Do you remember the first Harry Potter movie? Was it as good as the ones that followed? I don’t think it was. Sorcerer’s Stone was a nice enough movie, very faithful to the book but the pacing felt slow. Compare that to Fellowship of the Ring which strayed from the text and cut out some characters altogether but was still moved along while still staying true to the book in spirit. Peter Jackson’s audio commentary on the DVD of Fellowship details many of these choices and convinced me to soften my “the book is always better than the movie” stance.
Ready Player One (the novel) was a love letter to 80’s nerd culture. As a book it was a quick read but if the movie had stayed 100% scene-for-scene the movie would have dragged down to a crawl with all the exposition that couldn’t be condensed into a few seconds of screen time. Imagine having Wade turn to the camera and talk about how Dungeons and Dragons works, or watching those scenes with Wade and Aech in their hangout just sitting around talking about stuff. It works in a book but not in a movie. What happened, and what you see often in adaptations, is the movie appears to have looked at the book from the 10,000 foot view, lifted the major plot points and character names, and wrote a new story. I get it, I understand why they had to do it, and it’s a tough job. In many ways, they went out of their way to give nods to the book with references in the background to Dungeons and Dragons, Joust, and Rush. I loved what the movie was on its own merits, and how they reworked the book’s plot and incorporated more movie-friendly throwbacks and shoutouts in the OASIS.
[SPOILER ALERT] My only problem was the ending, where Sorrento goes off the rails with respect to his character (as do the residents of the Stacks) just to manufacture a face-to-face confrontation between Wade and Sorrento at the end that went nowhere. Wade rallies the Stacks to confront Sorrento and then meekly stand to the side as he waves a gun around? Nobody in the mob brought a weapon or thought to tackle him from behind? Then Sorrento reaches Wade and thinks twice about shooting him because Wade’s gloves are glowing, immediately recognizes it for what it signifies, and has a change of heart? Balderdash. Weak Sauce.It reeks of focus group research and boardroom rewrites. But that is also part of the movie business and I can accept it as a missed opportunity.
By all means if you have even a passing interest in the movie go ahead and see it. It’s full of nostalgia goodness. Just go easy on it when you realize it wasn’t as good as the book.
