We have reached quite a fascinating era, where the past is suddenly becoming far more fashionable than it was before, and people are more obsessed with recapturing previous eras than actually moving forward, particularly in terms of entertainment. This has resulted in many television shows from the 1990s and early 2000s being rebooted – Roseanne, Will & Grace, Murphy Brown and many others. It has led to the cultural phenomenon that is Stranger Things, a show that had an original story but was clearly inspired by the generation-defining films and television shows of the 1980s. One person that did seemingly inspire the Duffer Brothers to create the show (of which I am an ardent critic, finding it poorly written and uninspiringly dull) is Steven Spielberg. Personally, I find it impossibly difficult to embrace this wave of heightened nostalgia, because it panders towards past generations and creates the illusion that a piece of work is great when in actuality, it relies on the fond memories the viewers retain in order to make it appear better than it actually is. These shows are not good, they are just familiar, and Spielberg himself is responsible for making the worst example of this pandering nostalgia with Ready Player One, a film that I found, quite sadly, to be mediocre and unspecial, and perhaps one of the weaker moments in Spielberg’s otherwise impressive filmography.

I will not pretend that I am absolutely enamored with Steven Spielberg, and I readily admit to being one of his most relentless critics, but I am also one of his biggest cheerleaders when he hits the right notes, and his filmography of late, particularly in the last decade, has been admirable and interesting, specifically the three-film streak of Bridge of Spies, The BFG and The Post, three films that show Spielberg at his narrative best, being able to adapt true-life stories or a well-beloved novel into something extraordinarily special. It seems that such an impressive streak came to a grinding halt with Ready Player One, a film that, in all honesty, feels like an overt and poorly-written parody of Spielberg, rather than something that he dedicated time and effort to making himself. In some ways, this film appears like Spielberg attempting to hearken back to the days of Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These are films that I may have troubling relationships with (particularly E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, a film I never quite enjoyed), but they were well-written, genre-defining masterpieces in their own right, and even if I did not particularly like some of them, I do recognize their importance to film history. Ready Player One is clearly an attempt on the part of the director to create the same fantastical, endearing epic, but one without any heart or soul, a manipulative and poorly-constructed misfire from a director who has been capable, even at his weakest, to show genuine authenticity and warmth. There are some interesting elements within Ready Player One, but for the most part, it is one of the most painfully average films Spielberg has ever made.

However, to be fair, most of the shortcomings of this film are not the fault of Spielberg himself, but rather of the individual who wrote the novel on which this film was based, as well as being the co-writer of the screenplay (there is a reason that many filmmakers choose to keep the original author of a source work at a distance in the filmmaking process, because it is a rare feat to accomplish without any problems). Ernest Cline is nothing short of a troubling author, with some of his poetry (one in particular, that I will not name, but has received considerable exposure recently) showing him as one of the flagship representatives of the nostalgia without substance movement. Ready Player One is not a good film, and that is really only the result of a very poor book. I have yet to encounter someone who considers the source novel to actually be well-written – audacious and interesting is possible, but I have heard nothing but middling reviews for the book, and while I know that I cannot accurately comment without having read it (although my original plans to read it are now soured, a good reason to avoid watching the film before reading the book from which it was adapted), it is increasingly clear that the source material is quite simply not good. Science fiction has always been a popular genre, mainly because the vast majority of authors, mainstream and obscure, have been capable of incredible world-building, with even the most average works of science fiction have often been audacious in contextualizing the stories to a particular era or location that is familiar yet foreign. In this film, Cline and co-writer Penn do not build worlds as much as outright steal elements from the past half-century of pop culture, arrange it in a certain way and call it a story. This may pander to nostalgia, and make the audience laugh and feel the familiar warmth of recognizing aspects from our childhood, but it certainly does not make the plot of Ready Player One any less empty, lifeless and absolutely void of any soul or meaning.

