play a little game. After all the commercials, trailers, subliminal hunger messages, and cellphone-silencing reminders have finished, I try to remember what movie I am actually there to see. Sometimes it takes some serious brain-racking! Before “Ready Player One”, they must have shown us at least ten previews, mostly for lame-looking movies aimed at young teens. By the time the feature started, my brain felt like mush. I couldn't remember what I was there to see, and my expectations were creeping downward. Fortunately, “Ready Player One” surprised me by being a pretty entertaining action movie.

Tye Sheridan (young Cyclops from the new X-men films) plays Wade Watts, an orphaned, young man living with his white-trash aunt in a multi-tiered trailer park called The Stacks. That's not really where he spends most of his time, though. Everybody in this crummy, post-apocalyptic America spends as much time as they can wearing virtual-reality goggles and gloves, living in the virtual world of The Oasis.

The Oasis was created by an Aspergian genius named Halliday. Before his death, Halliday inserted some Easter Eggs into the game, a set of challenges leading to keys, which lead to the grand prize, which is ownership of The Oasis itself. With most of the world regularly plugged into The Oasis, this is a prize worth billions. Vying for the Egg are regular egg hunters (“ghunters”) like Wade, as well as big corporations like IOI, which employs hundreds of gamers and researchers to hunt the keys. Thus, rich and poor alike spend their time in The Oasis researching Halliday's life and playing games that they think might lead to the keys.

While everyone vies for control of this virtual world, the real world is falling apart. As Wade says, “...everyone stopped trying to solve problems and just started trying to outlive them.” We don't get to see a lot of the real world in this film, but you get the impression of a world that is corrupt, filthy, and lacking a middle class.

Forget the real world, however, because the Oasis looks AMAZING! It's a beautifully-animated world full of fantastical characters and stunning action. It's no wonder the real-world scenes look dull and drab by comparison, but it's a shameful waste of some talented real-life actors. Tye Sheridan is a perfectly serviceable, young actor. Olivia Cooke has loads of charm, which probably explains why she is suddenly in everything. Lena Waithe is amazing on the Netflix show “Master of None”. They all do fine voice-acting in the Oasis, but none of them gets to do a whole lot in the real-life portion of this movie, which, seriously, looks like a cheap, film-school project grafted onto a high-octane, animated action movie. That isn't a dealbreaker. This just looks like a mostly-animated film where they didn't have a lot of money to spend on the live-action part of the movie. It's kind of off-putting for a Steven Spielberg production, though.

“Ready Player One” is young-adult dystopian fiction, and at the end of the day, it's intended for kids. There are movies like “The Hunger Games” that are able to transcend that genre, but “Ready Player One,” while entertaining, is not transcendent. One thing about YA fiction is that it tries to get kids to think about things. “Ready Player One” tries to have a message about how video games are fun and all, but the real world is what is real and important. The film undercuts that message by focusing most of its energy on the beautiful, virtual world of the Oasis. It also ignores the point that everyone is trying so hard to win control of this world that exists only on computer servers and could be re-created by anyone with the computer skills. Rather than paying all those people to search for eggs in the Oasis, IOI could have just developed a competing virtual world. Whatever, though, it's just a movie, right? Movies, themselves, are a form of virtual reality. Here in the real world, the job of movies is mostly to entertain us, and “Ready Player One” does that. It's a pretty thin entertainment, though, one that kids will like more than adults.

3 stars out of 5