It’s been a few weeks now since Spielberg’s latest offering Ready Player One was released. I did not review the movie for my blog, because a) I saw it two weeks after release and figured a delayed review would be pointless, and b) it’s not necessarily a film that warrants a script analysis. It’s a film that butters its bread with visual effects, so it could get away with a more cliched and predictable script.
With that being said, I was intrigued enough by the story to want to read the novel the film was based on, 2011’s Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. While the novel shares the nostalgia-chic themes and general plotline of the film, many things were altered in pursuit of adapting the story for a visual medium. The surprising difference between novel and film was pronounced enough to prompt an examination.
Botched Execution
Here’s the thing…I didn’t like this book very much. Often when I compare a film adaptation to the work it was based on, I end up preferring the source material. It’s rare for me to enjoy the film more than the novel (the last time that happened for me was 2016’s Nocturnal Animals), but this is sadly the case here. Believe me, I could spend this entire post trashing the novel’s many problems, but that wouldn’t be very constructive. Instead I’ll analyze how I would approach the book’s flaws when it comes to adapting it for the big screen, assuming I had been given the task to write the screenplay.
The best way I can describe the writing style of the novel is that Cline takes the flashy, gaming-inspired, sci-fi set pieces of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and infuses it with the mystery-driven numerology and symbology of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. In true gamer fashion, our protagonist is the obsessive type, putting vast amounts of time into deciphering the hidden meanings of obscure symbols and references that may contain no meaning at all. He breaks things down to the most minute level in his puzzle-solving quest, and is rewarded for his efforts when the quest tests his knowledge and attention to detail moreso than his raw skill. We are meant not only to explore the nostalgic 80’s entertainment culture, but understand its creation on a fundamental level. A reference to the famous arcade game Adventure, for instance, invites us not only to learn its history, but its hidden secrets, including an easter egg hidden in the game’s code that only the most dedicated of gamers would know about. That kind of minutiae is emblematic of not just modern-day gaming culture, but the book world itself.
One of the hallmarks of science fiction is its propensity for intricate, otherworldy settings that allow the reader to be transported to a new world. Cline unfortunately uses this as a crutch, as 80% of the narrative is bogged down by exposition. The plot trods along from description to description, and while the author certainly paints a vivid picture of where we are and what’s happening, the pacing is glacial. Even when we are not focused on something grandiose and worthy of comprehensive depiction, we get excruciating stretches of excessive detail, like an entire chapter dedicated to describing Wade’s real-life routine, including food delivery, body-washing, exercise, and masturbation. This slows the pace down to a crawl at times; just when we are getting into the thick of action, things grind to a halt to overanalyze something, or else jump ahead months at a time and retroactively describe what happened in distant, clinical terms.
The story itself is riddled with cliches, plot holes, and all-too-convenient coincidences. Characters talk and act exactly as you would expect them to, to the point that I found myself accurately predicting what the next line of dialogue would be on many occasions. There is little nuance to the characters’ actions and mannerisms: you have the evil corporate tyrant, the intrepid band of lovable misfits, and the flawless demigod-like figures of Ogden Morrow and James Halliday. Even when the plot tries to be coy and mask Wade’s intentions, as if he has some grand intricate plan that will play itself out and wow the reader, it turns out that he’s just flying by the seat of his pants before being rescued by a convenient twist. He gets himself arrested and indentured on the off-chance that he’s able to hack the network from inside and free himself without anyone noticing. Then he is rescued from the streets by the benevolent Ogden Morrow, who happens to be watching over him and offers him help on his quest with food and shelter. I may be jaded, but once these outlandish deus ex machinas started popping up to paper over the thin plot, I started to check out. Also, why the hell would the third gate require three separate keys to be opened? It’s a blatant excuse to have the gunters band together before mercilessly shoving the other two aside to allow Parzival the sole victory.
