So after surprisingly enjoying Pacific Rim 2, I just got out of
Ready Player One and I feel like shit
Now if you've read the book and you're a hater, might as well stop reading now. You'll probably like the movie in the way that I like the Death Note Netflix movie because I love to troll the Death Note source material and the movie was a troll of the source material so I had fun. Ready Player One movie is a troll of the source material as it takes what all the haters said about the book, that it's nothing but references to fap to, and makes the movie exactly that. There's nothing underneath. There's no characters, there's no story, there's no human emotion, it's just a bunch of zzzzzz CG sequences with a million pop culture nods.
I liked the book. I actually thought it was a great, fun read. Like even if you stripped every pop culture reference out of the book I'd still have enjoyed reading it because I liked the plot and the cast and felt it had some sappy, but nice power of friendship themes. I liked that it felt like an adventure, and had lots of mystery and downtime to develop the characters. I thought it opened really well on copy & paste school planet with nothing to do and a main character completely broke finding his way into an old dungeon and meeting the female lead. I liked the backstory stuff in the book with Halliday and Ogden and their relationship.
I felt like all of that was completely missing in the movie. Hell,
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Ogden's character is essentially cut out of the story (which makes you wonder why they bothered getting Simon Pegg to play Ogden).
I dunno how the movie stands on its own, but as a book adaptation this takes me back to the days when I used to read a lot of books before the movies came out and sometimes the adaptations were really trash and completely missed the point of the source material. What's even crazier is that Ernest Cline was actually involved in the screenplay, so the only conclusion I can come to is that the book is literally unfilmable, at least as a 2 hour movie and there is no way to make it work. I think if budgets didn't exist, Ready Player One probably works better as a 1 season TV show. The book pacing is a lot closer to a TV show with sorta an episodic feel between keys and doors and character moments along the way. But it would never work as a TV show because the budget, so yeah maybe just unfilmable.
Was surprised how much it got the source material wrong though. Like even the ending is changed,
spoiler (click to show/hide)
The whole 3 people for 3 keys thing, that what matters is working together with other people; hence why IOI fails...completely missing. It's just Percival doing it solo.
Idk, with Spielberg attached I sorta expected a good adaptation of a book I rather enjoyed, but this was really bad. Pacific Rim 2 was like 10x better movie than this. :'(
