Ready Player One (Movie)
Steven Spielberg
★★★★☆
I finally got around to watching the movie, having soured on the book by the time the adaptation came out. It was better than I expected!
It’s not a straight adaptation of the plot so much as taking the same premise and characters and finding more cinematic ways of hitting the same beats. And having Spielberg and real actors (or their voices, for the parts of the film that take place in virtual reality) definitely makes it more character-driven (shallow as the characters might be) than a book that mostly existed as an exercise in including as many pop culture references as possible.
My main problems with it are:
- Expanding the nostalgia beyond the 1980s to include the 70s and 90s breaks the laser-focus of Halliday’s obsession, and the focus on Halliday/Morrow as Wozniak/Jobs analogs.
- Some suspiciously convenient lapses in security. The guy with an easily-identifiable tattoo on his head, who doesn’t put on a hat when he acts against the giant surveillance company? The prison cell that can be opened from the inside by feel, relying on the prisoner not being able to see the opening mechanism?
- Tacking on the moral about having to live in the real world too was…well, to be fair it was a very 80s thing to do, but it still felt tacked-on. The movie really emphasized the OASIS being an escape, whereas in the book it was made clear that people were using it for school, business, etc. along with the gaming. Y’know, like the actual Internet the whole thing is a metaphor for.