Fun, fleeting mishmash

Tye Sheridan in “Ready Player One”

Steven Spielberg’s grand sci-fi adventure “Ready Player One” is visually busy, but the film, while depicting two distinct worlds, fluctuates from time to time due to its less-than-complex characters and clichéd conflicts.

It nevertheless entertains because of its steady barrage of pop-culture references, including nice cameos and integral appearances of characters from other fantasy franchises, in the virtual realm called Oasis, where all things imaginable converge.

One young player, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), gets to regularly visit the Oasis as the nimble adventurer named Parzival.

It’s 2045, and this game dimension offers Wade an escape from his problematic life in the ghetto. Going on a scavenger hunt with similar-minded allies regularly gives him a frenetic diversion—
and a real quest.

The Oasis has countless players plugged in, because the said hunt is actually a huge contest, as the virtual world’s creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), scattered important keys all over the realm.

Those who find them get the ultimate prize of the game—unfettered control of the Oasis itself!

Wade, as Parzival, meets pivotal figures, including the intelligent Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and the villainous corporate head Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who commands an unrelenting army of employee players.

Spielberg handles most of the interhuman connections deftly, as expected, but the romance angle feels especially forced. Not that there isn’t any chemistry between Sheridan and Cooke. It’s the least convincing part of a movie where fantastical situations are more believable.

Their heroic characters, just like Mendelsohn’s despicable Sorrento, share a cookie-cutter quality—they, their backstories and their reasons for being are far from unique, and it can be seen and felt.

The concept of life-altering technology that bridges two fronts has also been explored before, and inventively so, in other films, books and shows, examples of which include “The Matrix” series and James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

Be that as it may, the more family-oriented “Ready Player One” has its own valuable nuggets of wisdom, celebrating unlimited imagination and genuine friendship, while also pointing to luxuries that can be found in the real world.

If anything, this film is a massive nostalgia crossover, bringing together dozens of childhood favorites in rapid sequences. You can’t possibly catch them all in the first viewing, and you don’t really need to see it a second time, but it’s a fun and fleeting mishmash of resurfaced memories.