Ready Player One: Digital Man

 

He picks up scraps of information
He's adept at adaptation
'Cause for strangers and arrangers
Constant change is here to stay.

Rush, Digital Man, Signals

And the votes are in for the Ready Player One movie - I agree with Karli, it was fun.

Fun at a price, in terms of being faithful to the original.  As expected, most of the extreme geek gracenotes from the book are gone, disappointingly so to anyone who particularly enjoyed the nerdish 80s nostalgia that provided the basis for so much of the story.

However, I have to say that Zak Penn, who also worked on the scripts for The Avengers, The Incredible Hulk and X-Men: Last Stand, and Ernest Cline, author of the original book, do a noteworthy job of humanizing the story and tightening things up.  The referential background is updated and expanded, resulting in a stream of background visual cues that will undoubtedly result in a lot of frame by frame analysis when the film is released for the home viewing market.*

 

The IRL performances are uniformly well done. Tye Sheridan, who failed to impress me in X-Men: Apocalypse, redeemed himself as a completely believable Wade Watts, and Olivia Cooke and Lena Waithe both deliver solid performances.  Ben Mendelsohn plays Nolan Sorrento, the villain of the story, with the same air of grim menace that he displayed in Rogue One, and Mark Rylance does a surprising fragile turn as James Halliday, inventor of the OASIS.

And, speaking of the X-Men, it's obvious that the producers weren't able to make a deal with Marvel for any of its intellectual properties.  DC gets a few references, including the uninviting prospect of climbing Mount Everest with Batman, but there's no sign of Captain America, no friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, no invincible Iron Man, and so on - and when you think about it, there would undoubtedly be thousands of Wolverines in an unrestricted virtual reality.**

However, the computer gaming companies obviously felt no compunctions about having their creations appear in the film, along with lots of anime, science fiction and pop culture Easter Eggs.

 

All of the mechanics of the movie aside, as above, it's just fast paced fun, with good acting, lots of inside jokes, and an upbeat theme. Sadly, though, I couldn't help but think that Ready Player One was a movie out of its time, overwhelmed and overshadowed by the superhero franchises that dominate the box office right now.  Ironically, it might have been a blockbuster film if it had been released in the decade that provided the background for the book.

- Sid

* For example, the astute reader will look at the shot at the top of this page and see the Winnebago Chieftain from Spaceballs, what looks like the powerlifter from Aliens, and a Battlestar Galactica Viper Fighter suspended over ED-209 from Robocop, who is standing beside the Ferrari from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  There's a glimpse of a Buck Rogers Thunderfighter, the maintenance pod from 2001, and the Swordfish II from Cowboy Bebop.

** You do have to wonder how that sort of thing is policed in the OASIS.  Does Wade's friend Aech have to pay anyone for the right to build a replica of the Iron Giant?

"First to the key! First to the egg!"

(Contributed by Karli Thomas)

When my dinner plans fell through on the same night that Sid was going to see Ready Player One, he invited me to join him. I hadn't planned on seeing the movie as I had heard mixed reviews and hadn't read the book. But, I love popcorn, I love going to movies and I love Sid, so I said yes, and joined him.

I am so glad that I did. The movie was full of delightful surprises. Not having read the book meant that I didn't know what I was missing, or if there was even anything to miss. The joy of spotting characters and hearing references from the 80s was fresh in a way it couldn't have been if I'd read the book.

 

Early on in Ready Player One there is a race sequence that plays a lot like a car chase. Full disclosure, there's not much I find more boring in movies than car chases. The longer a car chase goes on, the more bored I get. Car chases are where I find myself wondering what I should make for dinner, or if I should add pink streaks to my hair, or if I should rearrange the furniture in my living room.  (The two exceptions to this are The Italian Job and any chase sequence in any Bourne movie.) The race sequence in Ready Player One was exactly the right length to hold my attention and full of interesting extras to keep me entertained. It was during this sequence that I had the thought "Well, this is fun!".

 

And the fun continued!  The action sequences were interesting and the pace of the film neither rushed or dragged. The Shining sequence edged right up to 'too long' but didn't step over that line. The High Five were sweet and innocent and full of tame rebellion. I felt as though I was watching a good YA novel unfold on the screen. After the credits finished rolling and the lights in the theatre came back on, I turned to Sid and said "I loved that! It was just pure fun!"

In the days since seeing Ready Player One, I find myself thinking about it and wanting to talk about it. To me this is the the true test of a movie's enjoyability (not a real word, but it should be). If you haven't read the book, don't! Enjoy watching it unfold as a movie instead!

