Steven Spielberg’s Most Underrated Sci-Fi Movie Is Now on Netflix — and It’s Tons of Fun

In the earliest years of his career, no other filmmaker had more consistent success with sci-fi movies than Steven Spielberg.

Since the mid-’90s, Spielberg has largely turned to more serious films. But in 2018, the director returned to his science fiction roots with Ready Player One.

The film is adapted from Ernest Cline‘s 2011 novel of the same name, and it may end up being the last sci-fi movie Spielberg ever helms.

Now that the film is back on Netflix, Watch With Us is sharing the three reasons you should watch Ready Player One in November.

The Young Cast Is Charming

Ready Player One is not the kind of movie that’s an actor’s showcase, especially since many of the performances are rendered as CGI animation. The film’s critics knocked the characters as underdeveloped, and they’re not wrong. Ready Player One‘s characters aren’t as compelling as the ones in some of Spielberg’s other movies. Ben Mendelsohn‘s villainous Nolan Sorrento is particularly one-dimensional, even though Mendelsohn himself is a great actor.

The film’s saving grace is its young leads, Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke, the latter of whom went on to star in HBO’s House of the Dragon. Sheridan plays Wade Watts, who goes by Parzival when he enters the virtual reality world called OASIS. Wade is a gifted player and the first one to discover how to advance in a contest that could determine who controls OASIS. Cooke portrays Samantha Cook/Art3mis, one of the players who joins forces with Wade to take down the IOI corporation and return the OASIS to the people. There are not really enough scenes of the pair together in the real world, but they do bring some life to the movie.

The OASIS Is Visually Stunning

The CGI look of the OASIS takes some getting used to, but it’s one of the film’s primary attractions. Parzival, Art3mis and the rest of their High Five team spend a lot of time there trying to decipher the clues left by the late co-creator of the OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance). That leads to some visually dazzling scenes, including the racing sequence in the video above. Parzival uses the DeLorean from Back to the Future for his ride, and it’s a blast to see that car again.

Sometimes, the CGI in Ready Player One actually serves a more human purpose. Late in the movie, Rylance portrays Halliday’s digital avatar, who has the chance to share his regrets from beyond the grave. Rylance’s performance is so good in that scene that it gives the finale some unexpectedly poignant moments of humanity.

It’s an Overload of ’80s and ’90s Nostalgia

If you grew up during the ’80s or the ’90s, then you’re going to recognize a lot of the background details in Ready Player One. Cline’s novel piled on the references even more than the movie does, but Spielberg was limited to the characters he could get permission to use. In that sense, it echoes Who Framed Roger Rabbit with its sheer number of cameos, including the Iron Giant and a lot of video game characters.

We’re not going to spoil the specific details about the horror movie and the classic video game that factor into the film’s plot. But the former felt like this movie stepped back in time to another era, while the latter gave the game a more interesting look than it ever had on a gaming console. Ready Player One embraces nostalgia to a greater degree than most films. Not everyone enjoys that, but we found it fun to revisit the past. We just wouldn’t want to live there.

Ready Player One is streaming on Netflix.