Review of the movie Ready Player One from a fan of the book by Ernest Cline circa 2011

Hi family! @silverlining1 here again spreading my wings in all directions and trying new things, today I am taking a crack at giving a movie review.

Ready Player One the book 2011 by Ernest Cline

I actually listened to this book as an audio recording read by Will Wheaton *Wesley Crusher from Star Trek Next Generation* last year and it immediately become one of my favourites of all time, I have since listened to it in excess of 8 times (sometimes just listening to my favourite parts)

I lived through the 80's as a child and so a book that combines the future with so much 80's nostalgia almost seemed made for me directly. 

I highly highly recommend reading or listening to this audio book and more so if either appreciate 80's pop culture or lived through it yourself but let's move on to the movie review.

Ready Player One The Movie 2018

Directed by Stephen Spielberg (you know the guy who brought you E.T, Goonies, Indiana Jones etc) you would think this would be right up his alley... but you would be wrong. 

Right from the start he diverges from the original story line of Wade Watts (named so by his father because it sounds like a good name for a super hero) doing some due diligence and discovering the location of the first key inside his own school (which is also where he first meets his love interest Art3mis), instead what we get is a giant virtual car chase scene with a king kong/donkey kong cameo (I'm so tired of this hollywood bs) where he ultimately figures out a trick, wins the key and meets Art3mis. 

From here Spielberg decides to smush all the main characters from the book into being friends already but in the book Shoto and Daito come in later as mutually respected competitors for the quest for the keys, Iroc (I am spelling it this way because I believe his name was taken from a popular model of car from the 80's with a lot of power which was owned by a lot of italians and which my friends not so affectionately coined the acronym I-talian R-etards O-ut C-ruising)

is made into some kind of mercenary villain while in the book he was simply an 80's poser who threatened to expose Parzival's identity but never caused much harm.

There is basically very little that was kept intact from the book which was interesting for awhile because at least I didn't know exactly what would happen next but when all the main players started working directly together I started to get fed up and here's why...

In the book and also in the movie the characters referenced that they would never "clan up" , clan up meant that you joined a team of people who shared information with each other and these guys known as "The high five" (because they were the top 5 on the scoreboard) were very much lone wolf types and while they had mutual respect for each other they didn't directly give each other information, in the book respect was earned not given because interpreting meaning to clues to the keys required a dense amount of information of the 80's as well as a supreme amount of skill at the games from that era. 

In the movie the characters claimed they would never "clan up"but within 30 minutes of run time these guys had all teamed up sharing all information together and effectively created their own....clan *sigh* 

In the book they ended up sharing information reluctantly with each other because they were forced to after Wade's surrogate family was killed and then daito was thrown to his death from his highrise apt by IOI, in fact a lot of the friction between Wade and Art3mis had to do with her hesitancy to interact with him while she was working on getting the keys.

All in all the movie was a bust for me, I realize that there was a lot of information to cover if they wanted to recreate the book but it could of easily been two movies and done right and I thought Spielberg was the man to do it, instead I saw very little character development and a lot of hollywood craptasticism (woot I made a new word).

I rate the book an 11/10 and the movie a 4/10 but what do I know, I rarely poke my head out to watch movies I just thought this one might have potential :/