Ready Player One dumps pop culture over its audience’s head like a baby playing with a bowl of spaghetti. You’re not just immersed into it – you’re lathered with it. It stays with you like stink on a skunk. You retreat to it, hide in it, elope with it off to for a happy few hours away from the sordid strains of reality. The lines blur, and the game becomes not just life’s diversion, but it’s replacement.

In this fictionalized version of life-as-we-know-it, reality has been given the OASIS, a virtual reality in which players can morph into whatever they want to be, interact with whatever beloved characters they can imagine (or, well, its game owners can get the rights to – did you see Han Solo and Chewie walking around in there). Fun becomes a full time occupation in this matrix, with many people – as Ty Sheridan’s Marty McFly-te tell us – given up on trying to solve the world’s problems. Indeed, nobody seems too concerned about trying to solve anything other than whatever new adventure the OASIS cooks up for them. Relationships, vacations, heartbreaks, financial concerns and wildest dreams have gone into the cloud. Maybe this isn’t so fictional after all, he types as he loosens the imaginary necktie around his neck.

It’s no shock to see hovels form where apartment complexes used to be. Who cares where you sleep if you can wake up to scaling the 8-bit-Alps with Batman? For Sherdian’s Wade Watts, a crawl through a few broken cars and piles of trash takes him to his 80s-out van, where his OASIS hookup send him to that world of pure imagination. But, of course, this thing makes folks in suits a lot of money, and when Watts discovers the key to transferring the rights of the OASIS over to the game’s best player (in an impossible contest laid out by the game’s late creator, James Halliday), big corporation X (led by Ben Mendelsohn, Hollywood’s new go-to villain) gets skittish, and tries to stop Watts (or, well, Parcival in video game land) and his pals from cracking the code, which could change the world as they all know it.

That’s a lot of plotting, but somehow, it’s still not enough to really grasp everything that’s going on. Ernie Cline’s source book is packed to the brim with pop culture references that run from the mouth of Olympus like honey syrup, and even thicker worldbuilding. It’s no wonder the script, penned by Cline and Zak Penn, rambles along like Roger Rabbit with his ninth cup of extra-caf expresso. It’s a bit of a surprise to see a Spielberg film devoted to being this chatty, but if this is going to work, you’ll need the lay of the land.

Half the fun in this one is just looking around, seeing the world Spielberg and his creative team have built, and watching them take all the toys out of the box. One particular scene – a Hot Wheels jaunt through New York City with flames, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, King Kongs and their “hey, it’s that!” reference racers – shows the mastery Spielberg has over the cinematic set-piece and why cinema’s most recognizable director would want to crack this one open. Sure, we’ve seen pop culture stews before with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and The Lego Movie series, but Ready Player One will no doubt join those IP-mashups on the top shelf.

The film also shows a storied auteur grappling with the effects of pop culture on the populous, and what his responsibilities are as one of the gatekeepers. Halliday is Spielberg’s Willy Wonka equivalent – the kind of groundbreaking, world-renowned artist who has every one of his works blown up, dissected, printed on lunch boxes, attached to vital memories, used as refuge when life hits its hardest. When do we take it too far, though? When does entertainment become not just a hideaway, but a dangerous diversion from reality’s greatest concerns. As we come to see, this society’s gone zombie-eyed for the shiny possibilities of what the OASIS can do and has grown either unaware or apathetic to the plight of its fellow countrymen, some of whom are actually enslaved by the game’s overseeing corporation. While in the real world we haven’t gotten that bad just yet, Spielberg and company ponder delicate ideas – What if we poured the same amount of energy and time into solving real world issues as we do into fictional realms of entertainment? When is too far too far in terms of diving into the imaginary? What is the creator’s role in moderating this, or is he even responsible?

Spielberg is known to deal with parts of his life through his films, and here, it’s hard not to see him toggle around with his place in the entertainment cosmos, and what role his creations have had, good and bad, on the audience. It’s all at once an act of introspection and absolution, as the film ultimately places the responsibility of the OASIS on the user. After all, it’s up to us how we divvy our lives between reality and its virtual alterative.

What Ready Player One does through its story is never quite as interesting as what it means, but it’s a Spielberg science-fiction pop culture soufflé, so you’re bound to have a great time, even if it’s never quite as memorable as the pop culture it seeks to admire.

(Oh, and Mark Rylance is aces in this…but when is he not? If you can find me a magical world where that guy turns in a bad performance, I’ll deem it pure imagination indeed.)