Ready Player One plays things extremely safe. While I haven't read the book, I get the feeling some of the artistic elements were lost in it's translation to a modern era film. What I mean by that is that it takes away your ability to be imaginative when everything is shown visually. It has some fun action and effects, but is totally unoriginal. Furthermore, it has A LOT of pop culture references that people seem to like, but none of them have any purpose and to me, they take away from it's identity. The story is simple and entertaining enough, though it doesn't have some plot holes and non sensical moments. Characters are pretty two demensional and writing is a little flat. Overall it's an average movie, but there's another thing:

*this is a rant* I want to talk about the message at the end of this movie; it just annoys me and feels out of touch. When you say "reality is the only thing thats real", what exactly do you mean?? When you say that, you raise the question, "what is real?". Most of this movie takes place inside the Oasis. Are the lessons these characters learned and the things they acomplished and the relationships they formed "not real" then?! If you say yes, then then thats pretty dumb because all you're left with is the message "don't spend your whole life playing video games" which is hilariously ironic. You're telling me the guy who invents a whole virtual world because he seems slightly autistic and dose'nt fit in socially says that that experience isn't real, wtf😂!? What are they trying to say? . Let me tell you my opinion: Virtual/gaming experiences CAN absolutely be real. My definition of "real" experience is one of genuine substance and growth. The right types of games and other media absolutely do grow us as people. It doesn't matter if they didn't occur in the physical world. We could have learned things, felt emotion, or in the case of online gaming, met people, worked together, learned to negotiate, coordinate, stratigise. How is that not real? If you think I'm over interpreting this message, but what else does can it mean? *end rant

This movie could have done a lot more with its setting, but it chose to be average and draw the widest appeal possible, yet sunnenly becoming rather pretentious by the end.