Hey Guys! Let’s talk about Ready Player One, the new cyberpunk action-adventure from Steven Spielberg.

Ready Player One starts off with our protagonist, Wade Watts, explaining the current world: It’s 2045, people live in piles of garbage, and most people escape their reality using the OASIS, a VR Headset that puts you into a world where your limit is your imagination. People only come out to the real world to “eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom.” When the creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, dies, he begins a long lasting game where users must find an easter egg that, if found, will give them a vast fortune and total control of the OASIS. To find this, users have become experts at Halliday and all of his interests in pop culture. One movie that specifically comes up a lot is The Shining, which I highly recommend you watch before viewing this movie.

Along with the nerdy Watts, who is known in the OASIS as Parzival, he is joined by Ar3mis, also known as Samantha, who is played by Bates Motel star Olivia Cooke. Like Watts, Samantha is also nerdy and obsessed with the late Halliday, and together they go on an adventure that will lead them into places they have never dreamed of.

Who else is better to play a villain than Ben Mendelsohn? Nobody, that’s who! Mendelsohn stars as IOI leader Nolan Sorrento, who is hell-bent on getting the prize and is not above any method of doing so, which includes jailing, shooting, and a lot more.

Ready Player One is at its essence a roller coaster and does that effectively, but the Spielberg magic comes in that it is able to be a roller coaster without sacrificing a good story, like a lot of special effects-driven movies. The movie, which you HAVE to see in IMAX 3D (it should be a requirement), does a good job at being an entertaining movie yet also sending us a message about our future. The movie is almost satiric in that sense, as we live in a world where virtual reality is becoming bigger and bigger by the year and more games are being made for it. The movie teaches us that we should always have a foot in the real world and make sure we don’t keep burying our heads in technology.

Ready Player One is a non-stop thrill ride that features a great mix of special effects and rich, deep storytelling. See it in theaters today!