'Ready Player One' Takes You on a Nostalgic Adventure

Damn! What can I say about Ready Player One? Honestly, the real question should be what more can't I say?! This movie is so good, it's easily one of my favorites this year. It's definitely in my top-five of this year, that's for sure. It's filled with so many things I remember from my childhood, from my parents' childhood that they passed on to me, and even some things that's been around since at least the 30s or 40s.

So the movie starts with Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, Mud, X-Men: Apocalypse) living in the slums of Columbus, Ohio in the year of 2045. Wade was born in 2029 but he considers himself a child of the 80s, as do I, and to experience all of that, he goes to the OASIS since the real world has been to everywhere else.

Wade has an avatar in the OASIS like everyone else that is modeled almost like a character from an 80s movie. He wears a denim vest with buttons on it, a pair of Converse, and Han Solo's blaster holster. As we discover what else goes on in the OASIS, we see that you can go rock climbing with Batman, do deathmatch tournaments where you bump into countless people like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, go into Minecraft, even meet up with other characters like Sonic The Hedgehog and RoboCop.

The movie gets going when a race is gearing up to start, and Wade's avatar, Parzival, meets up with his friend, Aech to start. When the race starts, it's full of nothing but awesomeness because Parzival drives the best car of the 80s: The DeLorean from Back to the Future and in the middle of the race, he notices that Art3mis (Olivia Cooke, Bates Motel, Thoroughbreds) is in it, and she's riding Kaneda's bike from Akira.

After the race, the creator of the OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies, The BFG) dies and he's left three keys. Whoever finds all three keys has ownership of the OASIS, so a huge hunt begins. Wade finds a way to win the race and gets the first key, Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The Dark Knight Rises) catches word of what he did and goes after him in the real world.

Wade meets Samantha, who's the one behind Art3mis, they team up after finding another clue that leads to the second key which leads them to one of Halliday's favorite movies and they actually go into the movie. After they find the second key, that's when they all meet other avatars in person like Aech (Lena Waithe), Daito (Win Morisaki), and Sho (Philip Zhao).

After they meet in person, they go to Planet Doom for the final showdown between everyone that's part of the OASIS for the fun of it like Halliday was and everyone that's working for Sorrento. As soon as the final showdown begins, that's where you see everyone like Battle Toads, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spawn, Chun-Li, The Iron Giant, Chucky, and even Master Chief from Halo.

This movie is filled with nothing but things that people recognize, it's like someone took everything that's in pop culture from today to way back, ate it in its mouth, and spat it out all in one movie. And since this was adapted from the book, something tells me that there's a lot more in the book that they couldn't put in the movie and now I'm not only waiting on a possible sequel for the movie—but I'm waiting to read the book as well. It was like my childhood came back to life along with things I remembered from when I was a teenager.