Over the weekend, I went to see Ready Player One in the theatre. It’s a movie I’ve been thinking about, and the opportunity to see it in a nearly-empty theatre was too good to pass up (even though I’m not a huge fan of theatres, in this case I got to go with someone). Generally, I thought it was a reasonable adaptation of the book, but it was missing something critical that I’m surprised that I missed…
You see, the book Ready Player One was all about a romp through the 80s. It’s about a guy who recreated pieces of his best memories for someone else to find, in the hopes that they may find them to be as meaningful as he did. That these memories were 80s references really tied the story together – it gave a specific time and the (not-quite-pop) culture in which he lived. It was also, if I’m being completely honest, meaningful to me because the references in question were just one step to the left of normal, and that was a space I occupied during my childhood, so the choices resonated with the geek in me in a way that a lot of modern media has failed to do.
The movie, however, stripped out almost all of those references. Instead, these sequences were replaced with much more generic set pieces that, while entertaining, did not have the historical nor personal significance of the original. In turn, I really had two problems with this. First, by replacing 80s immersive set-pieces with generic ones, the movie lost a lot of connection to me as a watcher – War Games I knew, but a random racing sim was simply not as interesting. Second, including only the most well-known allusions meant that the movie lost a lot of the “ah-ha!” moments from the book, and the joy of recognizing a bit of esoteric lore was lost.
I found this direction particularly odd as the plot itself was a bit weak (as I mentioned in my book review) – without these things to buoy up the movie, it was a weaker film by far. Further, while I usually do like a more concise plot, I feel like what they cut from the plot was from the depth, and what was left was only the most generic bits. I think it’s worth noting that this was clearly an adaptation of the book driven by stylistic (and possibly licensing) choice rather than technology limitations. There were a lot of changes from the book to the movie – so much so that this is basically a movie “inspired” by the book rather than “based on” the book, just set your expectations accordingly.
Overall, I can’t really recommend Ready Player One: The Movie – it may fill the void of non-comic-book action sci-fi, but it seemed to do so only in the most perfunctory sense – without pushing any boundaries or doing anything but what the most mainstream crowd could theoretically enjoy. I hate to be the book snob, but if it’s something you’re interested in, the book is a much more fun and engaging experience. I give this one one-and-a-half MMO pay-to-win coins – lacking enough essential value or distinctness to make it cool.