Rewriting Ready Player One for the Big Screen, and how I hated it. Nate Roth

   


 Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is one of my Favorite Books I have read. So naturally, I was very excited about the film adaptation released in 2018. After watching it though, I was disappointed in the film as it just rewrote or removed parts of the plot.

    The Major Spoiler-free plot of Ready Player One revolves around Wade Watts a teenager inside the OASIS. The OASIS is an open-world virtual reality game where you can do whatever you want. Wade however is taking school inside the OASIS so he is stuck on the school planet with no money to travel anywhere else. When suddenly the creator of the game James Halliday dies and he launches a massive challenge inside the OASIS for anybody to complete to win the OASIS. The challenge is to find three different keys, the Copper Key, the Jade key, and finally the Cyrstal Key. To find these you must complete smaller challenges each time to grab ahold of the Keys. These Keys then unlock a corresponding gate found after another challenge, once a player unlocks all the gates and find the Easter egg they wins the challenge and gets to keep the OASIS and all of James Halliday's assets. On Wade's, or his in-game character Parzival's,  journey he meets with a group of other gunters, or egg hunters, to find the easter egg together. Along the way, evil cooperation called IOI is using all their resources to win the hunt and take over the OASIS even going into the real world to win. I highly recommend this book especially if you're into pop culture from the 80s/90s or if you're just into sci-fi adventures. 

    On to the Film and its wrongdoings. Wade just doesn't go to school in the movie. He is able to do whatever in the game, rather than being stuck on the schooling planet until he discovers the Copper Key on his schooling planet and wins a bunch of coins to go do whatever. I can't really think of much of a reason the film producers would do this other than to save the time of Wade being stuck on the school planet to instead have him jump right into attempting to find the Copper Key, which is changed in the movie to not be on the schooling planet but rather at the end of a very difficult race track. 

    Leading me straight into my next rant, they switched up all the challenges for the keys and gates. First off they just removed any challenge to unlock the gate they moved the gate to appear once they got the Key right by them. This does make sense in a movie producer eye's because these challenges consisted of Wade role-playing a knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail reciting every line and action. So, adding the gate challenges would add more time to an already near two and a half hour movie. The Keys on the other hand did not have such an obvious reason in my eyes. The keys don't make sense to change for time reason such as the gates, because these were around the same length as the ones in the film or even shorter as with the First Copper Key. Another change in the set up of the keys is the Jade Key or the second one. After one of Wade's fellow gunters discovers and finds the Jade Key the IOI cooperation swoops in with their hundreds of accounts to get Jade Keys, all before Wade even gets to the planet the key is stored on. Seeing the evil IOI cooperation go ahead of Wade on the Leaderboards ticks of Wade driving him to rush to find the last key to win before this company does. And finally onto the Crystal Key. The movie producer did keep the location of this final Crystal Gate/Key the same, but they completely changed the final challenge once again. I do understand the movie producers cutting the gate challenges out for a time, but I really wished they have kept the key challenges the same. Changing all these challenges that were great in the book made watching the movie feel disconnected in a way from the original book and its plot. 

    There are other big changes the movie producers took that I also hated, but I will not get into them as they are major spoilers for the rest of the plot. So, I will just leave them out as I recommend you to read Ready Player One rather than just read my blog post with all the spoilers and then never read the book. But anyways in conclusion read the book first and then go live your life without watching the movie. 


-Nate Roth

Comments

  1. Walter KraatzNovember 12, 2020 at 3:20 PM

    I agree with you that they should have kept the key challenges, and that they would have been a huge time suck for the movie. I think that a montage of the key challenge would have been a good alternative because it would allow for a essential part of the story to be included but also keep them from adding a significant amount of time to the film.

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  2. Miranda BurgosNovember 13, 2020 at 1:23 PM

    I haven't read the book or watched the movie 😳 but I see your frustration. Movie adaptations of books often can be that way (as you could probably tell by some of my articles). It seems they made it too easy for the characters which usually makes for a less exciting watch. It's an issue I've seen in a lot of adaptations. Whether it's for time reasons or otherwise, the conclusion is still the same. The book is almost always going to be better.

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  3. Jaewoon JungNovember 13, 2020 at 4:17 PM

    I think this problem comes up a lot in many reworks of the original source. I think this is a good example of when this happens. As someone who watched the movie but didn't read the book, I think that it is a good stand alone movie, but when compared to the book it may fall short.

    ReplyDelete
  4. TaehanJanuary 27, 2021 at 12:38 PM

    Although I see your frustration, I also enjoyed the movie. tbh I haven't read the book, but I feel like changing some of the things in the plot also made room for a lot of the pop culture references in the movie which was awesome to see. Again have not read the book so probably cannot make a definite claim but I still enjoyed the movie.

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