“Ready Player One”
C+
Rated PG-13. At AMC Loews Boston Common, Regal Fenway Stadium, suburban theaters and in IMAX at Jordan’s Furniture.
Raise your hand if you have had enough of films based on YA novels set in a dystopian near future. “Ready Player One,” the second Steven Spielberg film in three months, is based on the 2010 fanboy novel by Ernest C. Cline.
Set in 2045 in Columbus, Ohio, it tells a pop-culture-steeped story that’s a mash-up of “Back to the Future” and “Avatar.” Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) like most young people in a stressed-out world, prefers to escape the dreary, trailer-park reality by donning headsets and playing in “the Oasis,” where he can be anything, any gender, any creature he likes and engage in violent game- and role-playing like a character in a video game until he “zeroes out,” that is dies in the game and loses all the money and treasure he has accrued while playing.
The head of the company running the Oasis is the evil Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who has a Darth Vader-like Oasis rig in his office and a hired assassin in the Oasis named I-R0k (T.J. Miller). Sorrento sends young rebels to Loyalty Centers, where they are forced to serve as slave labor on Planet Doom. When in the wake of his death, the Steve Jobs-like James Halliday (Mark Rylance) appears as his Gandalf-like avatar Anorak,…
