Almost three years ago, in the summer of 2015, I finally read Ready Player One.
The author, Austin-resident Ernest Cline was making a long-awaited tour stop at the Dallas Alamo Drafthouse, of all places, and, having unabashedly loved his first major screenplay (one of my favorite guilty pleasure comedies, Fanboys), I showed up, immediately enraptured by the stories he told and the passion he had for pop culture. Adding to the building hype, this appearance came mere months after the bombshell announcement: Steven Spielberg himself was going to direct the film adaptation of Ready Player One.
So, after months of friends and colleagues and random people on the internet telling me, “You would love it, Brandon”, I ended up buying a copy of the novel (as well as a copy of Cline’s follow-up Armada).
And it was fine.
Maybe it was the metric tons of science fiction pages I had read while I was growing up or maybe it was the weird reverence I have for an era I didn’t even grow up in … but I just didn’t fall in love with the book. People heralding it as one of the best books they had ever read seemed to ignore the bare plot, stuffed with literally paragraphs of non-stop references. It was a quick read, a piece of fun fan fluff (the literary equivalent to a later installment of the Fast and Furious franchise, but just crammed with references to video games). It was harmless and fine.
(I could, however, write an entire second article about the not harmless problems of the damaging romance subplot in the book, and indirectly the movie, a weird fever dream of r/NiceGuys-inspired rhetoric and if you had handed a twelve-year-old nerdy kid the keys to a fan fiction typing machine on how to talk to women. But that is mostly unrelated.)
Sitting down to watch the movie adaptation, thankfully, was completely different.
One of the most-looked-forward to movies of the year so far, Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is a near-triumph for many reasons, but especially because of how it overcomes its source material.
The differences between the book and the movie were astonishing. While Cline took an initial first pass at the screenplay, the real grunt work came from Zak Penn (X2, Last Action Hero), who was able to excise a cohesive story out of the book’s often meandering, long-winded plot. One of the best of these changes from book to screen is just a simple (paraphrased) line at the very beginning of the movie: “It was some unnamed gunter who stumbled upon the first challenge”. Immediately cutting fifty pages of the novel’s set-up, this quick change kickstarts the movie, plunging the audience into a brilliant Spielberg action sequence and near-instantly redeeming the slow (decidedly un-cinematic pace) of the original story.
In fact, all three of the famous challenges are markedly different than the book. The second challenge, in particular, replaces the book’s War Games with an in-depth reference that I really don’t want to spoil. It is one of the best scenes I have seen on-screen in recent memory and truly magical to watch Spielberg lovingly mimic another one of cinema’s great directors, creating an audience reaction that I will never forget. (And it is made even more magical when you think about the history of these two directors … and if this movie remains an integral part of the cultural zeitgeist, it will be because of this scene.)
The rest of the story weaves briskly around those three challenges, with main character Wade Watts (played by Tye Sheridan) working with his friends and fellow “gunters” to complete the quest set forward by the deceased, multi-trillionaire James Halliday (Mark Rylance). CG set piece after CG set piece spring up throughout, each breathtaking (but relatively shallow).
From a cinematography standpoint, the bleak skies of Columbus, Ohio disappointingly mirror the bleak skies of the OASIS, the washed-out color palate only further highlighting the (rightfully utilized) video-game-level visual effects. Really, the 10% of the film set in the “real world” is so tactile, so rich and fully-realized that it made me wish we had seen even more of Spielberg’s physical 2044. It has been nearly a decade since the book was written, a time when realistic VR was not something that could be bought at a neighborhood GameStop and, honestly, some of that wonder and awe no longer exists with a 2018 viewing audience.
Ready Player One’s supporting cast elevates this movie beyond some of these issues: Ben Mendelsohn (Rogue One) proves that he was born to play a villain, his corporate character seething with fakeness and self-importance. Rylance (as well as the criminally underused Simon Pegg) adds sentimentality and humanity to the “good guys”, starring in masterful flashbacks tht inform the entire narrative. TJ Miller, however, is a jarring voice to add to the talented mix, especially with the recent backlash against the actor (which partially prompted his removal from HBO’s Silicon Valley.)
John Williams is absent from his usual directorial pairing, marking just the third time Spielberg and composer haven’t worked together, and Alan Silvestri (famous for the twinkling score for Back to the Future) was brought in. Much like Spielberg, he delivers two hours of winks to his own works. Some of these play better than others (specifically one moment in the Zero G dance club that was legitimately great) but the score never stands alone.
There’s part of me that wishes Steven Spielberg didn’t direct this movie. Recently, there have been a lot of long-winded think pieces about the final phase of the director’s career. The turn of the century (from 2000 and beyond) has been an exceptional chapter: from Munich to Lincoln, we have been treated to some of the best works of his filmography, one that has moved forward and refined over time. This feels like a near-regression. The charm of Spielberg behind the camera really shines when he is creating, not literally driving someone else’s DeLorean. The other turn-of-the-century genre pieces he has directed (A.I., Minority Report, War of the Worlds, Tintin) all have that heart.
Ready Player One does not.
