Disinclined Spectator Mixed

Friends, I saw Ready Player One on (the day before) opening night and jotted down some digital notes on my subway ride home afterwards so I could write a thing about it.  But then I didn’t write a thing about it.  And then I opened my Notes app yesterday and said, “shit, I didn’t use these notes to write a thing about Ready Player One.”  So, as RP1 is old news now, I’ll just post those notes here.

Oh, but first I should say this- Ready Player One is… OK.  It is neither the BEST THING EVER MADE, nor the WORST CRAP EVER FILMED.  It’s simply not dynamic enough to even come close to either of those extremes.  Yes, the book (which itself is higher than just OK, but not by leaps and bounds) was better than the movie in pretty much every way… but yeah- it was clear while reading it that the story needed some tweaking to fit into the confines of its impending medium-change.  And tweaked it was.

Really what I’m saying here is, in the end, RP1 the movie was definitely… a movie.  And now that all is said and done and the dust has cleared, I can confidently say that it was… fine.

Anyway, here are my (edited for coherence) notes from the N train:

-If I had seen it without reading the book I’d be a little confused.  Having read the book I’m confused as to why some of the changes were made.  Beyond the obvious rights issues.  Although there are plenty of cameos and homages on display.

-The Iron Giant had no place other than “hey look, it’s the Iron Giant!”  Although… wasn’t The Iron Giant an anti-gun movie?  Isn’t co-opting him here as a weapon, even if it’s for the forces of good, sort of… wrong?

-The book gets a lot of (misguided and wrong) flack for its memberberries nostalgia content, but while reading it I mostly felt that its character cameos and references were earned, in the context of the story.  The movie goes ahead and dives head-first into cameos, some earned, some not, but leaves behind the specific moments that aid the story.  Like the fact that Wade is a Halliday übernerd, which is WHY he goes to the archives to study everything Halliday.  Are we to believe that Sorrento’s team of thousands of researchers didn’t come up with the easy first clue based on those archives?  It sort of cheapens the solution to the clue that Wade is portrayed, on a script-level, as just a regular guy that isn’t necessarily obsessed with Halliday, but is just sort of a Halliday “scholar.”

-Art3mis is part of a Resistance?  Completely unnecessary change.  She is much cooler as a lone wolf badass.  And the Resistance basically gets completely destroyed pretty soon after Wade joins them, so what was even the point?

-No RUSH?  Not even on the soundtrack?  Should have spent more $$ on those rights than making sure Freddy Krueger and a Battletoad could be seen in random crowds.  And no Temple of Syrinx?  Missed opportunity.  Yeah, maybe the kids wouldn’t have understood, but I it’s one thing I’ve learned over the past 25 years of the internet it’s that the kids WILL LOOK SHIT UP.  DUH.

-It’s not a bad movie.  The Shining thing was supercool, and I think I get that change (War Games just isn’t as exciting and much more obscure in 2018) although that obvious Disney’s Haunted Mansion dance hall bit is undercut by the fact that they couldn’t reference the Haunted Mansion ride by name.  And I loved the shoutout to Stephen King’s totally misguided hatred of The Shining movie.

-Race sequence was a super-obvious “we need an action sequence” change, but couldn’t they have at least had the winner of the race get the chance to play Joust against a skeleton king?  Cheating at Mario Kart is enough to win the first key?  Come on.

-Did the same people who hated Sucker Punch hate this movie?  Because those RP1 battle scenes could have basically been inserted into SP, or vice-versa.  Style, look, feel… same shizz, different dizz.

-Thankfully, this ain’t Crystal Skull Spielberg.  It’s not a bad movie.  But those leaps in story, man…

-…Like Daito & Sho.  The need to get the team together in the same physical place?  For some reason?  …and they’re just suddenly there?  In fucking Ohio?  And Daito waits to join them in the big fight… why?  This character we don’t know at all is dragging his heels like we’re supposed to care, but we’ve been given no reason to.  And it’s literally just so he can make a grand entrance as giant nerd-favorite obscure robotguy.  And then he dies.

-Not sure how to really define what I mean by the jumps in storytelling thing.  There wasn’t much in the way of “set things up and deal with them gradually, down the line” going on.  A new idea would be mentioned, then dealt with within minutes.  New concepts would just pop up to fit any given moment.  I guess the Daito thing is a good example of this.  And the few times these things were dealt with in what should have been the proper way it was so heavy handed and obvious… like Wade seeing the password Post-It-ed to Sorrento’s rig, as if we weren’t supposed to know that would be used against him at some point.  I guess the Extra Life Quarter thing was mostly well done… but I think that was it.

-Was real-world T.J. Miller a thing that got cut?  His I-R0k was one of the better changes in the flick, but without a tie to real-world him it ended up not mattering as much.  Was this due to his current #metoo status?

-I love Mark Rylance, but that performance was a bit much.  Halliday, as an Asperger-like recluse, maybe shouldn’t be such an affected character.

-Simon Pegg wig status: questionable.

-There was an opportunity here to keep more of the 80s visual references from the book and make them set pieces, but change it up enough to include modern-day video game references as well.  Make it “for all ages.”  Isn’t that supposed to be Spielberg’s bread and butter?

-Was this movie even directed by The Beard?  It felt like he thought he’d tackle this popular story, but had no passion for it.  Probably should have kept more of those self-references he claimed to want to avoid…

-…which was a weird thing to say since we did see a full-on JP T-Rex and the BTTF DeLorean, complete with musical cues.  So…  WTF?

-Oh.  Maybe the “lack of passion” vibe I got was because real-world time was drastically less than Oasis-world time, and therefore Stevie didn’t really have to be present for that much actual direction?  Hmmm… maybe we DID get Crystal Skull Spielberg…

-SO glad they kept the Adventure thing in there, though.  Even if it was reduced to an extended Easter egg… of an Easter egg.  To find an Easter egg.

That’s all folks.  I’ll probably watch this thing again, once, when I can do so from the couch.  But I suspect that’ll do.  

Later!