I feel like I haven’t seen a lot of Spielberg movies, but at the same time I’ve seen a few. I’ve seen ‘Jaws,’ ‘E.T,’ ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘Schindler’s List,’ ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ ‘Catch Me If You Can,’ ‘Lincoln,’ ‘War Horse,’ and ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ The last three, however, I have not seen in a while. At the same time, I haven’t seen ‘The Color Purple,’ ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ ‘Minority Report,’ ‘Munich,’ ‘War of the Worlds,’ ‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence,’ and the Indiana Jones sequels. Therefore, I’m still unsure on whether or not I’ve seen enough Spielberg’s movies. Nonetheless, here’s ‘Ready Player One,’ another film by Steven Spielberg to check off the list.

Based off the popular novel by Ernest Cline, 18 year old Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, the perfect fit) lives alone in the stacks of Columbus, Ohio in 2045. Nowadays, the only thing humanity does is go to the Oasis, a virtual reality world where the limits are your own imagination. Following the death of Oasis creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance), Wade and the rest of the world compete in a contest to gain control of the Oasis. Boy, that entire movie was very well made from start to finish! The 80s pop culture references, the action scenes, and production design were all fantastically done. My only problem with this movie was that I felt like there was so much work to put in on creating the Oasis that Spielberg forgot about developing the characters and pacing the story.

Performance wise, I feel like Sheridan and Olivia Wilde had the best. Playing Wade & Samantha-in the real world-and Parzival & Art3mis-in the Oasis, the two definitely had the only chemistry in this movie and were meant to play their parts. The only person I felt like that seemed out of place in this movie was T.J. Miller, who played I-R0k. I-R0k is a scary looking character in the Oasis and the problem is that Miller is a comedian with a unique voice who’s playing a character who doesn’t seem to fit Miller’s persona.

There was a scene in ‘Ready Player One’ that had me smiling the entire scene. What happened is that Parzival, Art3mis, and their friends go into Halliday’s memory to find a key. They decide to go to when Halliday saw ‘The Shining’ and end up entering the movie. The scene made many references to the movie including room 237, the maze, the “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” papers, the creepy twins, and even the portrait shown at the ending. As much as I enjoyed this scene, I later learned that this scene was supposed to be a ‘Blade Runner’ reference instead of ‘The Shining.’ But since production for ‘Blade Runner 2049’ happened at the same time as this movie, Spielberg couldn’t have the rights to pay homage to ‘Blade Runner.’

So to wrap this up, go see ‘Ready Player One’ whether or not you enjoy the type of movie that it is or just if you wanna see 80s nostalgia displayed in a Spielberg movie. Some people may say that the man hasn’t been on top of his game since the 90’s, I think ‘Ready Player One’ could be a start of a return to what Spielberg does best-bringing adventurous fun movies like he used to back in 80s and 90s.