Time to enter the game

EASTER weekend is actually a pretty appropriate time to release Ready Player One, since the film is all about hunting for Easter eggs.

Not literal Easter eggs, mind you, rather the digital kind, “Easter egg” being the term used to describe hidden special items in video games and movies.

And this wild, spectacular mash-up of video game and popular culture from the 1970s onward is a satisfying blend of nostalgia and contemporary themes, with an exciting story to hold it all together.

Based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One is set in the near future, when the world is in a pretty grim state, and people spend most of their time plugged into a sprawling virtual reality universe called OASIS, in order to escape the drudgery of real life.

But when one of the cocreators of OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance) died, he left a legacy behind: he buried a series of quests and hidden items within the OASIS, and whoever completes the quests and finds all three keys, will win complete ownership and control of the OASIS.

Teenager Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), using the online name Parzival, is one of an army of egg-hunters (or “gunters”) who have dedicated their lives to solving these puzzles, competing against the IOI corporation, who are using their considerable resources to try to win control of the OASIS for themselves.

When Wade’s painstaking research finally pays off and he becomes the first to find a key, the race becomes a war. He teams up with fellow gunters Art3mis and H to defeat IOI.

Because Halliday was a Gen-X guy who grew up playing games on an Atari 2600 and watching movies like Back to the Future, the clues and challenges are all based on games and movies form the 1970s and ’80s, making Ready Player One an absolute treat for anyone who remembers those days.

But by the same token, to fully appreciate this movie you probably need to fall into that very specific age range of being old enough to remember playing Pac-Man on a tabletop arcade game in a milk bar, and young enough to still be interested in playing modern games.

A segment based on the classic horror film The Shining means there is even something for Stanley Kubrick nerds like me to laugh at.

And if you have read the book, be warned that there are significant plot changes made for the screen adaptation, so while it might not quite be the story you remember, it means there will still be twists and surprises to keep you guessing.

There is a neat circularity in the movie being directed by Steven Spielberg, whose movies were heavily referenced in the book. Spielberg stripped most of these out of the film version (but not all), but his inextricable link to the culture of this time period makes him the perfect sympathetic hand to steer this flick.

The whole thing looks like a video game, which is a little bit distracting sometimes and that is also precisely the point: 90 per cent of the story is set inside a giant video game, so making it look too photorealistic would defeat the purpose.

The special effects are wonderful, though. Seeing this sprawling virtual universe rendered on the big screen is one of the best reasons I can think of for seeing a movie in 3D. And it is certainly great fun seeing so many video game and movie characters packed into the story as well: right down to a “live action” knight riding a giant ostrich, a la Joust.

There are a couple of downsides, though. Some of the plotting and clues are a bit contrived, and the backstory about the OASIS creators seems a bit vague and muddled.

Also, we don’t really see much development of the main characters, which is especially apparent with Parzival and Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), whose blossoming romance is a central arc in the story, but we never get a real sense of who they really are. Perhaps that is fitting, though, given that the story is about people creating their own virtual lives in the OASIS – who they are in reality is virtually irrelevant.

And it certainly doesn’t harm the film much, since everything is structured just like a video game: solve riddle, find clue, solve riddle, find clue, defeat end-of-level boss. And the movie’s themes of overcoming corporate greed and resisting the urge to abandon reality are certainly very important ones.

Ben Mendelsohn (who seems to be playing an endless line of bad guys) is excellent as IOI boss and head villain Sorrento, and Mark Rylance is wonderful as always.

Ready Player One is a feast of nostalgia, action and visual style, which more than makes up for its fairly minor narrative shortfalls.

Ready Player One (M) is now showing at Village Cinemas, the State Cinema and Cmax. Rating: