Ready Player One

A heckin fun movie, full of stunning action sequences and laughs and winks at the kids who grew up watching Back to the Future and Jurassic Park and E.T. and Indiana Jones.

It's pure entertainment, and gives Spielberg an easel to prop his sentimental painting on, and all the colors on his palette to do so.

For all its ferocious energy, Ready Player One strikes me as the product of a cinema of exhaustion-it's a film about having come too far and being at the end of something, where extraordinary things no longer mean much, or have become toxic.

It is, despite Spielberg's claims, neither a purehearted popcorn flick nor a Paul Verhoevenesque subversion, but something uneasily in between, cowed by the idea of the fanboy demographic.

Turns out that treating the movies entirely as a jungle gym brings out Peter Pan's inner brat. He's made a movie for lost boys.

Ready Player One is a pageant of now-dated pop culture references, an elaborate feat of CGI and copyright clearance, with images from games and movies speeding past, to the tune of Van Halen and A-Ha.

Ready Player One is perfectly entertaining and enticing, but the sum of its parts ends up significantly less realized than its full potential.

While the first half of [Ready Player One] is all trivia is the superior form of geekdom and awkward geekboy somehow managing to get the geekgirl interested the second half shows how you can form real communities online.

Steven Spielberg delivers the ultimate expression of why we digest media, and possibly a glimpse into a world we could all be heading towards.

With Ready Player One, you can feel director Steven Spielberg pushing to reclaim his status as Hollywood's crowned head of spectacle as he pours his considerable talent into another memorable science-fiction fantasy.