Review: Ready Player One

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From Stranger Things to Cobra Kai to even a Roseanne reboot, nostalgia is the flavor of the times. Such is the appeal of the new movie, Ready Player One, based on the Ernest Cline novel of the same name. The book is filled to the brim with pop culture references overlapping with other pop culture references, mostly from the 80’s, and almost all as a crucial plot device when they aren’t just there for Easter Eggs. Fitting then that they were able to get the golden boy of 80’s film direction Steven Spielberg to direct, with Alan Silvestri of Back to the Future fame to compose the score. From the get-go, this was very much going to be a movie that reveled in the book’s craving for nostalgia.

Obviously, with an adaptation of a book to a different medium, changes are made to how the story is told. Certain items and world-building tidbits are made more prominent quicker, certain character meetings and interactions are moved up sooner or distilled to serve a three-act structure, and certain characters gain additional dimension in a third person story while others have theirs diminished due to time restraints. For people like me, who have read the book or listened to Will Wheaton’s rendition of the audiobook, there will always be a sense of longing for aspects and character development for things that were deemed unusable for this version.

One of the changes likely to be more positively received is the lessened over-reliance on obscure references for their own sake. The book in question is notorious for distractingly and suddenly leaning on its undeniable nerd cred for the movies, shows, games, books, and even cereal of that decade, and that is luckily minimized to much more tolerable levels. The nerdy fondness most characters have is more often than not used in scenes about characters connecting and growing closer, so the way they’re utilized is not a problem, at least in principle.

BOOK AND FILM SPOILERS BELOW!

What IS a problem is how the movie’s pacing of events and proffered focus practically drains the audience of almost all of the potential investment in these characters and their journey. In the book, the state of the world constantly put in a very bleak frame, and the influence and worth of control over the Oasis virtual world that the characters fight over is blatantly clear, and every step each character takes toward the Easter Egg prize has very real consequences. The hunt for the egg is shown to be a gripping obsession that both brings people together and tears them apart, and the lives of both the players and their loved ones are sacrificed or put in danger to properly illustrate the ruthlessness of the antagonists, corporate overlords I-O-I and their Sixer goons. Everyone is putting everything on the line to obtain this prize, and it’s natural that some people will lose it all in that quest.

The movie’s threat level is a far cry (pun unintended) from that, in no small part to rushing through the plot points to get to the big final battle at the cost of its characters. Wade Watts/Parzival (Tye Sheridan) and his growing romance with Samantha/Art3mis (Olivia Cook) is given a believable opening scene but zooms to a confrontation that had a substantial amount of time to develop in the book. Likewise, Art3mis’ absence of motive is supplemented somewhat by connecting her father to a cut subplot from the book about indentured servitude and puts her in scenes originally about Parzival, but then somehow requires her to be kidnapped in very unnecessary way on top of tacking her onto a superfluous “resistance group” that ends up not adding much of anything. Aech (Lena Waithe) is more or less unchanged, but then there’s the treatment of fellow supporting protagonists Daito and Sho, who practically had their own character arcs in the book, but are reduced to “those Asian kids.” And they ALL live in Columbus, Ohio? REALLY??? And don’t get me started on how they wasted Simon Pegg in this, even if his scenes were all treats.

Though I obviously don’t want to deny this film has its appeal. Following the characters, as they go through the hunt is not as suspenseful or complex as the book, but it still has its moments. The thrill of seeing characters from Overwatch, Batman, The Shining, King Kong, Gundam, and so much more overlapping at multiple intervals is not to be underestimated. Also, while I did enjoy the book’s version of the challenges, cutting out the search for the gates on top of the keys was probably a smart move, as well as switching up what those challenges were to keep people who know the book on their toes, as well as making the references into more accessible ones for those not up on their 80’s trivia. I don’t want to live to see the day that Spielberg loses the ability to make an easily likable feel-good popcorn flick, and that day is thankfully not today.

However, having reread the book for this review and seeing this film, it, unfortunately, dawns on me that this story is probably just not as substantial as it should be. It wants to be a grand love letter to the passion of fans and the power of hope and imagination but does so in a tragically shallow way. I’m not necessarily asking for a dark subversive commentary on the nature of fans, but when you have the Iron Giant rushing into a war zone with laser eyes blazing, a villain whose game avatar looks conspicuously like Clark Kent without the glasses, and a protagonist who wins the day and the girl pretty much entirely by just being a big enough nerd, I can’t help but think what could’ve been said. Ready Player One is certainly worth a couple hours in the arcade, but I think I’ll just rewatch Wreck-It Ralph again before I give this any more of my quarters.

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