#51: Ready Player One

Vast improvement.


There are only a handful of movies I would consider improved from their books. Ready Player One is one of those, considering it could be nothing else.

Seriously, the book is an incel nightmare, a nerdbro hodgepodge, a weirdo wonderland. The movie keeps Wade's (Tye Sheridan) awkwardness without making him a creep, and Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) is more than a Maniac Pixie Dream Girl.

I wish there was more Aech (Lena Waithe) though.

This movie looks stunning. Seeing it in A) The Theater, B) in 3D, and C) in DBOX must have been a real treat, one that would leave you slightly exhausted at the end.

The story is this; People live in a crapsack world where people can't afford to live and plug into an online MMORPG to live a semblance of a decent life.

Here is where it divulges from present-day America - the creator of this playground has instigated a hunt for clues that will give the winner a lot of money and rights to the game - The OASIS.

And Amazon - I mean, IOI - wants it.




After years of no progress, Wade finally gets things started, and the hunt is on.

First - props to having the action pieces be relatively spaced out throughout the film, and easy to see and comprehend. No Transformers nonsense where I can barely make out what's happening. They had to do it here - otherwise you would miss seeing all the properties Warner Brothers owns - or, rented, in the case of "Overwatch".

The style of the OASIS never falls into the Uncanny Valley at points. It's really beautiful, and all the props in the world to the artists who pulled it off.

The real world, as always, is slightly less enticing, pulling us from an engaging game to kind of a typical scrappy rebellion kind of storyline that's not awful, but given the persecution complex gamers like to wear these days, it grated on me.

Complete with Ben Mendelson as the bad guy. I know, surprising.

Second - The challenges in the book are either very different or made to fit a visual medium. The first one in the book was finding a key in a cave on a school planet.

Here? It's a giant hourly race where one has to avoid dinosaurs that definitely would be from Jurassic Park if they had the rights, and King Kong (To which WB does own the rights. We're going to revisit that soon...)

The second challenges mostly stayed the same - but instead of roleplaying in WarGames - No, you should watch it. It's hilarious and impressive all at once.

It's a bummer that so many people - Including myself - were annoyed with all the crowing and parroting of this as "Gamers' Black Panther" (???) that many avoided this in the theater.

But it's not too late to plug in.