Review - Ready Player One (2018)

            Hey guys, Chuck here, and I am back with another movie review. One of the most celebrated sci-fi novels in recent history is Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One, which was hailed for its story, references to pop culture, and so much more. So, it's not a surprise that, in 2018, legendary director Steven Spielberg would make a film adaptation of Ready Player One, and it was just as unique as the novel it was based on. 

          So, the movie and the book share the same basic premise. In the near future, James Halliday of Gregarious Games creates a virtual reality simulation called the OASIS, which becomes the most popular tech innovation ever. After Halliday's passing, he sets it so that, within the OASIS is an Easter Egg, and the one to find it will inherit ownership of Gregarious, Halliday's entire fortune, and total control of the OASIS itself. Now, THAT'S a prize of I ever heard of one. 

         So, our main protagonist is Wade Watts, who in the world of the OASIS is a Gunter (Egg Hunter) named Parzival, and also lives in the Stacks in Columbus, Ohio (Oklahoma City in the book, but he later makes his way to Columbus) with his aunt. In the OASIS, he befriends and teams up with others looking for the keys to the Easter Egg. These guys include the likes of Art3mis, Aech, Daito, and Sho. And, yes, they're all Gunters. The only other group after the keys to the Easter Egg are the Sixers, foot soldiers in the OASIS working for IOI (Innovative Online Industries) and their CEO Nolan Sorrento. Sorrento and IOI only seek to control the OASIS as a means of profit, and they plan to add intrusive pop up ads into a player's view. Yeah, I can see why it's a shitty idea to let Sorrento and IOI get control of the OASIS. And Sorrento has two main allies, one in the real world and the other in the OASIS. In the real world, his main ally is F'Nale Zandor, and in the OASIS, his ally is a mercenary named i-R0k. 

        Now, as far as the casting goes, Tye Sheridan did an excellent job as Wade in this movie. Hell, I found him more likeable here than in the X-Men franchise. I also absolutely loved Olivia Cooke as Art3mis (real world name Samantha), as well as Lena Waithe as Aech, Win Morisaki as Daito, and Philip Zhao as Sho. Both Ben Mendelsohn and Hannah John-Kamen were fantastic villains as Sorrento and F'Nale. And with i-R0k, we probably got T.J. Miller at his most hilarious since his role in Transformers: Age of Extinction. And seriously, only T.J. Miller could play a dude called i-R0k. Other major cast members in this movie include Mark Rylance as James Halliday and Simon Pegg as Ogden Morrow, the two creators of the OASIS. Both are fantastic, and are really great to see on screen together. A few other notable actors in the movie include Clare Higgins, Susan Lynch, and Ralph Ineson. 

           Ultimately, the main premise and characters are where the similarities between the book and movie stop, as several elements, including the Key Challenges are different in the movie than they were in the book. For example, in the movie, the Copper Key Challenge is a race from Liberty Island, through the streets of New York, and finishing in Central Park. However, the race has many hazards and obstacles, including the Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park and the mighty King Kong. The Jade Key Challenge involves the Stanley Kubrick horror classic The Shining, altered from the book due to Warner Bros. not allowing Spielberg to use the film Blade Runner as the basis of the Jade Key Challenge due to the production of Blade Runner 2049 going on at the same time as the production of Ready Player One. The final challenge for the Diamond Key was similar to the book, however, as it involved the Atari 2600 game Adventure, which itself contained an Easter Egg in the form of the creator's name: Warren Robinett. 

        Other notable changes, in terms of characters, is that Wade and Samantha meet in the real world much earlier in the movie than they do in the book. Also, Daito lives through the entire movie whilst his book counterpart is murdered by IOI. Also, Ogden Morrow meets Wade and co. much later in the movie than in the book. In fact, he's the character that gets the most changes from book to film, as his OASIS avatar in the book is akin to the Wizard of Oz, whereas in the film his avatar is the Curator, a character that's like a robotic child of C-3PO and Alfred Pennyworth. Oh, and we never see his residence in Oregon in the movie the way it appears in the book. 

          As far as pop culture references in the movie go, Warner Bros. and Spielberg were able to get many of the rights to references they wanted to include, such as the Batmobile from the 1966 television series Batman, Kaneda's motorcycle from Akira, the Holy Hand Grenade from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the DeLorean from Back to the Future, the RX-78-2 Gundam, and characters like the Battletoads, the Ninja Turtles, Chucky, Spawn, Tracer from Overwatch, and so forth. Unfortunately, the rights to Ultraman, and films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars could not be secured (although they did name drop the Millennium Falcon), and I already mentioned how Warner Bros. stopped Spielberg from using Blade Runner for the Jade Key Challenge. In place of Ultraman, the movie uses the Iron Giant from the classic Brad Bird animated film The Iron Giant, and I mentioned that Blade Runner was swapped out for The Shining. Now, aside from the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the DeLorean, many references to Spielberg's past work were left out of the movie due to Spielberg's desire to avoid the film becoming a vanity project, and due to the box office failure and poor critical reception of 1941, a film he made that lampooned the likes of Jaws and Duel, also Spielberg projects. 

       The music in this movie is absolutely fantastic. Now, normally John Williams provides the score for Spielberg's films, but he bowed out of doing so for this movie in favor of Spielberg's film The Post. In his place, Alan Silvestri, who composed the score for the Back to the Future trilogy, stepped in and made one of my favorite film scores of any Spielberg film outside of the likes of Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park. Also, the songs featured throughout the movie, such as "Jump" by Van Halen, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears, "Staying Alive" by the Bee Gees, and of course nods to the music scores from Back to the Future and The Shining were neat as well, and I loved that they included "Midnight, the Stars and You" by Al Bowlly in the sequence based on The Shining.

       The visual effects by ILM, Digital Domain, and Territory Studio were all fantastic. The overall look of the OASIS was stunning, and they recreated the Overlook Hotel from The Shining perfectly. And some of the outfit designs, all nods to the likes of Michael Jackson's Thriller, Prince's Purple Rain, and Buckaroo Banzai were really neat. And I completely lost it when I saw both the RX-78-2 Gundam and the Iron Giant fighting off against Mechagodzilla. 

      Overall, I loved this movie and what Steven Spielberg did with the movie. As for the book fans who disliked the deviations from the source material, remember this: screenwriter Zak Penn co-wrote the screenplay with book author Ernest Cline, so any changes from book to film were approved of by the author of the book. So, I'm giving Ready Player One a rating of 5/5. 

       This is Chuck signing off, and I'll be back tomorrow for my overdue review of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.