April 26th in Pasadena CA. Ernest Cline's bestselling novel gets brought to the big screen by legendary director Steven Spielberg. This has been a long awaited film and I jumped on that bandwagon after I read the book in 2016.
The film is set in the year 2045 and the human race is not in a very good place. The world is kind of a cesspool controlled by giant corporations. People have escaped into a virtual reality world of the OASIS. The OASIS is the world's greatest resource. It is used for education and for the general escape from everyone's miserable life (the general populace is dirt poor). The OASIS was created by a man named James Halliday (Mark Rylance) and upon his death, he wills his estate and the OASIS to the person who can find three keys and unlock an easter egg. Thus giving the person full control of the OASIS. Suffice to say, everyone on Earth is going after the keys. Including evil video game conglomerate Innovative Online Industries or IOI. The IOI CEO, Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, who's really good at playing a pr*ck by the way), will stop at nothing to get control of the OASIS in order to exploit it for profits.
Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) lives in the Columbus stacks, a series of trailers in tower form, and leads a generally lousy life with no hope of upward mobility. In the OASIS he is known as Parzival and he teams up with his pal Aech, a male avatar but who's female (Lena Waithe) in the real world and Parzival's love interest Art3mis, Samantha (Olivia Cooke) in the real world. Rounding out the rest of their group, the High Five, is Daito/Toshiro (Win Morisaki) and 11 year-old kid known as Sho/Zhou (Philip Zhao).
The High Five work together to solve the clues and try to stay one step ahead of the army of IOI participants known as "sixers. Of course IOI plays dirty (they blow up the stack that Wade lives), are actively looking for the High Five in real life and are trying to stack the deck in their favor. TO help even the odds, Parzival enlists the aid of all the of "gunters" in order to defeat IOI and keep the OASIS free. Guess who wins?
There a lot of pop culture references in the book and that's what made it hard to put down. This what made the movie so much fun was spotting all of the subtle and not so subtle references. The amount money it must have taken to secure the rights to the properties must have been staggering.
The film took in over $41 million on it's opening weekend. To date it has grossed over $135 million domestically (that's a little disappointing) and over $576 million worldwide. To be fair, 2018 was set up to big a tough Spring/Summer film season. There was a lot of competition with Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War out.
Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 73% rating which is about where it should be. A lot of details from the book were either omitted or changed in order to fit the 140 minute run time. I attribute the score to the changes from the book to the film. That's how I felt. There's a lot of CGI and there are times when I felt I was watching a video game but that's kind of the reality where the film takes place. The only real problem I had was when Samantha and Wade meet in real life, it takes about 5 minutes for Sam to fall for Wade because he was really nice to her. Sam is an attractive woman and I just found it hard to believe that no one is her group ever tried that route in order to try and score with her. Samantha has a facial birthmark and she's self conscious about. She styles her hair to cover up half her face but after a few minutes of Wade saying how beautiful she is, she changes her hairstyle. I guess they had to speed up the romance angle as well.
Spielberg excels at bringing the viewer a cinematic experience. His films are made for the big screen. The film is technically stunning. Great visuals (some may seem derivative but they're great) and great sound. The type of film that's a must see in a theater. It's not for everyone and with a PG13 rating it's a little more kid friendly but it's a lot of fun.
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