Ready Player One

Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One is expensive (175 million dollar) and disorienting (two-thirds of the film takes place in game space), loaded with pop culture references and self-referential witticisms, but, regrettably, it is also overstuffed and emotionally inert for long stretches. Most of the film's interest is in the execution of Spielberg's singular transporting vision onto the screen which occasionally in the past has fallen just short of full realization (see Bruce the shark from Jaws). In this case, the picture is a visual marvel set in the near future where citizens escape their overpopulated existence through a virtual reality game called Oasis, taking on avatars and living a fantasy life that occasionally means warring fantastic creatures to accumulate points and coins. Spielberg's hero is the teenage orphan Wade (Tye Sheridan), whose avatar, Parzival, is a skillful bad-ass who often teams with other masked players in Oasis. He befriends a rogue female avatar named Art3mis / real name Samantha (Olivia Cooke), who is actually playing the game to find a way to destroy it. This crew joins the rest of the gaming universe in a challenge to find secret keys that will lead to an Easter Egg hidden by the game's creator (Mark Rylance) somewhere in the guts of the virtual world that will pay trillions of dollars and transfer control of the game to the winner. Ben Mendelsohn plays the head of the gaming company plotting to keep anyone from wresting control out of his hands. Yes, it's convoluted as hell, which is much of its problem, the other part  being the actual people get so little screen time that the audience never really develops a connection with them and so their quest (while amazing to watch) feels remote.