I played
squash recently with someone when I mentioned that I was reading David Gibbins’
Atlantis and they mentioned that I
might enjoy Ready Player One. The
movie had just come out and I was also told that it was wildly different from
the book and that if I was going to watch the movie, I should read the book
first. So I did.
The general
premise is, this crazy genius, James Halliday, creates this thing called the
Oasis which is a virtual universe that people log in to play games, do jobs, go
to school and essentially do anything except for eat and sleep. It’s almost
where computer games are heading now we have VR headsets, only expanded to cover
more of our general livelihood.
In the book,
the real world is going to shit with wars, poverty and famine. This is summed
by the cover of the book which shows mobile homes stacked on top of each other
to increase the population density and cater for the ever widening rich/poor divide.
Anyway, in
terms of the driving force behind the story, Halliday dies and leaves no heirs
so he starts a contest to find keys in his game world. Whoever finds all the
keys gets full control of the Oasis – so essentially becomes the richest person
in the world.
There were a
couple things that irritated me about the movie, which I’ll throw in here as
it’s relative but first, the book. Now in terms of story, Ready Player One is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
It does that thing where it drags you in, gets you invested in the characters
and makes it difficult to put down. The arrogance of the antagonist makes you
want him to lose and the characters are both engaging and charming in their own
ways.
That’s not
to say it’s a well written masterpiece though. There are several issues I had
which unfortunately broke the flow somewhat. In hindsight, I should have
ignored them and carried on, but I can’t do that anymore.
The most
glaring of these was the time-continuity throughout the book. At some point,
weeks would go by in a sentence without any real clues toward the passage of
time. Then time will move back three days, then forward a day to the point
where it became impossible to know what day of the week it is. Maybe it’s got
something to do with the destructive capability of computer games on our
perception of reality, who knows. On the bare face of it though, it looks like
bad writing.
Halliday is
obsessed with 80s culture and a lot of the references in the book reflect this
with games like PacMan, Tempest and Joust making prominent appearances.
However, there are certain elements that cross over into the 90s. References to
directors on page 62 that only really rose to prominence in the 90s and some
didn’t make an impression until the 2000s. It seems like a strange choice when
there were a lot of movies released during the 10 years that comprised the 80s.
This is a minor point though and it annoyed me more in the movie when it states
that James Halliday’s favourite game was Goldeneye, a game released in the mid
nineties for a console that didn’t exist in the 80s!
I also found
it odd that all Wade can do in the Oasis is go to school because he doesn’t
have any money. It’s like EA came in, bought out the Oasis and then monetised
the whole thing. I would have thought that especially for a character like
Halliday, this would have been the exact opposite of how he wanted the Oasis to
work, and it feels like part of the premise of the movie – stopping the evil
protagonist from gaining control of the Oasis – is made almost redundant by
this fact.
When I
thought about it a bit more, it seems that Wade’s inability to go anywhere
other than school in a universe of infinite possibilities, it merely a device
to drive the story and it’s really weak when you think about it. The movie
didn’t create this problem and doesn’t have Wade confined to school so while
parts of the movie annoyed me, parts of it are better too.
Another
example of things done to drive the story, when you get to page 208, Artefacts
are brought up for the first time stating that they’ve been around since the
start of the Oasis. This again feels very much like, ‘I need to do something to
move the story on… so… Artefacts?’ It could have gone by unnoticed if done
differently but it’s at the start of chapter, 208 pages into a 374-page book so
feels like an afterthought. Not as bas as some of Stephen King’s Dark Tower decisions though, and there
isn’t an author note to justify them either.
One more
contrasting point from the movie is the character of Art3mis. A main part of
the book is that Wade believes that the Art3mis avatar looks like her real-life
counterpart – this is true in the book but in the movie, the avatar is an
alien. I can see absolutely no reason for this. The movie also rushes through
the premise of the Oasis making it so anyone who hasn’t read the book will
struggle to know what’s going on. Lastly, there is no relationship building
between Art3mis and Wade in the movie. He just sees her one day and the next
thing you know they are best friends. It condenses the story from the book for
no real gain or reason.
There –
movie whine over.
As I said at
the start, Ready Player One is an
imaginative story with some great characters. It’s just a little rough around
the edges.
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was
published by Arrow Books in 2012. RRP £8.99 (Paperback)
