Movie Review: Ready Player One

Certificate PG, 140 minutes

Director: Steven Spielberg

Stars: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn

Ready Player One is based on the best-selling debut novel of the same name by Ernest Cline. It starts in Columbus, Ohio, in 2045. The future is rather dystopian in nature, and Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) lives in the Stacks outside the city. The Stacks are what you get when you pile lots of mobile homes and vehicles into metal structures and have people live in them. Many people spend much of their time online, in a virtual world called the OASIS.

What is the OASIS?

The OASIS – the Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation – started out as simply a computer game, of the Massively Multiplayer Online variety, but it has since become much more than that.

James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the owner of the company that runs the OASIS and co-creator of the game, died five years ago and left as a prize for a competition ownership of his company. Which will make the winner practically a trillionaire; the company, Gregarious Simulation Systems (GGS), is the largest in the world. This started a massive online Easter egg hunt (Easter eggs in computer games are hidden elements inserted by the programmers, which may have nothing to do with the actual game itself) for three keys hidden in the game.

Five years later, no-one has found even one key. Many people are looking, called “gunters” – short for “egg hunters” but another corporation, Innovative Online Industries, or IOI, is also looking. IOI is the second largest company in the world and wants to become the largest by acquiring GGS, and then working it to make a lot more money from it. Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the recently appointed CEO of IOI is the man behind this.

The Hunt for the Egg

Wade – online name Parzifal – and his best friend Aech (Lena Waithe) are independent gunters, not part of one of the gunter clans. Two more friends of theirs are Daito (Win Morisaki) and Sho (Philip Zhao), but none have ever met in real life. Wade is definitely strapped for cash, but knows a lot about Halliday’s life, having become dedicated to find out as much about his hero as he can. Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) is another gunter, one that Wade has followed for some time, and in the race for the first key, he saves her life. Online life anyway; if an avatar is killed, they are zeroed out and all possessions and credits are lost.

Wade is the one who figures out how to actually win the race, and becomes the first person to get a key, making the hunt move forward again. He is shortly followed by Art3mis, Aech, Sho and Daito, then IOI “Sixers” so called because they all bear their IOI employee number, all of which begin with the number six, take more places.

Sorrento is ruthless in his desire to recover the egg for IOI, and in the OASIS sets I-R0k (T.J. Miller) on Wade and the others and in the real world F’nale (Hannah John-Kamen, Ant-Man and the Wasp). Sorrento is willing to use any means at his disposal, and IOI has a large team of players backed up by an Oology Department, specialist scholars of Halliday’s life. With one key found, the entire (virtual) words is at stake, and the owner of GGS will have enough money to make a difference in the real one.

Is it Faithful to the Book?

Short answer. No.

Longer answer. Some of the broad strokes of the plot generally remain the same, and so are three of the primary characters, but many of the other elements have been changed; minor characters, secondary characters, what happens to people and every challenge to get a key is different. Even where Wade lives has been changed from Oklahoma City to Columbus; possibly to reduce the story length, as there was a large part of the book which involved Wade moving to Columbus. Halliday’s relationship with the co-founder of GGS, his friend Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg, Mission: Impossible – Fallout), is also changed a bit; it still became damaged

However, the book’s challenges were tightly interwoven with various 80s pop culture references (some of the pop culture references are also less tightly integrated than they were in the novel and they cover more decades, from the 70s onwards) and getting the rights for all of these for the film would likely be difficult – and expensive. Spielberg also removed references to his own material from the story – he greatly affected 80s pop culture and didn’t want the film to look like a vanity piece. Perhaps one of the largest elements missing is Dungeons & Dragons; in the novel, D&D played a major role in Halliday’s life, and did in the egg hunt as well. There are still a whole host of Easter eggs included in the film, both original and new – quite fitting for a film whose primary goal is to find an Easter egg. Over a hundred different references of many different kinds have been identified.

Quite a bit of the depth and background to the novel is also missing. The planetary situation (bad) is skipped over, the influence that the OASIS has on everyday life – it has essentially replaced the internet, and people study and work in it – is not gone into in depth. Fans of the novel – which are especially those who have the correct knowledge for the time period Halliday loved – may be disappointed with the number of changes made for the film.

Reviewing Ready Player One

The film is available in 2D and 3D, and the 2D version was the one watched. With much of the story being set in a virtual online world, the film naturally makes heavy use of CGI, and would probably work well in 3D. Also, because it is set in a virtual world, there is absolutely no need to consider realism for the effects to any great degree. This is a world of magic and technology, so anything goes. Although it is not quite the love story to the 80s that the novel was, the soundtrack definitely dates back to the 70s and 80s. Visually, the film is spectacular, and the soundtrack is definitely nostalgic. The climactic battle between the Sixers and the gunters is perhaps as spectacular as it reads in the book – with some changes, largely due to licensing.

Some of the foreshadowing is a bit less subtle in the film than in the book; when there are several hundred pages to bury references in, it’s easier to make them more subtle than in a film where you want to ensure that the audience notices something that is important later.

Is it as good as the book? Perhaps not, but, as mentioned, licensing was always going to be a problem. The book, being longer, could also take longer to get to important points and spend more time building up relationships; characterisation is probably poorer in the film than the novel. Sorrento in particular is pretty one dimensional. The novel did have some holes in its plot, which could be overlooked, but the film hasn’t tried to fix these. The film has substituted the more slower-paced scenes from the book for more non-stop on-screen action, which perhaps might work better than some of the original content for the big screen. Ready Player One is a fun, action-packed, CGI-filled non-stop big screen adventure which perhaps enables its weak points to be overlooked.