I went into Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One with a lot of skepticism. Although I’m a huge fan of the legendary director, the source material was dodgy (great structure but prone to eye-rolling nostalgic diatribes) and the marketing kept seizing on the countless references to other media rather than promoting its own story. Thankfully, the finished feature has a more direct line of sight on what it wants to say and how it wants to say it. Although the movie certainly has no shortage of Easter eggs when it comes to beloved characters from movies, TV, and video games, those characters function more as a milieu rather than the point of Ready Player One. If anything, the movie wants you to craft your own story rather than getting lost in someone else’s.

In the year 2045 in Columbus, Ohio, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is an orphan who, like pretty much everyone else on a planet ravaged by climate change and poverty, spends their time in the VR landscape of the OASIS. Going by the handle Parzival, Wade and his friend Aech (Lena Waithe) are “Gunters”, hunting for three keys that will lead to an egg left by OASIS co-creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance). The egg will give the finder half-a-trillion dollars and control of the OASIS. Although Parzival works alone, he’s working against the remaining gunters (most have quit in the five years since the challenge was announced) and, more ominously, the IOI corporation led by the nefarious Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who wants to turn the OASIS into an ad-filled dystopia. Wade is also up against the beautiful and mysterious fellow gunter Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), who has her own designs for the OASIS.

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Image via Warner Bros.

There’s a lot going on in Ready Player One and you can feel the movie straining against all the exposition it has to carry. There are moments where facts are even repeated twice for some reason like the fact that Wade’s parents are dead. But Spielberg manages to handle these clunky moments by taking full control of the OASIS. Although some viewers will certainly go frame-by-frame to catch all of the Easter eggs, Spielberg rarely goes out of his way to call attention to these references. Instead, he lets them all blend together, and while there’s certainly some punctuation like Parzival’s DeLorean or Aech’s The Iron Giant, these aren’t the point of the movie.

Rather than a nostalgia parade or a chorus of “memba berries”, Spielberg is far more interested in a protagonist who has given his life to studying the life of another because his own is so empty. Wade doesn’t have much, but he knows every aspect of Halliday’s history. That’s a little weird that Wade probably knows more about Halliday than his own parents, but Halliday left the records and a purpose. Although the movie never questions the obsessions of fandom (and it’s clear that above all else, Wade is a fan of Halliday), it does ask where that fandom ultimately leads. When the script includes the line, “A fanboy can always tell a hater,” it’s a record scratch moment not just because of the noxious sentiment, but because the larger movie isn’t interested in those divisions. It’s not about “Who’s the biggest fan?” but what you do with that fandom.

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Image via Warner Bros.

Yes, the movie could go a little further in encouraging people to be their own creators, and it’s a bit rich that Sorrento’s avatar is just a guy in a suit, a condemnation that he has no imagination yet the world is filled with references to the creations of other people. Ready Player One is always straddling the line of fanboyism, but it never stumbles over, and that’s because of Spielberg showing that he still has complete mastery over telling a fleet-footed adventure story with clear arcs and characters worth rooting for in a fascinating setting.

The movie is nowhere near as disturbing as Spielberg’s last three sci-fi features—A.I., Minority Report, and War of the Worlds—but the director always has his eye on a coming dystopia. The movie doesn’t dig deep into any single aspect, but that makes its flying drones and IOI’s constant outsourcing even more disturbing. By letting these elements sit on the periphery, they help ground the lightness of the OASIS, adding real stakes and providing a firm grasp of IOI’s villainy rather than just labeling them the “Evil Corporation”.

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Image via Warner Bros.

The film is also supported by the fact that Spielberg has mastered mo-cap technology. When Parzival comes across a “Zemeckis Cube”, it’s not just Spielberg paying homage to a pal, but to a director who led the charge for the motion capture technology that makes Ready Player One possible. The gap between this and Spielberg’s first attempt at mo-cap, The Adventures of Tintin, is night and day with excellent performances (particularly from Waithe) being channeled rather than erased in favor of digital wizardry. Ready Player One is a vibrant, visual marvel that demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

There are certainly moments where the movie stumbles a bit, and those that have already written off the picture, whether due to the marketing or screenwriter Ernest Cline’s novel, probably won’t be won over by what Spielberg is doing here. But the movie is a different beast than the book, and it’s certainly not the cavalcade of character crossover the film has presented. Even moments that would have made me cringe, like The Iron Giant firing on people during a big battle scene, surprisingly work due to the context of the story and how Spielberg keeps the focus on his protagonists and their quest.

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Image via Warner Bros.

Ready Player One isn’t a flawless film, and it has some trouble getting started and finding an ending. But between the brief rough patches is an absolutely dazzling, dizzying adventure that sucks you in. Like he showed with last year’s The Post, Spielberg is still a master at work, and we disregard that at our own peril. Although Ready Player One may not reach the pantheon of classics in the director’s filmography, Spielberg shows yet again why he’s a permanent fixture on the leaderboard.

Rating: B

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Image via Warner Bros.