Ready Player One

In its best, most lucid moments, Ready Player One feels like an urgent PS from Spielberg the eternal big kid, just making sure we’ve got the message of his early work straight. It is based on, but quite freely adapted from, a cult science-fiction novel by Ernest Klein, set in a near-future dystopia in which the entire planet is hooked on escape. Following two apparently cataclysmic events referred to, in passing, as the “corn syrup droughts” and the “bandwidth riots”, most citizens have decided what remains of the real world isn’t worth the trouble, and spend most of their lives in the Oasis, an alternate wholly virtual reality in which fantasies run wild.

With a 3D headset and a force feedback bodysuit, the Oasis allows you to be anyone and do anything – though for the majority of users, this mostly entails play-acting and remixing favourite moments in 20th century pop culture. Simply put, if you want to pit Marty McFly’s DeLorean from Back to the Future against Kaneda’s red motorcycle from Akira and the 1960s Batmobile in a street race through a city that’s being simultaneously demolished by King Kong and the Jurassic Park Tyrannosaurus rex, the Oasis is the place for it. In fact, that’s the gist of the film’s first action set-piece – a “who would win in a fight between…” playground argument taken to preposterous extremes.

Exactly whose idea of an earthly paradise is this? That would be James Halliday (Mark Rylance): a coy, straggly tech guru who poured his own movie-watching and video-gaming obsessions into a communal fantasy world now shared by millions.

When the story begins, Halliday is already dead, but somewhere in his realm of pure imagination he has hidden a golden ticket-like Easter Egg, the finder of which will inherit the Oasis, and the underlying trillion-dollar business. And because of the stakes, the quest consumes everyone, from hardcore gamers like Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), an orphan living somewhere in the middle of a Jenga-stack of caravans on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, whose online alter ego is a floppy haired Final Fantasy-type called Parzival, to the IOI Corporation, whose boss Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) wants to monetise all this digital real estate until its pixels squeak.

The film follows Wade/Parzival’s ongoing quest to unpick Halliday’s riddles while dodging IOI goons, with the help of a ragtag gang of fellow players, including Aech (Lena Waithe), a strapping Orc, and Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), a wide-eyed, spiky-haired anime sprite. Chaos ensues when the online and offline worlds begin to intermingle – one sequence, which owes a debt to Christopher Nolan’s Inception, sees Wade is trussed up in a VR rig in the back of a speeding van, with every bump and jostle translating into an in-game body slam from unseen hands.

But for a while at least, the two domains are kept very strictly and artfully separate – not just by the players, but by the film itself. Life is grainy and drab here, a clapped-out version of 1980s Spielbergian suburbia, while the virtual space is sleek and stylised to a fault – a world of hyper-detailed fakery that’s always awe-inspiring but never exactly life-like.

The cacophony of cameos in the latter will scratch any retro itch going: I’m usually resistant to these things, and Stranger Things left me cold, but an audacious detour by Parzival and co into the setting of a certain classic Stanley Kubrick film is realised down to the most finicky detail, while a last-ditch Battle Royale between three well-known giant robots made my extremities fizz with fanboy zeal. Yet once the initial thrill wears off, it’s a hollow kind of fun, which is almost certainly the point.

From AI Artificial Intelligence to Hook, cautionary tales of everlasting childhood have been a Spielberg mainstay. Ready Player One doesn’t mess with the kind of weighty ideas that underpin the first of those two films, which feels like a bigger masterpiece every time you revisit it, but its vision of a world fixated on cultural nursery food has a spiky topicality and an occasionally piercing satirical bite.

This is helped no end by Rylance, who makes Halliday (who appears a lot in flashback) a brilliantly compelling tragicomic figure – one part benign Spielberg surrogate to three parts bashful megalomaniac in the time-worn Silicon Valley style, who treats his one-time friend and company co-founder (Simon Pegg) in a way that should ring bells for anyone who has seen The Social Network.

The meta-barrage of references often ties the film in knots: Alan Silvestri’s frantic score only really works when it’s quoting from others, including his own immortal work on Back to the Future. But considering this is Spielberg’s first ride film since The Adventures of Tintin in 2011, it’s a serious knuckle-whitener while it lasts.