It's 2045. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is a 17 year old orphan living with his aunt in the trailer park stacks in Columbus, Ohio. The world is obsessed with the virtual reality world of OASIS and Wade spends most of his time there as his avatar Parzival. The late founder of OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), left his company shares worth half a trillion dollars to the winner of a contest he designed. The first to find an egg after retrieving three keys is set to control OASIS with his shares. After years of lack of success, Wade and his OASIS friend Aech are some of the remaining Gunters obsessed with solving the impossible game. They are opposed by corporate head of IOI and Halliday's former intern, Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), with his army of worker gamers called Sixers. As they continuously play the first challenge, Wade is joined by intriguing avatar Art3mis (Olivia Cooke).

I'm not reading the book and I don't think it matters. There are some nagging issues with the underlying concepts. It's in need of a few tweaks. There are some greatness from master director Steven Spielberg but it is a flawed movie. There is no denying that it is a visually sensational action adventure. Spielberg's skills are superior although this movie is a bit of a modern references scattershot. Like Goro turning into Alien, it's a lot of recognizing familiar iconic images without it meaning anything. The only truly compelling reference is The Shining. The characters are allowed to spend time in the place and it ends with a compelling lesson. That's the only well written story arc. All the rest have some sort of flaws.

The first test relies on a random quote from a lifetime with little overall meaning. It would be more likely to come across the solution by accident. After years of failure, somebody should be driving off the track. Just by a process of elimination, a Sixer would have driven in reverse once. As for Sorrento, he is both omnipotent and ruthless. He's willing to kill. He has massive computer power to track down anybody. After capturing Samantha, the obvious move for him is to torture her for information on Wade and all his friends. After killing one, killing more is no hurdle. It's like Sorrento's character arc went back a step. He needs to kill off the five and tension could be build by killing them one at a time. I was perplexed by Daito and Sho's first inclusion but at least, I thought that they would make good plot devices or at a minimum, cannon fodder. The last thing I thought that they would be useful is as a real world Scooby gang. As for Wade's speech to rally the OASIS world, it should have happened sooner right after IOI blow up the trailer park. I kept waiting for Wade to call in an avatar press conference where he exposes his real identity and IOI's murder spree. Also, there is Samantha's god-awful ugly face. Yah, right. It's played up so much and yet it's only a Gorbachev birthmark. It misses a big point about that issue. She could easily cover it up with heavy makeup. Another thing, is Sorrento's big evil plan about pop up ads? Recent developments at Facebook show what actual damage to the social order looks like. This is kiddie writing by comparison in imagining the worst case scenario. In many ways, that's the problem. This could have been a deeper social commentary but it is mostly trying to be a fun videogame story. The final lesson is to go out and smell the flowers. It is the easiest and cheesiest of after school special. That's the level of the script.