Ready Player One (2018) * *

Directed by:  Steven Spielberg

Starring:   Tye Sheridan, Ben Mendelsohn, Olivia Cooke, Mark Rylance, Simon Pegg, T.J. Miller, Lena Waithe, Win Morisaki, Philip Zhao

There comes a point in Ready Player One in which coherence is thrown to the winds and we simply resist all of the information and pop culture references thrown at us.    Ready Player One is as chaotic as The Lego Movie, another movie in which your brain goes on overload from the sheer volume of stimuli.    The film takes way too long to tell its rather simple story, and after a while we stop caring about what happens to the characters or their avatars.

Ready Player One, based on a bestseller by Ernest Cline, takes place in 2045 Columbus, Ohio and is yet another future which is bleak and gray.    Why should we even bother to keep on going if worlds like this await us?    Our hero Wade Watts (Sheridan), lives in a trailer park in which the trailers are stacked one on top of the other and are referred to as "The Stacks".    Because the real world is so depressing, its people spend most of their waking hours in The Oasis, a virtual reality universe in which a person can assume an avatar and enjoy a respite from reality.   All one needs to do is don a pair of VR glasses and away we go.    It's bizarre how people live in The Stacks and don't have a pot to piss in, but can afford the glasses and whatever else is entailed to gain access to The Oasis.

The Oasis was created by the late James Halliday (Rylance), who from beyond the grave has started a contest in which whomever finds three "Easter eggs" or carefully hidden prizes, that person gains control of The Oasis and all of its riches.    Wade knows all about Halliday and by deciphering various moments from Halliday's visual diary, he can figure out the location of the eggs faster than anyone.    Wade, who uses the avatar Parzival while in The Oasis, is assisted by friends who also assume online identities, but we know Wade will meet sooner or later in real life.    The challenge is also undertaken by billionaire evil tech guy Nolan Sorrento (Mendelsohn), who wants to control The Oasis to make even more billions.

I can't possibly go further with the plot description because it would drive both you and I mad.   Instead, I can discuss the characters, who are nice, but rather bland.    The only compelling figure is Halliday, who is dead, but returns to life in a way through his diaries and as an avatar who awards the prize once it is discovered.    Wade and company will have to outwit Nolan and his army of minions and stormtroopers in order to win the game and it is baffling in such a high tech world that we still have gunfights and car chases.    We have plenty of 80s allusions, including Back to the Future's DeLorean, The Breakfast Club, Robert Zemeckis (a real-life friend and protégé of Spielberg's), and The Iron Giant.   There are many, many more, but if you can recall them then you have a better memory than I do.

The visuals are top-notch, as expected, and I can see why Spielberg would undertake the challenge of giving us a visual feast and trying to make sense of it.    He accomplished half of his goal, which is unfortunate, because while Ready Player One succeeds on a technical level, it fails on the human scale, which is not common for a Spielberg film.    We can call it a clunker and move on with our lives.