So you may have noticed that Ready Player One is on my six all time favorite books list, so it will come as no surprise that I saw the film the day it came out (yesterday). For anyone wondering, the film was good, and got an above average rating of 77% on rotten tomatos, however the clear deviations from the book signifigantly affected my opinion on it. I’ll give a quick overview of the plot, then explain the things I liked and the things I didn’t about this movie.

Ready Player One is set in 2045, a hyper-consumerist dystopian world, in which society is on the brink of collapse. However their escape comes in the form of the OASIS, the creation of James Halliday. OASIS is an advanced virtual reality gaming platform. When Halliday dies, he leaves his shares in OASIS and complete control over the virtual world to whoever can solve a series of challenges leading to hidden easter eggs in the form of keys. The first clue is given, but for 5 years no gunter (easter egg hunter) can solve it, until Wade Watts, or Parzival as he’s known on OASIS, finally works it out. The plot follows Parzival as he attempts to win the competition before the mega-corperation IOI, who plan to turn the haven into a profitable business.
Before I point out the flaws and shortcomings of the film, I want to acknowledge that Ready Player One is a long and information heavy book that would prove difficult to condense into a movie, so Spielberg did a good job. The locations in the real world were impressivly accurate to the book’s descriptions, and the OASIS graphics were perfectly done. All battle scenes were excellent, especially the last one which was appropriatly tense and epic. The chase scenes which took place inside the movie ‘The Shinning’’, arguably the highpoint of the film, was great, flowing fluently, clearly showing Spielberg‘s prowess. The way Sorrento, resident evil character and head of IOI, was portrayed was exactly as I imagined. Lastly, the comic relief throughout provided a break from the intensity of the lengthy battle and chase scenes you would expect from a video game, and broke up the film effectively.
So now onto my criticism. My main issue was that relationships between characters were honestly horrible and made no sense, but also that message the film ended with was forced and weak. This may seem harsh but allow me to explain.
In the novel, Parzival is obsessive, selfish and quite unfriendly. Therefore it makes sense that he has a stenuous relationship with other gunters, shown through fights with his friends throughout the book. In the movie, he shares all his ideas freely with friends, and has sudden close relationships with zero development. Without reading the book first, you wouldn’t have a clue who any of these charecters were! For example, Sho and Daito, important characters in the book, barely get 5 lines between them, and Pazival’s romance with Art3mis was exactly as forced, sudden and cringe worthy as you’d expect from a blockbuster movie. In summery, the charecters in the film met in reality too early to show that you can form real friendships online and it doesn’t matter what a person looks like, in the OASIS, you love who they really are.
Secondly, after the epic battle for the preservation of OASIS had been won, Parzival then chose to close OASIS completly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, pushing the importance of logging off your computer to spend time in the real world. Of course this is obviously a current issue that needs talking about, but Ready Player One was not the platform I would have gone with. The whole movie pushes the idea that in this broken world, OASIS is the one good thing that keeps society going. OASIS has become a need in life, a way of living that needs to be kept available to everyone, not turned into a money making scheme. To then push this idea of needing to log off into this awful world just seems stupid. This addition to the movie’s themes gave a strange and weak ending to a fantastically intense film. I feel this theme was poorly incorperated and should not have been included at all.

So there’s what I thought of Ready Player One. I always have critisism of book to film adaptations, so don’t allow this from stopping you seeing the movie. I would HIGHLY reccommend reading the book first, but also seeing the movie later. If I hadn’t read the book I would have found the film much more enjoyable, I’ve never been very good with any kind of changes to my favorite books. Tell me what you thought of the film or book below!