There's so much visual information, so many little Easter eggs, and references and pop culture nuggets that you could go through it frame by frame and still miss half of them.
And I'm pretty sure that no matter what your particular brand of nerdery is, you'll find at least a couple of references to it. I mean I saw at least three Dungeons and Dragons references.
As a movie, if feels like the 80's and 90's pop culture movies it's referencing... not in the sense of being dated, but more in the way those movies felt.
Which isn't really surprising, since Steven Spielberg is the director. And the guy who wrote the book, Ernest Cline, was one of the writers.
And clearly Cline is a big nerd for (mostly) 80's pop culture.
I'm not 100% sure what I expected from the movie, since I'm now mostly in the habit of avoiding almost all the trailers and other promo material beforehand (they only screw it up and show or tell you too much you didn't need to know going in), but it felt right.
Plot-wise it ticks all the boxes that you would expect from this kind of movie... it's not groundbreaking, but it is solid... and given that it's a movie that references a lot of other movies, it's not really a surprise that it's pretty much going by the movie playbook. And it does have a few moments when I'd kind of like to know more about how the world ended up in this particular configuration (which just makes me interested to read the book).
Tye Sheridan takes on the dual roles of Wade and his avatar Parzival (which I'm guessing is all him, hidden in a mocap suit) and is a very likeable lead. All the main cast, in fact, in both their virtual and real guises do quite well, although it does make me feel slightly old to see Ben Mendelsohn as the corporate bad guy because I've grown up seeing him in all kinds of things.
Visually it's a gorgeous movie... and it actually gets a pass on occasionally looking overtly computer generated, because that's what it's supposed to look like. Some of the big action scenes are a little frantic, occasionally because they're trying to cram so much background visual detail in there whenever they can, but it still holds together.
And definitely one that needs a rewatch.
yani's rating: 4 Orbs of Osuvox out of 5
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