Even though Steven Spielberg has received just as much attention for his historical dramas, it’s his work on genre classics such as “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Jurassic Park” that have people always primed to see whatever he plans to release. So, with this in mind, it’s all the more strange and strangely befitting that he would choose to direct a movie based on Ernest Cline’s science fiction novel that references the classic films and pop-culture from the 1980s and ’90s, which Spielberg himself helped define.

“Ready Player One” is perhaps a perfect representation of the modern audience. It’s big, it’s loud, fast-moving and full of call-backs to the cinema we watched as children. These references include the DeLorean from “Back to the Future,” the robot from “The Iron Giant,” and a major set-piece that takes place in the Overlook Hotel, from Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.” Mini Easter-eggs and other smaller references are dropped throughout. For these reasons, this story might resonate with a younger audience, despite the fact that Tye Sheridan plays a boring lead character, and the film moves so quickly that it becomes difficult to digest the reams of expository dialogue that litters this somewhat stilted script.

The story takes place in a dystopian future ravaged by war, extreme income inequality and a scarcity of resources. The hero, a young man named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) lives in a vertical trailer park and sleeps on his washer and dryer, but he escapes his miserable life the same way everyone else escapes their desperate economic reality: logging into a hyper-realistic, multiplayer virtual reality simulator known as The OASIS.

What everyone is especially obsessed with is a massive treasure hunt built into the system by the now-deceased architect of this world, a pop-culture obsessed programmer known as Halliday (Mark Rylance). This complicated game allows players to find clues that lead to a mysterious “Easter egg” that will hand over the entire enterprise to whoever finds all the keys. Wade, playing as his virtual character Parzival, and his rag-tag group of misfit friends must stop a corporate army of virtual soldiers known as the IOI from collecting all the keys and selling off chunks of The OASIS to advertisers and throttling its open playing capabilities.

The first half of this thing has a lot of heavy-lifting to do to catch us up with its rules, who the characters are and what goals they hope to achieve by the movie’s end. Unfortunately, Zak Penn’s screenplay deals with most of this setup through lazy voice-over that suffocates the aural space of the film as the already-busy visual design of the practical sets and the motion-capture animation clutters the screen. The result is a significant strain on any possibility of emotional storytelling, but what is lost in human relatability is picked up by the clever and subversive anti-corporate themes of the film.

On the heels of the recent repeal of Net Neutrality, the movie’s battle cry for an open and equal internet certainly resounds. The ideological war between Rylance as the OASIS creator Halliday, and Ben Mendelshon as the corporate villain Sorrento is the perfect cinematic representation of the fight that exists between those who wish to keep the internet safe from slow-lanes and pay-walls and the cutthroat capitalism exhibited by our current FCC chairman Ajit Pai.

Though “Ready Player One” doesn’t boast the strongest character work, I found its messaging and its science-fiction examination of real-world inequality to be worthy of exception. As an action picture, I was drawn into the cutting between the real world and virtual sequences toward the third act, where I could get a better sense of how one reality effects the other. Moreover, Spielberg’s subtle relation to the boyish eccentric Halliday, in the way they both integrate their personal love of movies and pop-culture into the art they wish to share with everyone else, ads the personal touch that the narrative storytelling often lacks.

Grade: B-

Cassidy Robinson is a former Idaho State University student with a master’s degree in film studies from Orange County’s Chapman University. He is currently working as a media journalist in Los Angeles, California.