Based on Ernest Cline’s 2011 sci-fi bestseller, Steven Spielberg’s busy adaptation is metatextual in its fascination with the limits, loopholes and crossover points of the self-contained universes artists create. The year is 2045, and in the Stacks, a greying junkyard in Columbus, Ohio, humans reside in trailers but live in the Oasis, a fantastically detailed Technicolor virtual reality accessed through headsets and haptic suits. Before he died, its creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), planted an Easter egg in his virtual world. The first person to reach it – after finding three hidden keys and their clues – would inherit his fortune, as well as the Oasis itself. Leading the race is gamer geek Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) via his avatar Parzival, alongside his virtual friends, the orc-like Aech (whose real-world reveal I won’t spoil here) and Olivia Cooke’s Art3mis, a spiky, sexy redhead whom Wade begins to fall for.
The denseness of the film’s pop culture references is both a pleasure and a distraction, though a set piece involving Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and a librarian called The Curator – who looks suspiciously like 90s search engine avatar Ask Jeeves – are very funny. More interesting, though, is Rylance’s Halliday, a powerful but desperately sad and lonely genius who we learn about through the Halliday Journals, a virtual archive of his memories.
For all the complexity of the film’s chaotic visual world, its central ideas (“A creator who hates his creation”, posits one of Halliday’s clues; the track Everybody Wants to Rule the World underscores a flashback) are simplistic. This is hardly Spielberg’s most creative genre work – but helped along by Back to the Future composer Alan Silvestri, whose score mimics the director’s John Williams collaborations, it does speak to the joyful, unapologetic classicism of his film-making style. If you’re susceptible to that (and I am), this should still deliver a dopamine hit.
