Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg, 2018)

Spielberg follows a pattern of output well-established over his career where a serious adult-themed film (in this case, last year's The Post) is immediately followed by a child-friendly adventure, by adapting Ernest Cline's science fiction hit novel. The computer game-addicted shantytown world of the near future is a dystopia, but it's dystopia-lite: the teenage heroes striving to win the ultimate competition in the online games world that most of mankind spends most of their time in, while a megacorp tries to stop them, are very much to be seen as cool and plucky: Spielberg young protagonist archetypes. Here, they are also calculatedly target audience-driven: there are the white American romantic leads, and their second-billing accomplices are black and Japanese, with layers of naff anime style and characters thrown in for good measure. Ironically, half the cast is actually British and the few real (as opposed to CGI) urban scenes shot in Birmingham.
As the Avatar-graphic quest progresses, we go through the most intense saturation of mostly 1980s pop culture references ever seen, at least what Spielberg was allowed to use, from Batmobiles and Duran Duran through to a complete recreation of The Shining as one of the challenges. This proves both daft fun and also as exhausting as the pace which is ramped up to beat even the video games that it reproduces, because it's clearly felt that it has to in order to retain the jaded audience's attention. Of course, both of these characteristics and the FX overload are conveniently justified by the plot.
On a base level, the message is that games-obsessed teens are good and adults are squares, and pop culture cannibalising itself is perfectly acceptable. It would have been nice if there was a more complex message in it, but you don't usually get that with Spielberg's kiddie products, so it was probably pointless to expect one. Compare this with Ender's Game, which was also built on a kid hero playing games to save the world, and yet managed to work in a morally ambiguous resolution.

5/10