Ready Player One

Better than the original that is too broad and targeted both at young people as a genre movie and at nostalgic viewer in their thirties. The film adaptation addresses most of the shortcomings, adjusts the tasks for the screen, understands pop culture and commercial video games, withstands a deliberate and stylized digital mess, does not overuse allusions, but the final footage is to excessive. You never start to care for the characters, and it keeps being silly (especially the solutions of the first and third task, there is no need to dedicate your whole life to that, the racing "glitch" would discover even a troll during the first race and the solution of the last task would be obvious to most players 30+ at first glance). In any case, after a long time, Spielberg is back as an “adult with a soul of a child", so he plays with the format, pace of narration (OASIS versus the real world) and often even in a surprisingly imaginative way work with pop culture (especially setting of the second task, it will make you smile. Generally speaking, these horror allusion are one of the most successful ones ever). The resulting megamix of pop-cultural easter eggs, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matrix, traditionally filmed Amblin movies, Sucker Punch and The Last Action Hero is significantly better than what the trailers made us expect. It's even so good that these few annoying weak moments will be even more disappointing. (29/03/2018)

The necessary trimming of a million specific '80s references in film language (even under the guidance of the original author, Ernest Cline) transforms into a million fleeting enchantments, for which everyone must reach out and inevitably contemplate how many of them they couldn't even catch. And it's good, because blindly following a cult template would be a path to hell. Therefore, the challenges are more action-packed, straightforward, inevitably easier, and, first and foremost, easier to find. The entrances to the paths to individual keys are more about luck and intuition than encyclopedic knowledge, but after watching it for a few days, even that doesn't bother me anymore, despite such a change taking away some of Parzival's nerdiness. Similarly, the casting of Olivia Cooke takes away from Art3mis that desirable curviness (the dreamy hottie from the original remains far from the gates of adaptation) and replaces it with a girl named Samantha, but given her talent, which surpasses the rest of the youth by a bit, I almost understand this decision. And the cherry on top? Mark Rylance. Every smile, solemnity, and wink creates an immensely touching combination of life disappointments and boyish efforts. Steven Spielberg becomes the king at least once again. Nobody could have expected the transformation of a cult geekgasm into a loving celebration of human relationships. (04/04/2018)

A very free adaptation of the book by Ernest Cline, updated both for the modern generation and for movie fans. It’s been a long time since Spielberg filmed something so playful and purely for entertainment and his classic trademarks are to be seen throughout. Even if the tasks relating to the keys are totaling different, the core of the story remains the same and it is Mark Rylance’s acting that carries the movie on his shoulders. His Halliday has the perfect parameters of endearing madness and so his classic truths about life don’t sound banal. The message that the Internet isn’t everything isn’t as important as the unbelievable serving of entertainment that a mass of fans enjoy during re-screening and looking for “their" thing. The action is awesome and packed to bursting with references. There is something for everyone (in my case the Godzilla theme), what worked for you? (29/03/2018)

I'm not fifteen anymore, so I can’t bitch about the fact that someone can stretch a game intro to over two hours. Yes, Spielberg has his egg firmly in his hand and coddles it with the grace of a pimply nerd with a gamepad in his hand, but the exuberant visual treat sticks to your palate after just a few minutes because it can universally high-five Cline's book on the price/performance ratio. On the one hand, it wants to please everyone, but in key passages, it misses the proprieties of the mainstream, i.e., interesting characters and functional interactions. Here, the film loses out quite substantially to the (already rather futile) book, and my yawns were at times more theatrical than the actor's declamations present herein. Refined visuals and fancy special effects are a standard nowadays, but unfortunately, Ready Player One doesn't offer much more than that. (02/10/2018)

The trend of video-game CGI fests has also caught the great Steven Spielberg and the result is positive overall, though I can’t shake the feeling that Ready Player One is unnecessarily frantic and cluttered in places. In general, one does not suppose that Spielberg would want to shock anybody after so many years of A-list filmmaking in Hollywood with self-serving action or thrilling effects at any price, but there are quite a few situations that are a bit on the edge. Neither the instant romance nor the final battle avoid the typical clichés. The winks to movie classics, a couple of which are the work of the creator of this blockbuster himself, are fine, but those 140 minutes get pretty grinding towards the end and the comedy interludes were nothing to write home about. I enjoyed more the slower, more fateful and more audiovisually polished Tron Legacy by Kosinski, whose digital set design and sense of visuals are further away, as opposed to his directorial ability to grasp a decent script. (16/06/2018)