Review of Ready Player One (2018) by Caleb J — 13 Dec 2018

When it comes to adapting a book to film, the result is usually just a sad ghost of the original material. Ready Player One, however, is a different story. While I do concede that there are parts of a book that need to be cut in an adaptation, too many book to movie adaptations are handled poorly and end up cutting out essential parts of the plot, such as character development, plot explanations, and even characters themselves, just to shorten the run time. The best movie adaptations however, adapt not for logistical reasons like budget or runtime, but to allow the story to work as a movie. RPO is an excellent example of how to properly adapt a book, not only to a movie, but to our modern age.

RPO is the story of a boy named Wade Watts and his quest to find the easter egg planted within the greatest virtual reality video game to ever exist, OASIS. In the time of the story, 2045, the world has fallen into a rut, the only thing giving people a reason to live is the OASIS, a place where people can be anyone or anything. Naturally, the creator of this massive virtual world, James Halliday, is a revered person. When he dies however, he leaves behind the clues for an easter egg hunt within this massive world, the winner of which will gain several trillion dollars and ownership of the company that runs the OASIS. How everything plays out however, is different depending on which version you are told.

The first big change that can be identified is the explanation of a lot of the OASIS's functions. The book spends the first couple of chapters giving exposition on things such as how all schools are inside the OASIS because it is convenient and requires no building costs, or that the economy within the game is more stable than any currency outside it. In the film, this kind of information dump would be tedious and bore the audience before they even have a chance to get into the movie. As a result, we get to see the more recreational side of the OASIS in the beginning of the film, from people gambling in a giant planetwide casino to shooting enemies up on the infamous planet doom. The reason why this is important is because it allows us to relate to what we would use a massive VR game like the OASIS for: as a game, not some form of economic problem-solver. This change also keeps some of the key elements of the original, such as zeroing out, that allows the original fans of the book to feel like there wasn't much missing.

The next large change is one that I personally dislike, but I understand why it needed to be changed. All of the challenges are different. The book has 3 keys, each with their own challenge, and 3 gates that the keys unlock which provide another challenge. The challenges in the book are all widely varying and play more on the interests of Halliday, rather than his personal life. The original challenges were things such as beating a lich from D&D at a game of Joust on the NES, or quoting an entire movie from start to finish. However, from a more modern standpoint, this kind of thing would have been boring and only appealed to the highest level of nerd. This works fine in a book where you can quickly summarize being in the movie or playing the game and give a short explanation to some of the difficulties that the hero had and move on, but this kind of challenge would have been a struggle for a movie to pull off without sacrificing the viewer's investment and connection to the story. The adaptations we get are much better for a viewing audience, being a race that allows for some cool action scenes and little nods at the extent of nerdism that Halliday employs. We even get a scene that is definitely a call back to the original movie scenes in the form of a movie i'm pretty sure everyone has seen or at least heard of: The Shining. Even if I dislike the changes, this kind of call back to the books is exactly what keeps the movie grounded in its original content and what makes it such a good adaptation. It actually adapts and doesn't just throw the original content out the window.

The final reason this adaptation works so well is that it adapts to our modern audiences. The original book was just choc full of things for a specific audience, containing details of specific minifigures that the main character had or almost random trivia that I had to google to get the reference. This is all fine in a book such as Ready Player One with a good story that can let you pass over the references for sake of story. For a movie however, everything is usually noticeable or upfront, so random dives into this 80's nerdism would be boring as I stated earlier because no one would be interested. The movie remedies this by including things that are actually quite a big part of our modern culture now, or things that are not too far back from our time. We see things such as Tracer from Overwatch, Battletoads from the NES, the Iron Giant, and more. These are things that pretty much everyone in our time has seen or at least heard of. The result of these background details is a movie that is full of fun things for people to look for that doesn't detract from the story by interrupting the flow for some big reference. It isn't boring because the references aren't outdated and the movie marches onwards with references galore for the dedicated nerds and fans out there.

Beyond all of the redeeming qualities of being a good adaptation, the movie is genuinely a good movie as well. We get a chance to love and care about our main characters as they move towards a goal that is clearly stated from the beginning. You have a villain with a clear motive and actually devious plan, but doesn't come off as inhuman, especially in the ending sequence. The movie is full of fun action scenes in the races and the trip through The Shining. The story is still structured and has clear organization. This film is amazing in addition to it being a good adaptation.

Ready Player One was a great book, but that doesn't mean the movie was awful because it changed from the source material. Because it expanded upon the source, changing things to fit our modern day and to fit the film medium it was a good adaptation. Something this great can only give me hope for future book to film adaptations to come.