"READY PLAYER ONE" (THE MOVIE).........THE SPIELBERGERMEISTER SORT OF RETURNS......

Ready Player One (2018)   We started off the summer by posting about the book on 5/22.........so it's only natural we wind up the summer with the Spielberg movie.......

                     Same problem in both.........the story's dystopian future sucks so bad that everyone has lost themselves in a jumbo virtual reality playground created by a gaming wizard/titan/obi-wan who's a cross between Steve Jobs, Peter Pan, Gandalf and the Dali Lama..........

                      So basically, it's high-tech bread-'n-circuses to distract everyone from their squalid lives in skyscrapers made up of mobile homes piled on top of one another........

                      Pardon us if we find that scenario a tad depressing........especially since we already live in an age where more and more people choose to devote their entire lives to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.......

                       But to hell with hellish reality......'Ready Player One' is all about OASIS, the VR theme park that's functions as a pop culture landfill (mostly from the 1980's)........and any player who cracks the late Game Wizard's quest inherits his company, worth trillions.....

                      And handing this to Steven Spielberg to direct seemed inevitable.......since the movie's a jet propelled tour through all the toys and accumulated crap that cluttered up Elliot's room in "E.T.".....

                     As masterful, slick and professional as Spielberg's filmmaking is here.........there's something fundamentally cold, corporate and yes.....connect-the-dots about the entire enterprise.

                     This isn't the late 70's and 80's Spielberg, delighting and astounding us with his warm,  finely crafted mixtures of everyday life colliding with the the fantastic. "Ready Player One" plays more like a movie concocted by film's Evil Corporation to placate and massage the poor suckers stuck in those piled up trailers,

                       It's fast and way too furious, sometimes dazzling, but mostly dizzying as it hurls 80's characters and references at you like splatter blasts from a paint gun.

                      As we watched the movie take a obsessive detour into the hotel from Kubrick's "The Shining", we couldn't help sighing with disappointment.  Yes, we all hoped and prayed that Spielberg, after making so many adult dramas, would make a grand, glorious return to the humanistic sci-fi fantasy that put him on the map in the first place.

                      Alas, "Ready Player One" is not that movie.  Nothing fresh, nothing original.......just a flashy vomiting up all the usual CGI whim-whams we've endured in dozens of comic book movies.

                      And even more stranger, for Spielberg, you'll find only one real actor in the entire cast -  the director's go-to master thespian Mark Rylance........the rest of them (the gaming kids) remain underwritten, indifferently performed and half the time replaced by their motion-capture animated avatars.

                       The constant thrills 'n spills entertained us for a while, but at 135 minutes, you start to realize that there's nothing much going on here except a multi-million dollar video game. 2 & 1/2 stars (** 1/2).......and that's generous, considering we expected much much more out of Spielberg's return to imaginative movies.