Steven Spielberg has the creativity and the clout to carry off Ready Player One. Cine-literate to an eye-popping degree, it’s an action-packed, characterful movie propelled by the Wunderkind’s visual clarity.

In 2045, teenager Wade Watts – like most of the planet - lives his life as an avatar in the OASIS, a virtual reality created by the recently-deceased billionaire James Halliday. An 80s nut, Halliday recorded a video-codicil: hidden in the OASIS is an Easter egg and the first to find it not only inherits his millions but the OASIS itself. Through his teen-cool avatar Parzival and his geeky-knowledge of Halliday’s life, trailer-park kid Wade vows to crack the code. But corporate bad hat Sorrento is investing big money to get there first and will kill anyone, either virtually and in reality, to win.

Ready Player One is fun on many levels. Thrillingly shot, it’s funny, feisty and faithful to Ernest Cline’s 2011 bestseller. As a rollercoaster it’s more refreshing than the today’s surfeit of blurry effects-driven movies. Stuffed - like the book - with 80s and 90s pop culture, it invites you to namecheck the movies and the synth-rock tunes. Or you can savour it as a cautionary tale on the pervasiveness of social media.

A hyper-inventive mass car race - for the first of Halliday’s key-clues - is a crazily fun ride. Obstacles crash in from other movies: wrecking balls from Fast and Furious 8, King Kong swinging down from the Empire State Building. True to Spielberg’s visual dexterity, it’s then re-seen Tron-like from under the virtual road, deep within the game.

Other films crowd in, including a few of Spielberg's own. Parzival’s game-car is the DeLorean from Back to the Future. A rear-view T-Rex from Jurassic Park gets a thumbs-up from James Cameron’s Terminator 2. Less originally, there’s an invocation of Inception’s back-of-a-van sequence – but for sleepers submerged in a dreamworld, we now have Wade’s warriors hooked-up to the OASIS, racketing about through the streets of a dystopian future – or Birmingham, as it turns out.

The biggest coup, though, is Spielberg’s re-use of entire scenes from a Stanley Kubrick classic. Inserting his gamer-characters into it, it’s an eerie, audacious and funny sequence. Spielberg’s friendship with the Kubrick family, and having visited the same Kubrick set in 1980, certainly pays off here. Ready Player One is never predictable, in narrative or vision.

Tye Sheridan (X-Men: Apocalypse, Mud) is suitably underpowered as Wade, the orphan with limited life experience. But the film comes alive with stand-out turns from two Brits. Olivia Cooke is Art3mis, Wade’s supercool, no-nonsense rival in the hunt. And in an endearingly fun turn as Halliday, Spielberg’s post-Hanks alter ego Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies, The BFG) oozes 1980s whizz-kid geek. Is it intentional, though, that his amusingly-named avatar, Anorak, looks like Gandalf’s twin?

In lesser hands, only one dimension of the movie might work. But Spielberg makes it fire on all cylinders. Love the book? Have no fear. Never played a video-game? Doesn’t matter. Prefer characters to effects? No worries. Want an edginess to your film-making? Ah… Spielberg’s movies always sing in the storytelling and his cine-skills are peerless. But Sugarland Express apart his films are almost always reassuring. And Ready Player One’s no different. For example, Art3mis doesn’t want Wade to meet her in real-life because she thinks herself ugly. But it’s only movie-ugly; in that respect it’s a boy-meets-girl film that doesn’t buck the trend.

It celebrates our love of big-screen movies – while warning us not to be glued to our phone-screens. Unlike most special effects movies, it’s about escaping from escapism while having a blast in the process. 'Reality is real' - an obvious but timely point. And Ready Player One makes it perfectly.

Ready Player One might be one of the most frustrating films I have seen in a long time. Visually it's a stunner, and narratively it is compelling, if rather broad. And there are one or two performances that manage to escape the CGI gloop and leave a lasting impression. So why did this film leave me so cold?

The film is set 30 years in the future, where the planet is slowly sliding into dystopia. To escape their miserable existence, everyone is hooked to a virtual reality world known as The Oasis, where you can be whomever you want to be and do whatever you want to do (within the limits of a 12A certificated film; Black Mirror this is not). Our hero is Wade Watts (avatar name: Parzival), who is on the hunt for a set of keys left behind by the now-deceased creator of this brave new world. The first person to have all three of these gains control of The Oasis.

Ready Player One is Steven Spielberg's latest film, coming a brisk three months after The Post. The director is nothing if not efficient and the undertaking here is, on a technical and visual level, a marvel. Adapting Ernest Cline's novel, the film is part Tron, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the Tim Burton version). The strongest element here is the visuals, with extensive amounts of time spent in the Oasis with CGI characters that are a long way off of the nadir of the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns. One believes these characters could live and breathe, almost to the detriment of the film's real world, which is just a bit boring, sadly. The cast do a mostly fine job but few are able to leave a lasting impression. The two standouts are Lena Waithe and Olivia Cooke. Waithe (so very good in Master of None) is a charismatic, often funny sidekick to our hero, while Cooke, as the love interest, is far more interesting and expressive. One wishes she had been the lead.

My biggest issue with Ready Player One is that I wasn't sure who this film is for. The film's plot is constructed in broad strokes, with a clearly defined quest at its centre and few grey areas when it comes to character motivation. But the film is far more interested in the references it is making, the culture it has cannibalised and strapped to itself. But the issue with this is that these are all taken from twenty years of cinema, the 70s to the 90s. There are almost no modern references, and every character seems to idealise a period of time that almost none of them were alive for (the film is set in 2045). I'm not saying I don't have immense affection for the 80s, but the degree it is placed a pedestal here is just frankly odd. This is particularly apparent during an extended sequence where the characters visit the setting of one of a particularly iconic horror film of the 80s. It is a technical marvel to watch this unfold, with the music, set and camerawork all spot-on. But it is so very odd to watch this horror film appropriated into an action scene in a family blockbuster. On a wider scope, I can't help but feel troubled by a narrative that boils down to a generation that has broken the planet creating a solution where people escape these traumas into the creator's nostalgia-filled fantasies.

There is no denying Spielberg's talent as a blockbuster director. From the time we first saw the shark's fin in Jaws to the sight of a T-Rex bellowing its dominance at the end of Jurassic Park he dominated cinema, having a hand in many of the iconic moments of the period. And as his camera whizzes through a car race early on there is no denying he still is very capable of putting together blockbuster thrills. But Ready Player One never hits the heights of his past works, and instead placed me at a distance, able to admire it but not able to fall in love with it.