Ready Player One, based on the book by Ernest Cline, directed by Steven Spielberg

Ready Player One, based on the book by Ernest Cline, directed by Steven Spielberg

In the view of this cinephile, The Post was the best film of 2017, superior to the Academy Award Winner for Best Picture, The Shape of Water, worthy as the latter is.

Furthermore, Steven Spielberg has never had an accident a misfire, even if he could not create only classics like Schindler's List, E.T., Saving Private Ryan, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Bridge of Spies, Catch Me If You Can and so many more.

Hence, Ready Player One cannot be a waste of your or anyone's time.

Besides, " Ther is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" - Hamlet, Shakespeare.

It seems that if you are a gamer, a fan of video games, this is the motion picture for you, and on the other hand, if you are not so keen, then the enjoyment might be diminished.

Having said that, the premise of the feature is that in the future, games will become not just more important, but paramount and somehow integrated in life, or maybe the other way round- given the bleak, lamentable state of things, humans have this chance of escaping in a Fantasy world.

The biggest company in the world is none of the formidable quintet dominating the online world and a good chunk of the real one too: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon or Microsoft.

In this vision of the future offered by this motion picture, that giant that will tower over the rest is a gaming company, founded by a strange, recluse, shy inventor played by Mark Rylance.

Like today, there is a fierce competition and another firm, controlled by a ruthless villain tries to get to the number one spot and crash if possible the adversary, especially of the death of the genius founder.

Before he died, this Bill Gates of the future, records a message,an invitation to a Mega Game that he has created.

There are three keys in this virtual combat and the most astute, clever, brave, resilient will win and all the riches of this earth and the other, virtual world will be hers or his.

Perhaps half of the film takes place in this other dimension, with avatars and a romance that debuts online so to say and then moves off, to the real world.

There is suspense, tension and a gripping conflict, much of those taking place among monsters, zombies and other creatures that are - or is this not true? - familiar to gamers.

There are movie references, like the famous Shining, and for a good few minutes, the avatars of the protagonists walk on the set of the Stanley Kubrick classic, meet the twin girls, press the wrong button and all the tidal wave of blood from that set flows into the cyber space of this one.

Some statements sound preposterous or too evident to be worth mentioning, like the repeated

"Reality is the only one that is real" or some words to that effect.

Nevertheless, considering what happens even in this day and age, with people glued, fascinated by the screen of their phones and so trapped in this other dimension that they forget to Live in this "only real life's", it may be worth emphasizing in the motion picture, the need to escape the Game, the Online and to come to reality.

When they come to make rules, the protagonists decide to declare Tuesday's and Thursday's - was it?- as days when the Game is not available, so that humans come back to Earth from that other dimension.

The film is in conclusion good, if not outstanding.