Critics reviews

There’s a pure pleasure to seeing Spielberg doing Kubrick again, both paying tribute to a friend with whom he had an unexpected artistic symbiosis (A.I. is nearly as good as anything either of them did, after all) and poking fun at his own commercial instincts.

Only Spielberg’s use of The Shining is really noteworthy, because it includes lots of actual footage from the film, over which Spielberg has pasted his Scooby-Doo action. Spielberg loves Kubrick so much he has done him the favor of defacing his work in public, something the director of Lolita, being dead, could not agree to or prevent.

Its extravagant effects are never as involving as Mark Rylance’s all-too-human performance as the ghost in the OASIS’s machine. But it offers a glut of eye-popping toy-box set pieces (including an extended homage to one of Spielberg’s fellow film titans) from the Hollywood master of the form. It’s all about small screens, but is best seen on a really big one.

Ready Player One, like 1941, is less than the sum of its references, inviting grateful, uncritical recognition rather than reflection. 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.

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. . . . What should be a gleeful rush of nostalgia soon becomes exhausting, though – the Lego movies handled their barrage of references with much more aplomb – and ultimately it’s only as nourishing as the Halliday-approved diet of Tab soda and Froot Loops.

[It's] a movie of spiritual zombies whose souls have been consumed by the makers of generations of official cultural product. . . . The movie, framed as a story of resistance to corporate tyranny, is actually a tale of tyranny perpetuated by a cheerfully totalitarian predator who indoctrinates his victims by amusing them to death—and the movie’s stifled horror is doubled by Spielberg’s obliviousness to it.

If you are not into video gaming and noticing references to 1980s pop culture gives you no jolt of trainspotter’s thrill, all of this could well seem tedious. But for all of the above, it's a classic Spielberg spectacle and is undeniably enjoyable. The OASIS is an imaginative masterpiece and fans of Guardians of the Galaxy and similar films will enjoy the wryly self-aware dialogue and retro soundtrack choices.

A film that is at once a work of startling energy and brashness from a seasoned talent, but also one that fits with surprising elegance into the director’s autumnal phase, a contemplation of the notion of legacy in terms of a receptive and interacting audience and also in personal reckoning.

It’s a film that constantly asks . . . Is this where all this technological brilliance has left us? That arguably makes Ready Player One a blockbuster in bad faith, constantly undermining and defusing the pleasures it purveys. But it’s fascinating to see a master film-maker in the (at the very least) autumnal phase of his career making a work that’s at once so boisterously crowd-pleasing and so extremely neurotic.

I don’t want to be the mic-dropping goof who points out that Ready Player One is, in fact, the corporate product it seems to be afraid of — that part is obvious. Instead I’ll be the goof who says that the irony of that would probably be more satisfying if this were a less overbearing, dead-horse-kicking movie. It’s Spielberg, though, so the set pieces stick out with flair and good intentions.

Halliday is the most interesting character here, and it’s hard not to feel like his story is where Spielberg the father’s true interests and sympathies lie. Ready Player One is entertaining enough, and it’s certainly well-made, but what truly stands out is the filmmaker’s prevailing-present sense of bemused disgust at the way his offspring are spending their time. He can’t go home again, and he knows it.

If it turned out to be Steven Spielberg's last film, it would make for a grand and fitting final curtain call for his brand of escapism. But since he's following it up with, among other things, yet another Indiana Jones installment, it feels onanistic, the synthesis of a novelist's own cloistered view of pop culture with the cinematic vocabulary of a filmmaker largely viewed as responsible for ossifying said culture.