This review contains spoilers. Read my review of the book (from 5 years ago) here. You can also read my slightly updated review here.

First of all, just some general observations. I went to see Ready Player One on opening night at my local cinema and there were probably twenty people there, maximum. My mum reports about 8 for 3D (I saw it in 2D). I was incredibly nervous because I love the book Ready Player One and I anticipated that the film would not be as good, oh how little I knew.

I would call this the most disappointing book to film adaptation I have ever seen, though perhaps I am too close to the source material. Everything that was good about the book has been thrown in the trash and the remaining characters have been sent on a brand new makes-no-sense adventure. Sure, Halliday dies and they go on the hunt for his Easter Egg but honestly, that’s the only similarity. I don’t know how Ernest Cline was involved in the screenplay but I am incredibly disappointed and betrayed. Although I am enraged, I’m mostly just sad because I feel as though I have been waiting for this for a long time and it wasn’t worth it. I am devastated because I don’t want Ready Player One to go down in history as something that sucked.

For some background, Ready Player One is the story of a dystopian future, 2045, where everyone basically lives in the VR world of the OASIS. Created by James Halliday and his partner Ogden Morrow, the OASIS is a massively multiplayer online universe where literally anything is possible. When Halliday dies he leaves his entire fortune and his share in the OASIS to the person who can find the ‘Easter Egg’, hidden within the game. It takes three keys, Copper, Jade, and Crystal, to unlock three gates within which there are tasks you have to complete in order to get the next key and clue. Of course our hero, Wade Watts, lives in the stacks, 22 mobile homes high, densely packed slums. He must solve the riddles and win the game before a large corporation, IOI, take over and start charging for access to the simulation, plastering it with advertising.

Honestly, I tried to keep an open mind – even after the race right at the beginning (a stark difference from the book where the main character, Parzival, must enter a real life DnD module). Sadly it only got worse from then. I understand that film adaptations of books have to change some things, I totally get that, they need to be shorter, need less exposition, but this was a mess. The first chapter of RPO is essentially a frame-by-frame description of Halliday’s video will, something that would translate very well to the big screen. In fact, the entire novel feels as though it was written to become a film, and yet they changed every discernible moment of the book. Sure, I am a die hard fan of books over films, but this could have been the best film ever. Anything of worth, any of the original meanings were removed, only to leave us right at the end with a flimsy moral about the importance of friendship in the real world.

Wade was supposed to be fat and bald. Aech was supposed to be a lesbian. In this hellish approximation of the story Art3mis grabs his virtual crotch (queue me vomiting). Not only that but there was absolutely no time for any of them to become friends. When Wade declares his love for Arty in film time they’ve known each other all of 10 minutes, so it makes perfect sense when she gets the hell out of there, but makes no sense that she comes back totally in love with him.

Where, pray tell, were the video games? Where was the ’80s nostalgia? I wasn’t even alive in the ’80s and I know that whatever it was I just watched, it wasn’t that. I would say one of the key themes of a book, literally called Ready Player One, is the video games. Well I don’t think they played a single one until the very end when he ‘loses’ at Adventure and that’s supposed to be something deep about not always winning or something. Not only this but the soundtrack, bland at best. Guardians of the Galaxy has a better nostalgic soundtrack than this, a film supposedly wrapped in nostalgia. These are all just missing details, things that make the book so rich.

Yes, I understand that the book is not a literary masterpiece, it’s mostly surface level stuff – but that gives it a quaint and warm accessibility that I love. This film has no accessibility, it lays it on thick that you’re supposed to know stuff about games and then throws in presumably sponsored shoutouts to Minecraft and Twitch. Oooh look there’s the masterchief how cool, omg that’s Overwatch, and wow is that a T-Rex?! I wonder who directed this!?! Despite all these ‘references’ that the book uses so well, the film falls short, pivotal moments like Wade playing games in his Aunt’s trailer, playing Joust against Acererak and playing a perfect game of Pac-man to get the EXTRA LIFE coin are lost. They also lose the warm, friendly uncle figure of Ogden Morrow, from what I can tell all for the sake of an insane car-chase in a postal van – which really just raises more questions about how the haptic rig works, adding nothing to the story.

Which brings me on to probably my biggest criticism. Everything that they removed from the film not only took away some of the soul, but it took away something that when I read it I found really important. The characters aren’t very clever.

Sure, Wade works out the first clue by going to the Hall of Records or whatever (Anorak’s Almanac is a much better name just saying), but there’s no cunning plot to out-do the bad guys. Where is the teenage boy, living in poverty, trapped on Ludus (the planet for school), working it out from Latin and rising up against The Man? They mention that Wade is poor of course, but how did he get his rig, or that fancy stupid omni-directional treadmill he’s somehow installed in his van? Why is he hiding in a van, ’cause it sure ain’t from his Aunt who is positively nice compared to the book. There is nothing left of Wade to identify with, and the opportunity to give Art3mis more screen-time when she’s taken into IOI slavery – completely missed. For a second I thought that she was going to cook up the amazing plan and hack her way into the Oology department and blow up the shield, but she just whispered a spell into a ball and then gets shot in the face by the main, male, character.

Things I liked? The effect of the coins bursting out of them was great, exactly how I’d imagined. The worst character in the book, I-Rok, hands down the best character in the film. Voiced by T.J. Miller, I-Rok really came into his own and provided some of the best lines, and a welcome reprieve from the hell that was the rest of the film.

Obviously I have to take a minute to discuss the film on its own. Let’s say I’d never read the book, would this be a good film? No not really, it’s confusing and flimsy and the characters lack literally everything, and no slight to the actors who really had nothing to work with. I’m inclined to give this film 3/5 just, as a film. The special effects were good, interesting use of filming to make the real world look a bit shit compared to the OASIS, the recreation of The Shining was masterfully done if completely pointless. As a film adaptation of a book, 3/100.

My advice, save yourself the disappointment, buy the paperback and read Ready Player One.