Ready Player One

This film really shouldn't work at all. A vast conglomeration of pop culture references in a tale of an online world where people are competitively hunting three magic keys that will give them a vast fortune and rulership of the entire world, this is all the formulaic regurgitation that we've come to dismiss and fear.

Except that you should never entirely underestimate Steven Spielberg. True, there are plot holes you could drive a truck thorugh (if this game is meant to be a wildly popular essential part of the world, why does everybody important who's playing it appear to live in Columbus, Ohio? if this is set in 2045, how come absolutely nobody has pop-culture references that go beyond about 2011? why does your fully functioning gaming rig body suit allow people to hit you very very hard in the crotch?). And this has some serious malfunctions with some of the female characters - part of the backstory involves a lost love whose entire characterisation basically consists of those two words, and our hero's love interest similarly takes an interest in him for no apparent reason.

Still, Spielberg gives this energy and a celebratory feel to the world, and, if leads Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke aren't exactly giving deeply thoughtful performances, they are not actively annoying. Ben Mendhelson gives his somewhat generic corporate baddie some sneering swagger that makes his dopey schemes somehow fun, and Mark Rylance plays the creator of this whole world as a somewhat tragic figure, a guy who's never quite figured out human connection and clearly feels a little bit lost anywhere he hasn't created. The action sequences have verve, clarity, humour, and a lot of the pop-culture references feel deliberately more like wallpaper rather than anything masquerading as substance - the film doesn't try to make any of them mean anything more than they actually do. And while Spielberg can't resist splattering on a moral at the end of the film, it's not enough to drag down the pleasure of a story that maybe didn't need to be told, but is never the less told quite well.