Ready Player One Misses Getting Top Score

It’s been a good seven months since I’ve seen a movie adaptation of a book that I was familiar with. For those that don’t remember I’m still scouring my eyes from the experience that was The Dark Tower. Book-to-film movies and I aren’t on the best of terms as of late, and even when I don’t know the source material that well I find myself getting let down. But Ready Player One may be an exception.

Ready Player One is set in the year 2045 where much of humanity, to escape the desolation of the real-world, use the virtual reality software OASIS to engage in work and play. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) discovers clues to a hidden game within the program that promises the winner full ownership of the OASIS. He joins several allies to try to complete the game before indentured players working for a large company, run by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), can beat them to it.

Director (or should I say Maestro) Steven Spielberg, lovingly put his style into this one. Whether it was in the virtual world of the OASIS, or the dystopian setting of 2045 Columbus, Ohio, Spielberg made the book come alive.

Casting was superb, and Tye Sheridan took what was essentially a blank slate in the book and a decent job. It wasn’t Oscar worthy but he was likable. Lena Waithe, Win Morisaki, and Philip Zhao who played Aech, Daito, and Sho respectively where cool, but they weren’t in it enough to be developed. The same goes for Simon Pegg as Ogden Morrow, whose American accent was on point.

And I’ll just say this right now — I hate T.J. Miller in general. His voice is grating and he talks too much. His role as the cyber bounty hunter I-R0k was completely superfluous. Mark Rylance was everything I imagined the character of James Halliday, the genius behind the OASIS, to be. Ben Mendelsohn doing what he does best, playing a weasley bad guy. He had some prime moments as both a threat and a foil to the main characters. He gave some real personality to what was originally a one-note villain in the book. Olivia Cooke who played Samantha, was the true MVP of this movie. She and Rylance captured the very souls of their characters in their respective performances. Cooke’s performance was strong and stoic, never feeling like a damsel in distress.

Alan Silvestri, who stepped in for John Williams, did an exquisite job with this movie’s score. His music meshed well with hyper kinetic action in various scenes.

Pop culture was a big part of the book, it held clues to various mysteries within the story. Unfortunately much like in the book, the movie’s reliance on pop cultural references overstays its welcome. Thankfully, the plot isn’t so bogged down by references that it ruins the overall experience.

And I was not a fan of the overload of exposition from Wade. Most times it was going on as the very scene we were watching explained part of the movie for us. However, I can excuse it as author Ernest Cline co-wrote the screenplay and probably could not get out of narration mode for Wade’s character.

The movie worked as well as it did because it knew that it couldn’t recreate every aspect of the book, it was streamlined to appeal to fans of the book and fans of pop culture as well. I would have loved to have seen certain aspects fleshed out more, but with a two-hour run time, this was probably for the best.

This is how adaptations should be done. If you loved the book or are just a huge geek, this movie is for you. But if you don’t like that like that kind of stuff, why are you on this website?

I give Ready Player One (Warner Bros., PG-13, 2hr 20mins) a 3.5 out of 5.