Review of Ready Player One (2018) by James I — 29 Jul 2018

After reading Ernest Cline's excellent book Ready Player One I heard that it was to be adapted into a movie by Steven Spielberg. I immediately had misgivings about this choice of director. Spielberg was a great director at one point, but somewhere along the way he has lost his magic.

I feared that Ready Player One would be stripped of everything quirky and fun that made it special. I actually waited to see it until it showed up to rent at Red Box. I'm now wishing that I had waited until it was available watch on Netflix as I then wouldn't have wasted $2.

00 on it. I got through about 15 minutes before I shut it off. Instead of the charming scavenger hunt through virtual space that included a D&D module and a series of games of Joust with a terrifying Lich there was a street race with King Kong.

Yes, this was exactly what I had assumed Spielberg would do. Remove all of the things that made the book great in the first place, and replace them with a car chase with a giant monster destroying a big city.

Because we all really crave seeing more monsters destroying big cities at all times, and in every movie. We don't want to see anything fun and original. No way. It is probably not fair for me to rate the movie based on only seeing the first 15 minutes of it, but it wasn't going to get any better.

I have enough bad memories in life that I can't delete from the cerebral hard drive. I didn't feel like dutifully sitting through this bad adaptation so that I could have yet another. Read the book.

It's really great.