I did not read the book, so I had no frame of reference before going in. I did hear there was a Willy Wonka-esque story line where the creator was dying and wanted to leave his creation - the Oasis - to someone before he passed.
With that said, I liked it and I catch myself still thinking about it. Then the more I think about it, the more questions I have that the movie didn't answer, but more on that later.
First, the visual and sound effects were great. I noticed a lack of background music to enhance what was happening in the action filled scenes. Downside to those scenes, they start to feel like the first Transformers movie and it's hard to follow the action when all the CG objects are just crashing into one another, giving no weight to the scene, just a beautiful spectacle bordering on a mess. Sure, you can glimpse something nostalgic here and there to ground you back into the scene, but you care about the nostalgic CG character, not the human behind it.
With that said, I did found myself caring about the main character and his group of friends, but nobody else in the film. I think we were supposed to care about the crowd / residents of Columbus, Ohio because they are tasked not once but twice to come to the aid of the main characters that call themselves High Five. The narrator/main character mentions some bad things happened in the world, but they didn't go into detail on why things are so bad and if the Oasis helps with that. It seems like the IOI corporation uses the Oasis to get away with slavery. Multiple times military-esque IOI team comes into the Oasis or real world to make things hard for our heroes as they are the main antagonists. I thought they were the law in this future 2045, but then the actual police are shown at the end, so there is some sort of law and order that you don't know exists until the very end of the movie.
Also, I don't know if I missed it, but what does the main character do for a job? Sure, you want to spend all your time in the Oasis because you can do and be anything, as long as you have the coins to do so, but you need to work to buy food to eat and such, and that's never shown. Sure, I wanted as much Oasis as I could get, but we needed more reality to make us appreciate the real characters behind the action. The message at the very end of this movie is how important reality is so it's a little bit of a curve ball after spending 5/6 of the movie in the Oasis and not really caring about reality.
With the aforementioned gripes aside, I did like it and I want to see it again to spot all the nostalgia nods possible. I was expecting to see E.T., and maybe some Star Wars things, but I didn't spy either. The Millennium Falcon did get a name drop. I do love the Iron Giant, and even though he flew in his own movie, he doesn't fly in this one which I was semi expecting. I'm not a Gundam fan, but I enjoyed that reference when it appeared. The movie had some good laughs, but it didn't make me tear up like other Spielberg movies in the past, so I'll give it 3/5 stars.