But I said I wouldn’t spend this entire entry bashing the novel, so I’ll try to talk about what it does well. The nostalgia factor is dialed up to eleven, filled to the brim with quirky geek references so that anyone with even a mild interest in 80’s entertainment will find something they remember and enjoyed. The book focuses more heavily on video game tropes than films as Spielberg did, better portraying the culture of competition you see in the speedrunning community and other gaming circles, an element that was lost in the film rendition. The macro-storyline is pretty engrossing and kept me turning the pages even when its delivery rubbed me the wrong way. The world of the Oasis is well-realized and felt like a living, breathing universe that I would certainly enjoy wasting time in. And really, that’s the key here, because when it comes to justifying a sci-fi adaptation like this, the setting is all that matters.
Diamonds in the Rough
So how does the film attempt to fix some of these structural issues that the book possesses?
For starters, it keeps almost nothing from the original plot. It retains the world of the Oasis, the quest for the golden egg, the 80’s nostalgia, and the primary characters’ backstories. From there the plot takes an almost entirely original turn. The film eliminates many of the esoteric video game references in favor of more visually-pleasing fare. For instance, rather than describing the characters’ personal and private research into the life of Halliday, their investigations are manifested in the physical archive building of his mind so we get to see his past interests and memories played out visually. The challenge for the first key is a death race through a towering city of film homages, rife with over-the-top CGI action effects, rather than a bland dungeon crawl. The second challenge is a foray into the world of Kubrick’s The Shining (fittingly, another adaptation better than its source), which is barely even mentioned in the book. The third challenge does remain mostly the same: an all-out assault on the IOI-held fortress culminating in Parzival using his wits to find the Adventure arcade easter egg. These changes are all fairly obvious, making things more approachable for a wide audience by appealing to the eye as much as the mind.
The characters’ base identities are retained, but they are given a lot more to do in the real world. After Wade’s home is destroyed by IOI, he is brought into an underground “resistance” movement led by Art3mis/Samantha. They gradually involve the other members of the “High Five” – Aech, Daito, and Sho – rather than meeting them all at the end as in the book, allowing them more room to develop. The film axes the ludicrous subplot of Wade intentionally entering indentured servitude, as instead Samantha is forcefully captured which forces the others to rescue her, adding more urgency to the pace. And rather than a convenient rescue by Ogden Morrow setting up an uninterrupted final challenge, the characters are still on the run til the end, forcing Aech and the others to protect Wade on his journey. Morrow has a significantly reduced role in the film as a result, making his character more irrelevant, but the film gives him role of Curator as consolation. I don’t mind this change since it creates far more agency for our protagonists instead of having them rescued left and right, though it’s arguable that his character could have been pulled completely from the film without consequence.
Much of the geeky video game nostalgia of the book is replaced by geeky movie nostalgia in the film, but again, this allows for greater visualization. Gaming is still a central focus of the film of course, as it takes place in a virtual gaming world, but movies take the forefront, with the likes of Pac-Man and Megaman replaced with King Kong and The Iron Giant. Look, I’m a fan of both film and gaming, but there is a reason the two don’t mix well and most video game adaptations are trash. Games are all about player freedom and active participation, whereas film is a passive medium…we’re called the “audience” for a reason, because we can’t impact what’s happening on-screen. It can work for books when the writer can take the time to get into the nitty-gritty details inherent to a gamer’s dedication, but for film it doesn’t translate as well, often stooping to surface-level pandering or lowest-common-denominator fare, pleasing neither the general audience or dedicated fans of whatever franchise is depicted. Ready Player One film avoids this by avoiding the hardcore gaming world as much as possible in favor of sticking to the medium we already exist within.
One other simple change the film made was to lower the bar to PG-13. I was surprised to find such graphic language and sexuality in the book, with fuck‘s and faggot‘s and dick jokes galore. I don’t consider myself a prude, but it doesn’t really make sense for a story so obviously catered to kids to be quite this mature in content. I get that the language makes the gaming lingo more accurate and representative of reality, but that also happens to be one of the reasons gaming culture is so looked down upon as immature, so…yeah. Books tend to have more leeway than film in the first place. I’d read many a novel in high school involving graphic sexuality after all.