To be clear, I am not immune to nostalgia. I am an ardent devotee to pop culture, with so much of what I adore being built on an endless stream of pop culture, ranging across varied and eclectic sources of information and entertainment. There is absolutely nothing wrong with nostalgia, and there have been many instances of it being used effectively. However, the problem with Ready Player One is that instead of using the powerful tool of nostalgia in an optimal way – as an instrument to support the story – it overuses it, and instead of being an original story with delightful pop culture references peppered throughout, it comes across as an attempt to string together every possible pop culture reference together, through the lens of an uninspired and diminished story. There is nothing interesting or audacious about Ready Player One, and the flaws in the story are almost impossible to hide, despite the tiresome efforts of all involved to conceal these through an endless barrage of pop culture, shot directly at the audience without any tact or skill. I recently read that Ready Player One is Spielberg’s most expensive film in a decade, and one can only assume a large portion of that money went to buying the licensing rights to the many characters that appear throughout this film. It would have been far more worthwhile to use that budget to construct something original and intelligent, rather than a film that assumes the audience will be satisfied with being bombarded with familiar pop culture images. For the most part, audiences seem to be reacting quite positively to this film, and perhaps there is something I am missing, but I feel somewhat betrayed, because Spielberg has been a great stalwart of memorable, genre-bending cinema, and I honestly expected him to make something better. Even if Cline’s original novel was nothing more than a pop culture assault without any originality, surely Spielberg could have modified it into something meaningful. Unfortunately, this was not the case, and it seems like Spielberg is morphing into the worst possible parody of himself.

Yet, Ready Player One is not entirely bad. It would be important to note, especially because I am aware of how cynical and bitter I appear to be, that there were some elements (albeit only a few) of this film that I did like. There was a sequence involving The Shining that I found, for the most part, to be inspired. The creative attention paid to reconstructing the iconic Overlook Hotel, as well as the fact that this story included arguably my favorite horror film as a major plot element, really did catch my attention, and almost redeemed the film for me – almost. The blatant revisionism added to this element of the plot was inauthentic and poorly-executed, and the goodwill gained during it was almost entirely lost. Another element of Ready Player One that I did like (also, only to an extent) was the music. I am someone who adores recontextualizing of popular songs into a film, and Ready Player One has some of the most popular songs of the 1980s on its soundtrack. While this is certainly very entertaining and does positively feed the nostalgia, it also points to a much larger issue, a major flaw of the film – Ready Player One is set in 2045, quite a while from the present moment and even longer from the time-frame of nostalgia that this film relies on. The music , the movies and many of the other references are restricted to a particular period of time, which unsurprisingly coincides with the childhood of its creator, Ernest Cline. Ready Player One becomes less of a nostalgic trip down memory lane that many of us can relate to, but rather a pandering millennial fever dream, an attempt to energize a certain demographic through familiar sights and sounds, hoping that it would appear meaningful. Shoehorn these dozens upon dozens of references into a poorly-constructed future narrative that features the extremely relevant concept of virtual reality gaming, and you will have a film that will bring out the geeks and young people in droves. Ready Player One may not be a good film, but one has to admire the audacity of the creators to make such a shrewd and cunning move, convincing audiences that what they are watching is actually interesting, and not just an unhinged barrage of references that lack subtlety and restraint. There are some good moments scattered throughout Ready Player One, and they are adequate to prevent this film from being entirely unbearable, but the lack of originality is quite frankly laughable.

