Ready Player One: The Movie Directed by Steven Spielberg

Ready Player One: The Movie

Directed by Steven Spielberg

First, a quick note on how this review will go. Because this is a book review series, the movie will be receiving two scores. The first one will be on how well it holds up on its own as a movie; the second will be judging it on its merits as an adaptation of the novel. Fair warning there may be spoilers. Ready Reader? Let's go!

The movie rights for Ready Player One were bought before the book was even released to the public, what followed were a number of negotiations for rights to various characters that were actually completed fairly quickly all things considered. Now some rights were not able to be obtained, for example the rights for Ultraman, who plays a big part in the plot of the book, are the matter of some dispute at the moment. So the movie creators weren't able to get a hold of them because no one is really sure who to even talk to right now. So instead the Iron Giant was substituted. Most of the Spielberg references were removed on the insistence of Spielberg himself, because he felt it would be vain to pack the movie with references to his own work, even if his list of films is a massive cornerstone of the 80s. Let's take a look at Spielberg for a moment shall we?

Steven Spielberg was born December 18, 1946 to an Orthodox Jewish family in Cincinnati Ohio. Later as a child they moved to Phoenix, Arizona (once again a creative genius spends his childhood in this sun-blasted locale, I begin to wonder if there something in the water? [Editor: What water? Long live the fighters of Mua’Dib! Okay okay, it only has the temperature and dust storm of Arrakis, there are several rivers that have been fully drained by the time they hit Phoenix proper, and several artificial reservoirs. But if the metro area keeps growing the way it is… That’s gonna change.]) where Mr. Spielberg would take the first steps on his path by earning his photography merit badge using his father's movie camera, because the still camera was broken. At age sixteen he wrote and directed his first independent film. His parents would move to California and divorced before he graduated from high school. He moved to LA with his father and was accepted to California State University. While attending college he got a unpaid internship (Spielberg had one before they were cool/completely ubiquitous exploitation of free labor.) with Universal Studios, it was during that internship that he got a chance to make a 26 minute short film called Amblin'. The film won several awards at various film festivals and impressed Sid Sheinberg, a Vice President at Universal, who offered Spielberg a seven year director contract, making Mr. Spielberg the youngest ever signed director in Hollywood history. He would not complete his degree until 2002 (God, can you imagine being his film professor? Talk about imposter syndrome. “Hey Steve, you wanna just teach the class for the week? I’m going through a divorce and just… can’t handle this right now” or “Well Steve, I’d planned on having the class analyze one of your films but that’s right out now. Thanks.”) but considering we got ET, Jaws, and Raiders of the Lost Ark... I'm gonna say Mr. Spielberg likely made the right call there. Let's move on the movie itself shall we?

Ready Player One takes place in Columbus Ohio, in the Year of Our Lord 2045 AD. Wade Watts lives with his Aunt Alice and her crappy boyfriend Rick. His only escape is the OASIS, where he competes in the race for the copper key. The OASIS is a virtual reality internet, created by James Halliday. When Halliday died, he announced that whoever could get all three keys (Copper, Jade, and Crystal) by defeating all three of the challenges, accessed by solving riddles which would lead to the challenge locations, would inherent all of his money (half a trillion dollars) and full control of the OASIS. As you can imagine this made some people excited. Someone figured out that the first riddle led to a race, where King Kong jealously guards the finish line. No one has made it past him in five years, until Wade finds a clue that lets him beat the race. This attracts the attention of the one of the more talented egg hunters Art3mis, a young lady that Wade has been a fan of for years and more dangerously attracts the attention of the villains of the piece Nolan Sorrento, leader of the corporation IOI. A corporation that has used predatory loan practices to amass a slave army of workers and Sixxers, young men and women who compete in the challenges using faceless avatars under the agreement that if they win, IOI gets full rights to the OASIS and will remake it in their corporate image. Wade now has to race against time and with the help of his friends defeat the corporation, save the OASIS from ruthless exploitation, and learn something about himself in the meantime (There’s the Spielberg schmaltz we all know and love).

Ready Player One the movie is a fairly standard plot held up by amazing visuals and locations. Like a dance club with zero g dancing or that race track I mentioned. While the plot is done well and the characters are decently acted and written, frankly if you've seen a movie about a plucky underdog out to save the world from the powers that be and grow up at the same time... You can call this plot beat for beat and get a handle on the characters pretty quickly (but I'll talk about that in the second part of the review). That said the visuals are amazing and the writing and acting is better than your average Michael Bay Movie, so if you liked those, you’ll like this. If you came only to see those action set pieces and all the references in the movie you'll have a blast. Otherwise the movie is pretty average and I'm gonna have to give Ready Player One a C as far as movies go.