A Beautiful Mess
Now let’s not get too misty-eyed when comparing novel to film, because the film is far from perfect and has plenty of problems of its own.
A few tweaks to characters both new and pre-existing baffled me. There’s the reduction of Ogden Morrow’s character as I mentioned, though that’s largely passable due to the solved problems I outlined above. Meanwhile Sorrento gets a major buff in screen time; in the novel he’s just a looming presence hanging overhead that we meet only once, but the film frequently cuts back to his devious schemes. He was so transparently evil that it bordered on satire, but the source material wasn’t much better either. At the very least he had clear motivations, which is more than most movie villains can say. A couple new characters are introduced surrounding Sorrento: a mercenary named i-R0k in the Oasis and a special operative Zandor in the real world, helping Sorrento track and eliminate Wade and the gang. I didn’t really buy their inclusion to the story, but they were comic relief and mini-bosses of sorts so who knows what kind of issues they helped solve for the first drafts of the screenplay? Wade’s aunt and step-uncle get more screentime as well, real lowlifes who exploit and mistreat Wade. I suppose this was meant to make us feel less bad about the destruction of Wade’s house and their deaths, but it was a contrived plot point from the start. Again, most of these problems stem from a weak source material, but all the same, the end result is similarly thin.
There are times that the form takes precedence over substance, especially given such a visual CGI clusterfuck. Spielberg puts his signature camerawork on the film, and there are sequences that do genuinely impress, like the scene at the stacks where we pan down with Wade as he descends the structure and we see its size and the state of the people inside each apartment. But these moments are few and far-between considering that the vast majority of the film is spent in the digitally-rendered Oasis, where it seems the visual effects artists just crammed as many references into frame as possible. Ironically, there is a scene where Sorrento mulls the possibility of filling 80% of consumers’ field-of-view with advertisements, which is meant to seem excessive and cruel, but it’s basically what the film’s action sequences do anyway: overload our peripherals with referential imagery. Most of the critical emotional moments occur in the Oasis, where the characters’ avatars are speaking to one another rather than face-to-face, so it’s harder to make a connection to their relationships. The film does attempt to spruce up the real-world sequences to accomodate this fact, but it doesn’t work every time.
The film also, unfortunately, loses the sense of wonder inherent in games and reduces the culture to caricature at times. As mentioned previously, the book does a pretty good job at portraying the lifestyle of an avid gamer. Spielberg’s take mostly plays off the gamer stereotype for laughs or generalizes behaviors to appeal to audience expectations. The romance in the film was far less believable than in the book, in which Samantha resists Wade’s pursuits far longer and he’s portrayed for what he actually is in the first half: a digital stalker, a facet only briefly touched upon in the film. I also prefer the novel’s portrayal of the hunt for the egg; from the outset of the film the gunters seem to be working together, which would not be the case in real life with such vast amounts of money on the line for the sole victor. Take a look at the speedrunning community for an example of how such a culture would look: distantly respectful, yet cutthroat competitive. Yeah, the book’s ending got sappy and melodramatic too, but at least it was a more well-earned moment there after such strife between the main group.
Conclusion
Ready Player One is an anomaly to me because the story is so compelling yet neither the film nor the book seemed up to the challenge of doing it justice. Yeah, the film was decent and the book was at least readable, but slightly better decisions from the writers could have made this something special…maybe even a franchise. I don’t think I’ll look back on the story with too much disdain (as long as I don’t get too wrapped up in the details), but I am sure I’ll always think of it as a missed opportunity. It’s one of those films where I would desperately have liked to be a fly on the wall in the writers’ room to hear what challenges they were tackling and how they approached them.
VERDICT: Book D+ / Film C
What did you think of the film or the novel version of Ready Player One? What adaptations did you enjoy more than the book it was based on?
-AD
All images are the property of Warner Bros. Pictures.
Scriptophile 
It’s a lot of fun. Nice review.
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