An Anorak's Thoughts On Ready Player One (Film Adaptation)

MILD SPOILERS BELOW

As a bestselling pop culture-soaked and action-packed young adult sci-fi novel set in a safely near future on Earth, Ernest Cline's Ready Player One at first glance looks like obvious material for a Hollywood blockbuster. On closer inspection, however, one sees that it lends itself less easily to adaptation to a blockbuster movie than one might guess.

The book's looseness is certainly a factor, with its numerous incidents, the sometimes significant lapse of time between key events, and general sprawl. The way the book is written is still a greater factor in this. Narrated by the protagonist (Wade Watts), the story is substantially told rather than shown (as is so often the case when the first-person point-of-view is employed), not a minor point given the significance of the characters' back stories, and the world building. There is the associated fact that we spend so much time in Wade's head, sharing his considerable angst, and watching him work his way through the intricate puzzles--by way of which, we indirectly share OASIS creator James Halliday's own angst as well. All this is also bound up with two key traits of the book that make it problematic from the standpoint of content as well as form, its bleakness and its gleeful, almost Baroque geekiness of certain very distinct flavors--the challenges Watts having to overcome deeply based in '80s era geek culture.

The thick detailing of all this gives the story its emotional charge, and none of it translates easily to the screen, especially within the framework of a fast-paced action film (even one drawn out to a 140 minute length). Much of the content is not the sort of thing a major studio picture would convey even if it could. Bleakness did not stop the Hunger Games series from being one of the most successful franchises of all time, but the mass audience's appetite for dystopia is finite, and was already waning well before shooting started on this movie.

It is worth noting, too, that the Hunger Games saga offered a more grounded vision, rather lighter on the science fiction trappings, arguably easing much of the audience into absorption in the events on screen. (Indeed, this seems to me sufficiently the case that I used it as a reference point in discussing alienation effects in Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry--or more precisely, discussing the minimization of such effects for the sake of dramatic interest.) The extent to which the book is utterly saturated with (often obscure) geek nostalgia, and how central the minutiae of that nostalgia is to the puzzles the hero spends so much of the book unraveling, is even less forgivable. Halliday was an anorak par excellence, with the quest he laid out for his successor itself an extreme realization of the geek fantasy of others' coming to share one's obsessions rather than treating one as an awkward bore because of them (and along with it, the fantasy of one's "useless" knowledge changing and even saving the world), and it is hard to picture a commercial film treating anything like that faithfully. It is harder still to picture a major film having the hero play through one retro video game after another, reenact one old classic of geek cinema after another--dramatizing to any extent the portion where Wade Watts has to act out the role of Zack Lightman in a Wargames simulation, completing the task by remembering every beat and line of the movie.

Naturally it is implausible that it could have been a purist's film, and indeed it was not. It seems predictable enough that the quest was scaled down to conveniently fit in a two hour movie, and the events of the narrative played out over days rather than months.

It is only slightly less predictable that the back story and world-building are also trimmed--in this case, to the minimum necessary for minimal coherence, with the inevitable voice-over confined to an expository beginning and the conclusion. The film downplays the bleakness of the scenario considerably in the process. The ruin of the world is only briefly and vaguely alluded to. The combination of energy scarcity, environmental collapse and economic crash, the Mad Max-ish condition of much of the country, are not mentioned at all. Our first glimpse of the Stacks, so vividly horrible in its poverty and ugliness and harrowing danger in the book, instead presents them in images so bright and vibrant and colorful it actually looks like a fun place to visit, even if one would not want to live there--and despite putting more images of graffiti-covered urban decay on the screen than any comparable film of this century, the film practically shrugs it off. Likewise the villainy of Innovative Online Industries, its ambitions for OASIS, its reduction of human beings to serfs; the resentment felt toward it and opposition engendered toward it; are treated slightly. (Even the more personal aspects of their anguish are downplayed, with the aunt Wade lives with made to seem less horrible, and the tensions of Halliday's home life when he was growing up in the '80s elided.)

The same goes for the geekiness. In the challenges Wade had to face the film emphasized grandiose action-adventure set pieces over puzzle-solving. In what remains of the mystery the film privileges a Citizen Kane-like pursuit of "Rosebud" (the characters actually use the term more than once in the film), which is, alas, Halliday's failed romance, over the pop cultural obsessions in which Halliday so immersed himself. All of this helps the film keep the pop cultural references easy, marginal to the mechanics of the quest, and usually both, while being less '80s geek oriented. (We get, for instance, a Saturday Night Fever-themed dance scene at one point, which is quite the divergence from the matter of the original.)

Ultimately the spareness with the information so abundant in the narrative, the strategic changes so critical to turning a cult book into a mass-appeal entertainment, took its toll not just on the book's sense of immersion in the virtual world of the OASIS, and the pop culture of a bygone time, but that more conventional matter, characterization. Simply put, Wade, Halliday and the rest are less troubled and less interesting figures. Art3mis' motivation is reduced to simple revenge for the destruction of her father (about which we know only because of a few lines), a less compelling motive than her original, grander aspirations, and less compelling, too, than the revenge narrative of the character who originally acted on such motives in the novel. For all the lush CGI the film does not quite do justice to the vastness and variety of the OASIS as conceived in the book, while the "real world" outside it seems insubstantial, along with the stakes in the competition--which, after the revision of the puzzles and the compression of the time frame, felt easier than it ought to have done.

The movie does improve as it goes on. At the climax the film becomes more faithful to the source material, not quite attaining the visually spectacular hyper-geekiness of the final battle, the movie version scaled down by comparison, but still very recognizable and about as satisfying as one might hope for from the Hollywood version. As one who enjoyed the book on its own terms this was some compensation. Still, while Ready Player One is considerably better than average as blockbusters go these days, not only proving fast and slick and visually flashy, but a bit more original and with a bit more sense of fun than most, it falls well short of matching the oddity and extravagance, the texture and tension, and the epic feel of the first, print, version of Wade's adventure.