Ready Player One (some nerd)

[monolith94]

So where is the US government when all of this taking place?

Maybe the film is saying that this is the natural outcome of a libertarian political takeover? :shrug:

I skipped this film, mainly because I listened to the podcast 372 pages We'll Never Get Back, and that was plenty for me.

[Grouchy]

The first challenge is a point-to-point race that gamers have been stuck trying to finish for five years. Parzival has to be dragged through a bunch of plot and exposition to come up with the solution of driving backwards. Five years, and nobody hit reverse at the starting line? Here's what happens when people play racing games: Somebody will go in reverse. Now let's just say the odds of that happening is extremely low, or even basically zero. The moment the first race finishes without a winner, the odds increase to 100% on the second race. This is the fundamental rule of play. Ask any game developer what the biggest challenge is for a designer, and they'll all tell you the same thing: It's anticipating how a gamer will try to break what they spend years creating.

This film can point at Mario Kart and say what it is. But it does not understand how gamers interact with games. It does not understand the concept of "play" as a psychological or social activity, which is even more damning. That entire racing sequence, and really the film as a whole, as slick and entertaining as Spielberg can make it, is basically Steve Buscemi walking around with a skateboard asking, "How do you do, fellow kids?"

My friend and I agree whole-heartedly with this. The movie celebrates but also seriously underestimates gamer culture.

What D&MU says is also true to an extent. The pop culture fandom could have been used more profoundly in a way that related to the character arcs.

These two points aside I still gave this movie a Yay. Why? The visual spectacle and the choreography of incredible events is hard to beat. Any other director would have been drowned by the ambition of this movie, but Spielberg keeps both the action coherent and the storyline simple enough to be affecting at all the right moments.

[dreamdead]

I wish this film subverted more of its cliches, but perhaps its whole 80s/90s ethos is structurally designed to satisfy a quick surface-level arcade fix. It's absolutely acceptable, and there are a few instances that are legitimately interesting (the Shining restructure, which Sarah mentioned wasn't in the book in the same way), but so much of it plays at such a broad level that it never is able to transform into anything affecting. It doesn't help that the villain is so generic.

And it has at least 4 endings before it finally wraps up.

[StanleyK]

Man, if the novel is worse than the movie, I can't imagine how terrible it must be (actually I can imagine it very well from excerpts I've read online). Its worst crime is probably that the next time I watch The Shining I'll be reminded of this crap.