At least Ready Player One has a talented cast of veterans and newcomers, all of which are promising and welcome presences, right? Unfortunately, not even the eclectic and well-established cast can elevate this film particularly high. Tye Sheridan is a promising young actor who has already made a name for himself in diverse and fascinating films such as Mud, The Tree of Life and Entertainment, giving memorable, complex performances. Ready Player One was not one such film, and while he is serviceable in the role and does everything that one could expect him to do, he is given a character that is nothing more than an archetypal protagonist of an action film, dashing and courageous and intelligent, but with very little beneath the surface. Olivia Cooke, who has done some marvelous work in independent film, plays a character that is merely the feisty love interest of the main character, intended to convey the massively popular rhetoric that female characters can also be brave and courageous and tough as if this was entirely new information. The problem with Ready Player One is that it seems to believe that it is actually meaningful and interesting, and actually has original characters. Its quite the contrary – these characters lack any complexity and nuance and are stereotypical, one-dimensional stock figures that are impossibly dull. Not even two of the more talented actors working today – Ben Mendelsohn and Mark Rylance – are able to make any impact. Rylance plays the sage and respected founder of the virtual reality world that the world is obsessed with, and while he is good, this kind of wise character is so over-exposed in cinema, not even arguably the greatest living stage actor can garner any meaning through it. Ben Mendelsohn has risen to great heights as an actor in recent years and has become considerably well-regarded, but his character of Nolan Sorrento is one of the weakest, most meaningless villains cinema has ever seen. He is positioned as this grandiose, malicious antagonist, and rather than being actually malevolent, he is flippant, ridiculously weak and unbelievably void of any characteristic, other than being a representative of a power-hungry corporate leader who wants world domination, which is hardly original. The LEGO Movie even did this better (as well as many other things The LEGO Movie did better in regards to nostalgia but let us not get into that). A villain is only good as his motivations, and Nolan Sorrento was uninteresting beyond belief, and one of the most underwritten villains in cinema history.

Ready Player One does have one positive aspect that is without any caveats – it is visually very creative, and Spielberg does exercise his cinematic flair with the execution of the film and its aesthetics. However, it is hardly original or groundbreaking, and it often feels predictable. However, while the story may be entirely lacking, and it may have a complete absence of particularly good performances, Ready Player One is a well-made film, with the juxtaposition of the motion-capture scenes and the real-world sequences that show that Spielberg did have some creative spark intact during the making of this film. It may not be Spielberg at his most visually-creative, and this same level of innovation could be done by most filmmakers who have access to the adequate resources. The visuals may be the only worthwhile part of the film, and perhaps the only aspect that the film was entirely successful in conveying. It does not excuse the multiple other weaknesses, and sometimes it even emphasizes how diminished this story actually is. Yet, for the most part, Ready Player One is pleasant to look at, but like many visually-stunning technical achievements, it is only alluring on the surface, as it lacks any depth that would make it even vaguely special or noteworthy. It also does not excuse the length, especially when the third act is possibly the most excruciatingly boring moment in Spielberg’s career. A film like Ready Player One should not ever dare be as long as it was, and it often felt like 140 minutes of absolute torture, with only the pleasant aesthetic (and the soundtrack) making it bearable.

As much as I wanted to enjoy Ready Player One, I just could not. It would be wrong to imply that this film had much potential that was not met because, in all honesty, it was a fragile, depthless story, an attempt to pander to the nostalgic generation through an endless barrage of pop culture references. It becomes extremely overwhelming and almost unbearable to experience. The redeeming qualities of this film are few and far between, and it contributes very little to the artistic landscape. It isn’t even mindless fun, as it is overlong and takes itself way too seriously, despite some welcome (but rare) moments of genuine levity. Ready Player One clearly wants to be the pop culture event of the year, the film that audiences flock to see for an entertaining, thrilling good time – think along the lines of Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The only difference is that these franchises, despite their shortcomings, they are original and audacious, and do not rely on familiarity, and rather strive to be meaningful, nuanced blockbusters with depth. Ready Player One is a misguided, dull exercise in challenging the patience of the audience, and after the energetic nostalgia fades in the first act, the audience is left with nothing but a weak storyline, unlikable characters and a film that wanted to be special but was not willing to put in the effort. There are very few instances of me wanting to leave the cinema partway through a film, and the only thing keeping me from forcing me to walk out was the hope that somehow, Ready Player One would get better, and it just never did. It is not awful, but it is extremely mediocre, and considering the prestige talent involved in this film, we can describe this film as being quite simply an enormous disappointment.