REVIEW: ‘Ready Player One’ changes a bit too much from the novel
Photo: Olivie Cooke stars as Art3mis, an avatar in the Oasis. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures / Provided with permission.
Ready Player One, the new movie from director Steven Spielberg, is a fun joyride through pop-culture nostalgia. Based on the successful novel by Ernest Cline, the new movie features stunning CGI and an action-packed plot that almost never stops to take a breath.
And yet …
Having read Cline’s book earlier this year, I can attest that the movie offers as many disappointments as it does thrills. Thankfully it’s thrills are otherworldly good.
For the uninitiated, Ready Player One takes place in a dystopian future in which pollution and overpopulation rule the bleak United States. An evil organization known as IOI stand for the corporatism of the times, and most people, at least in the Ohio area, live in the “Stacks,” a maze of vertical skyscrapers made out of trailers. To escape these dreary surroundings, individuals enter a virtual-reality environment known as the Oasis, created by the Steve-Jobs-like duo of James Halliday (Mark Rylance) and Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg).
The hero of the story is Wade (Tye Sheridan), a young man who assumes the avatar identity of Parzival while in the Oasis. It’s Wade’s mission to find three secret keys in the virtual-reality environment. They have been left behind by Halliday who has died and created a contest for someone to inherit not only the rights to the Oasis but also an inheritance worth half a trillion dollars.
Find the keys, and then receive access to the egg (a reference to an Easter egg, or the secrets that game designers sometimes leave inside their games).
The competition against Parzival is fierce, especially from the murderous IOI crew and their ringleader, Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn). However, Wade has some allies, including Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and Aech (Lena Waithe).
The basic premise and main characters are similar to Cline’s source material. However, as Cline and Zak Penn adapted the book for the big screen, they made some difficult and curious concessions.
For starters, the addition of an entire sequence from The Shining is genius and surely the highlight of the film. The Stanley Kubrick horror movie starring Jack Nicholson is given such a bizarrely entrancing tribute that fanboys and fangirls will simply melt. Yes, the maze is there. Yes, the ax through the wall is there. Yes, those funky carpets and room 237 are there.
Other changes are less impactful.
Cline’s book goes deep into video game lore, and Spielberg’s movie doesn’t mention too much about video games. The nostalgia is largely built around movies, including Back to the Future and King Kong.
There’s no mention of Parzival, Art3mis and Aech going to school. The backstory of Halliday is not fleshed out enough to make the emotional impact of the Oasis’ creation an invigorating story (the love triangle that seemed to disrupt Halliday’s creativity is not explored completely).
Perhaps worst of all, the movie is talk-y. There is so much “telling” and not enough “showing.” Admittedly it’s difficult to set up a new world and so many nostalgic references, but the voiceover and speed of the story don’t let the audience attach to any character and care about him or her. When Parzival and Art3mis fall in love, it feels trite and too quick. When death strikes close to home for Wade, the loss doesn’t feel real.
Ready Player One is definitely a joyride, but that’s about it. The book offered an interesting commentary (and sometimes a biting critique) on obsession and nerdom, and the movie decided to sidestep some of the pathos for the visual thrills, which are plentiful and beautiful, but not terribly earth-shattering.
Still, these are mostly quibbles. The movie is fun, and that’s exactly what nostalgia should be. Plus, it’s enjoyable to have Spielberg in the driver’s seat, and his visual aesthetic has not softened or dated itself since his genre films in the 1980s and 1990s. He was probably the right man for the job, but one wonders what the result would have been with someone not riffing on his own career.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Ready Player One (2018), directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Ernest Cline and Zak Penn, stars Mark Rylance, Tye Sheridan, Ben Mendelsohn, Olivia Cooke, Simon Pegg and Lena Waithe. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action violence, bloody images, some suggestive material, partial nudity and language. Rating: 
