Well this is the perfect "Father and Son bonding over a movie" watching experience. Dad will catch most if not all of the 1980s and early 1990s pop culture and video game references, blasted in quick repetition. Son will enjoy a story based on his favourite pasttime - complete with all the trappings of modern on-line gaming, pay-to-play, cheating, hacking, and corporate privacy issues. At least Daddy will remember a simpler time before video gaming turned into the morally ambiguous swamp. And yes, that leads us straight to the plot of this story, with it's "Willy Wonka" inspired moral. Nice and predictable, sugar-coasted, and unsurprising.

Having never read the book, I have a feeling that it was more dystopian and darker than what we see on screen. The pacing of the movie goes so quick that anyone not well versed in videogaming lore is going to be getting lost really quickly in the dialogue while trying to understand just what in the heck is really going on. That said, the correct market segment had to be targeted, so here we are with a Spielberg directed romp through the video game arcade with a group of teens.

Sadly that aspect of it is probably going to turn a lot of more adult viewers off, but hey - there's some serious CGI chops being shown off in this movie. Why then, does it remind me so much of Avatar? Maybe because it feels like I'm watching someone else play a video game? The film tries to bootstrap itself with real stakes and suspense, but the cartoony world makes it all feel unearned.

This is box-office fodder and it doesn't take itself too seriously. Just as well then, that I couldn't either. It was an entertaining easter egg hunt spotting all the 1980s pop references, but I also feel that the story doesn't really get out of it's pixellated two-dimensional treatment of the subject matter and into fully rendered 3D when it had every reason to do so. We're stuck in the Chocolate Factory when in fact we need to be in the Matrix. Is reality the only thing that's real? Well, what if it's not? Will the people of this movie put down the game long enough to rebuild their real world? Will the computers running the virtual reality sim have their resources switched to running protein folding simulations to discover a cure for cancer? This movie has no answer.