Review of Ready Player One (2018) by Nikolayg — 17 Aug 2018

I was looking forward to this movie, but I could not watch it for more than about 15 minutes. The setup was extremely basic. Find 3 keys, pass 3 trials. I expect movies to be more sophisticated than a game of Doom.

The mindless overdone CGI in the "virtual" world was just overdone for the sake of overdoing it. King Kong roams about, but who cares? None of it meant a thing. It was all gratuitous nonsense.

And this whole idea that VR enables some kind of a magical transportation to another world falls flat. I actually had VR in the mid 1990s (it was called VFX1 and VFX3D), and now I have PS4 VR. It's not magical transportation to anywhere.

You have to make sure you don't step on the cord, that you don't step on your cat, that you don't trip over the sofa. And the "world" is just basically a TV screen pushed up against your face.

It's fun but it's not exactly transporting. This kind of sci-fi fantasy would have been more interesting and convincing years ago before so many became familiar with VR; the simplistic setup to this story was not interesting and the reality of VR makes the story hard to accept.