A smashing box office success and an Oscar nominee for Best Visual Effects, Ready Player One has already proven itself to be a smart and surprisingly adequate rendition of today's techno-anxieties that underpin the use of VR in popular culture. Through its elaborate portrayal of a magnificent utopia—a world where you (your avatar) can be anything you want—the film acts as an antidote to what many would call the end of cinema. Fears about VR interfering with filmmaking and the potential dismantling of film worlds through that particular kind of "virtual realism" are countered by the ever-expanding possibilities of OASIS. Spielberg is anything but cynical here and even if the main characters, Wade and Art3mis, are teenagers who have been born in a world beyond salvation, there is still hope in their idealism. While they find themselves up against the CEO of an evil corporation called  that seeks to overthrow the OASIS, the battle is not as uneven as it seems. Even now, being the giant of sci-fi film that he is, Spielberg still believes in the youth, as he always has.

One spectacular scene of the film is based on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and takes place in the Overlook Hotel. Spielberg pays tribute to the iconic film by reconstructing not just any set, but the bit where waves of blood flow through the hotel corridor. Perhaps the most arresting bit of a film that can be decontextualised, this episode finds its way in the plot of Ready Player One through the universe's creator—James Halliday—and his particular kind of cinephilia. The idea that a tech-bro entrepreneur has hidden the clues to his fortune in recognizable film references is already something that sets the film apart from many of its sci-fi predecessors. By replicating a scene and having the characters role play that very same action from The Shining, Spielberg makes the best out of his Hollywood influence: he is perhaps the only director to afford such a direct reference and to execute it in such a veritable and fun way.