There’s a phenomenal sequence early in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One: Countless vehicles rev their engines at a starting line, the air electric. There’s the DeLorean from Back to the Future. There’s Adam West’s Batmobile. There’s Speed Racer’s Mach 5 and the Akira motorcycle. But it’s not important what the vehicles are so much as what Spielberg does with them: The race starts and the cars peel out, speeding and skidding over twisted, contorting roads, launching into the air and spinning into crashes. It’s such a great car chase—even before King Kong and Jurassic Park’s T-rex show up—that you forget it’s all CGI. It’s just motion and color and sound, expertly cut together, telling a story that thrills and delights. It’s a reminder that when Spielberg’s firing on all cylinders, nobody else even comes close.
And from this high, Ready Player One plunges straight downhill.
