Review: Ready Player One

Often the most interesting thing about a movie is the thing they don't want you paying attention to. When you're setting up an extreme scenario that you want to play around with, usually the easy thing to do is to set up an environment where that scenario seems reasonable; there's a reason why crime rules the streets in every Death Wish movie. So to have everyone constantly logged into a virtual world in Ready Player One , the real world has to be a crapsack. But why? Movies have always struggled to make virtual worlds interesting. Movies themselves are a virtual world we willingly enter; add another layer to that and you run the risk of the audience feeling too far removed from the story. Inception made it work by having the layers of removal be part of the story; The Matrix set the bar impossibly high by making the virtual world the only place where the characters could be fully human. And here? It's important because that's where all the cool stuff is. The ori...