- Karli

Thanks for an excellent guest posting, Karli!  On behalf of the movie Easter Egg crowd, reading from left to right, you will note that the race starting line image above features 1) The Mach Five car driven by Speed Racer in the anime of the same name; 2) the classic television series Batmobile, and Mad Max's V-8 Interceptor from The Road Warrior.

 - Sid
 

Ready Player One: Easter Eggs.

Use the key, unlock the door
See what your fate might have in store
Come explore your dreams' creation
Enter this world of imagination

Rush, Twilight Zone, 2112

I've just finished an enjoyable re-read of Ready Player One, Ernest Cline's epic 2011 homage to 80s pop and geek culture.  I was thinking about seeing the Steven Spielberg movie version, but my somewhat disappointed co-worker Christi reported that it was a long way from the book, so I thought that I'd refresh my memory of the story before making a final decision.

For those unfamiliar with the book, it tells the tale of a near-future world on the brink of collapse, where most of the world's population spends its time in the OASIS, an immersive virtual reality that has replaced the internet.  James Halliday, the inventor of the OASIS,  has recently died, leaving behind a complex puzzle in place of a will.  Whoever solves the puzzle will win control of both his incredible fortune and the OASIS, effectively making them the most powerful person on the planet.

Wade Watts, the 18-year-old protagonist, spends all his spare time attempting to solve the riddle left behind by Halliday.  Halliday never abandoned his fascination with the geek lifestyle of his youth in the 1980s, and as such Wade has become an obsessed expert in both Halliday's life and the 80s, especially the nascent computer and arcade gaming culture of the period.

Ultimately, the book is a tribute to (and justification for) that sort of obsession, making it a pathway to being the richest person in the world rather than the dead end that it is often is in real life.  It's one thing to memorize all the dialogue from War Games in order to become a billionaire, but perhaps a bit sad if you're doing it because you have nothing else in your life.

Surprisingly, the book won an award from the American Library Association's Young Adult Library Services division in 2012, which puzzles me more than a little, given the book's fanatical reliance on 80s geek trivia - I would expect that in spite of its frequent explanations, most of the book would be gibberish to a young adult reader, although I admit that the novel does teach larger lessons about life.

 

I'm also puzzled as to how anyone who wasn't around in the 80s could appreciate most of this book in the first place - in fact, just being around in the 80s probably isn't enough to make the grade. I'm a science fiction-fantasy-computer game geek who turned 19 in 1980, and, as such, I'm right in the zone for Ready Player One. I know what a Trash-80 is, I played Zork* and Joust on my 8-bit Atari 800XL (which I still have in storage**), I know who Gygax Sector is named after, I smiled when I read that the password for the hero's teleportation ring is Brundell, I still have an MP3 version of Oingo Boingo's Dead Man's Party in my iTunes library, and on and on and on.  I can't claim to recognize every single reference, but I strongly suspect that I score higher than a lot of people in my generation, not to mention anyone born after 1990.

As a result, I would expect the movie to abandon a lot of the dense deep-dive geek content that fuels the book, purely out of self-defense.  Based on the trailers, the movie relies more heavily on visual cues from a wider range of pop culture, which would certainly makes it a lot more accessible to the average viewer.  People are far more likely to recognize iconic images like the Iron Giant than they are to pick up on the arcana of 1980s Japanese giant robot anime, for example.  Even so, I suspect that there's a lot of obscure references to modern geek culture buried in the script, which should satisfy my desire for otaku superiority.

I had almost decided to pass on the big screen version of Ready Player One, but after finishing the book I decided to give the movie a chance.  I'm coming in quite late in the film's run, but fortunately it's still showing in 3D at theatres in Vancouver, and I'm off to a showing this evening.

I was originally going to attend on my own, but Karli's plans for the evening were cancelled at the last minute, and she's agreed to join me, thereby providing a useful non-geek control group for recognition of Easter Eggs. Oh well - my level of obscure geek knowledge may not make the richest person on the planet, but at least I'll be able to use it to impress my girlfriend - a term that hardly ever ends up in the same sentence as "obscure geek knowledge".

- Sid

* To tell the truth, I never liked the interactive text games like Zork, I was much more of an arcade-style gamer.  And I never did manage to get the damn Babel fish into my ear.

** And which actually still works, although it took a few minutes for it to warm up the last time I hooked up all the bits and pieces.

P.S.  There are two Easter Egg references in this posting, let me know if you find both of them.