Now let's talk about this an adaptation, so if you don't care how the novel and the movie compare you can stop right here. I'm not going to pretend I'm a fan of the novel, I gave it a C- after all. That said, there were interesting and clever things in the novel and most of them have been ripped out of the movie because they weren't safe. Let me start on the changes to the characters, Wade is kinda bleached out of his individual characteristics to make movie protagonist #4; a young man who wants to make it big with a heart of gold. Gone is his cheerful, unaware hypocrisy where he criticizes sixxers for selling out while agreeing to endorse products he's never used for money. Gone is his general cynical view of humanity and his distrust of groups. Now instead of talking about using 500 billion dollars to build a spaceship to escape Earth and start over, he babbles about living in luxury. The movie softens him to a degree and makes his poverty less real as a result. Movie Wade does not feel like a kid living in poverty, he feels like a middle class boy chasing the dream of wealth. Book Wade did feel like a boy who came up from poverty, having a willingness to do things simply to get out of poverty and stay out of it. Also drained of gray characteristics is Nolan Sorrento. In the novel Sorrento is allowed to have some skill and actual grasp of the pop culture everyone is obsessing about. Not only that but in the book Sorrento isn't presented as a coward. The film goes out of it's way to make him look like a craven suit, bumbling to control something he doesn't like or understand but wants because it'll make money. Bluntly, this drains him of menace and dimension. Art3mis is given what I feel is an unnecessary tragic backstory and turned into your bog standard rebel fighter against the evil empire. She's also changed from Canadian to American (Why? I can almost understand but never approve white washing but… Red-white-and-blue washing? Why? The only cultural differences anyone would notice in a movie are accent, apology frequency, poutine, and saying zed instead of zee {Because everyone must be from Ohio in this movie… EVERYONE!}). These are all safe changes made to the characters to make them more like stock movie characters. There's nothing wrong with stock characters on their own, they serve as a shorthand for the audience but when you take a character and turn them into a stock archetype, you're basically deciding not to take any risk and to avoid doing work getting the audience to understand and connect to the characters in their own right. Now some of the changes were good, having Aech be a modder and craftsmen who makes money by creating new items on the OASIS was a nice touch and I liked that nod to the modder community in general. I am utterly annoyed by the changes made to Daito and Shoto, who in the novel were Japanese shut ins, referencing a real social problem in Japan, and it made the OASIS feel bigger to know that there people from other nations in it. It made the OASIS feel more like the internet we have today. Instead in the movie there's no reference to their nationality, but given their age and the fact that they show up in Ohio in person... I have to assume they're Asian Americans (*Editor Twitches*). This makes the movie OASIS feel smaller and more like a virtual reality arcade then an actual internet. We didn't need all five of our protagonists to come from the same city! Not in a movie about the bloody world wide web!(Of course we do Frigid, that’s how Spielberg rolls. He has to have his small-town Schmaltz, and if he can’t have that, it’s parental issues. So many parental issues.)

Additionally much of the indepth nerdery was taken out to pander to a wider crowd. So instead of Dungeons and Dragons adventures which are solved by Wade learning the right Latin word at the right moment, we get the race instead (Oh for the love of… The people who go to see this movie are going to at least know what Dungeons and Dragons is, and everyone pretty much recognizes Latin when they hear it even if they don’t speak it. I really don’t see the point of this one, even for the sake of pandering to the widest possible demographic. It can be de-geeked a little bit without losing that completely. What the hell?). The obscure animes of the 80s are replaced with references both visual and audio to major movies and video games. This makes it feel less like a celebration of geek culture and more a pandering trip to the widest lane on the nostalgia highway so as to hit as much of the audience as possible. I'm being a bit of a snob here, there's nothing wrong with preferring King Kong, Overwatch, and Doom over Dune, D&D, and Joust; but when you remove major references from the novel, I can't help but feel the motive was to pander to a wider audience so you could get at their wallets. In my view the film drains away what little subtly there was in the novel and replaces it with more pandering when the story was already dangerously over the top with it as it was.

I'm also going to take a shot at the changes made to the message of the story. In the novel the message was that pop culture obsessions cannot and do not take the place of real communities or relationships with real people. There’s nothing wrong with hobbies or liking certain kinds of entertainment but you need to balance that with spending time with actual people. Wade had to learn that by burning bridges with his friends and struggling to rebuild those bridges and work with them to win in the novel. Here it's reduce to a quick, power of friendship and a message that you damn kids need to go outside and stop staring at those damn machines so much. Given all of this. as an adaptation I have to give Ready Player One the adaptation a D+.

Well... Next week we're heading back to the books! We're reviewing Platinum Magic by Dr. Bruce Davis. Nut first, this Sunday a joint-sidebar with both your editor and I, your reviewer discussing a topic I like to call Crouching Author, Hidden Minority. Keep Reading!