In all honesty, the first time I watched the Ready Player One trailer, I was not impressed.

I can’t pinpoint the exact thing that set me off, but I was just not interested. I told my family I wasn’t going to join them when they went to watch it. My dad bought tickets anyways.

Looking back, it was good I went. The movie turned out to be great.

For those unaware, Ready Player One is a sci-fi adventure movie based on one of Ernest Cline’s books with the same name. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg directed the film, and although it probably won’t become a classic like some of his other films, I would still recommend seeing it.

The movie begins with Wade Watts, played by Tye Sheridan, explaining the history of the real world and the OASIS, a virtual reality world where people spend most of their time. The creator of the OASIS is dead and the OASIS is up for grabs. Watts, screen name Parzival, teams up with Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Aech (Lena Waithe), Daito (Win Morisaki), and Sho (Philip Zhao) to get control of the OASIS before the Big and the Bad: Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn).

The film was fast-paced, which had both its positives and its negatives.

Pro: The fast pace meant that I wasn’t bored. Action scenes and quick plot developments kept my eyes glued to the screen for the entirety of the film.  

Con: There’s no character development. We meet the characters. They meet each other. They go off to save the world. The end. Of course, there is romance and friendship and all that fun stuff, but there isn’t much depth to anything they do. It’s just fun.

As someone who does not care for slow, romantic, and meaningful films, this film was amazing. I needed some neon lights and speedy action sequences with equally fast background music. The graphics were great and well-beyond my low expectations, unfairly founded upon the short clips I saw in the trailer. The music wasn’t anything amazing, but they went with the movie and that’s what counts, right?

However, I must point out that, like usual, the movie did not match the book completely. Or at least, that’s what my fellow movie goers said. There was a guy who came up to me at the end and started complaining about the lack of a specific scene. My sister said that there were certain scenes that were in the movie that were not in the book and vice-versa. But my dad, who read the book years ago, was silent. I think he, like me, was just happy to have seen a good movie.

Final Verdict: 8/10