Our verdict on Spielberg’s Ready Player One

CERT 12A, 140 MINUTES, IN CINEMAS 29 MARCH

THE PLOT Columbus, Ohio, 2045: in a future world blighted by poverty, 18-year-old Wade (Sheridan) and countless others lose themselves in a multi-player video game exploring virtual world OASIS. But they’re not just slacking: they’re hunting for a hidden Easter egg, and if they find it, they’ll inherit billions of dollars of shares bequeathed by the game’s deceased creator James Halliday (Rylance). The likely winner: sinister CEO Nolan Sorrento (Mendelsohn), who has a whole division of the Innovative Online Industries corporation working on the mystery.

WHAT’S RIGHT WITH IT? Hollywood has struggled to turn the experience of gaming into big-screen storytelling, but maybe its mistake has been the source material: video games. Spielberg instead collaborates with Ready Player One author Ernest Cline to turn his acclaimed sci-fi novel into a satisfying screen adventure, thrillingly throwing us into the heart of the game via Wade’s avatar Parzival and the fellow underdogs he befriends inside OASIS. And ’80s fans rejoice: since the eccentric Halliday was obsessed with the decade, the world he created is crammed with pop culture of the era. WHAT’S WRONG WITH IT? It’s unapologetically geeky and gleefully retro – if you’ve never seen, say, The Shining (1980), the experience of watching Ready Player One is going to feel incomplete.

VERDICT While Hollywood’s brightest young minds puzzle out how to turn virtual reality into a scalable business, it’s an irony that it’s grizzly old Spielberg who now comes closest to capturing and delivering the form’s immersive essence. See it on the biggest screen possible. ★★★★ Charles Gant