Ready Player One

First to the egg!

    So I just recently realized that Ready Player One isn’t the greatest thing of all time. Wow, what a sentence. I never thought that I would write that. For years (two at the most), I thought that Ready Player One was one of the greatest pieces of fiction ever created. I thought Ernest Cline was a genius. And he is, but not for the reasons I thought he was. Ernest Cline is a genius because he realized that if he put a bunch of pop culture references from the time that most people right now with lots of money and nostalgic memories grew up in, then it was very possible that whatever he made would generate some serious coin. And it did. That’s not what the point of this article is about though. 

    The point is that I thought Ready Player One was amazing because of all the 80s references. After reviewing it from another angle though, I realized that the references themselves were great, but the story…not so much. If you just watch the film itself, the story gets a bit confusing. Names are hard to understand, the story constantly shifts from real world to Oasis (the virtual reality that everybody plays all day). Speaking of the Oasis, let’s just take a second to realize that there are about a million copyright issues with that world. There’s absolutely no way that Disney would ever collaborate with Universal or any other competitor. 

    I also don’t understand how you can get a copy of say, a DeLorean, without paying lots of money, which apparently, our main hero doesn’t have. Do you start out with a vehicle? Because in the movie, Wade Watts (Aka Parzival), has very little money, and in the book he has none at all. So I guess the first time Parzival entered the race, he just ran behind all the cars and picked up the scatter coins (avatars drop all their currency in the game whenever they die, so Wade drives through the coins and collects it).

    Overall, Ernest Cline did explain a lot about the Oasis, and I’m grateful for that, but half the movie’s version of the game doesn’t line up with the book’s version, which leads to confusion. 

    I will forever thank the book for getting me into major pop culture, and also just having fun with all the properties. Like whenever the Iron Giant plus the RX-78-2 Gundam fight MechaGodzilla, I was like “Why wasn’t this half the movie?!” Or whenever they just throw Chucky at a bunch of bad guys and it kills them, spraying coins everywhere (“Hey Parzival, come and get it!”) 

    In conclusion. Ready Player One isn’t the best story of all time. But the references are timeless and the best part of Ready Player One. I will forever hope for some sort of video game that’s similar to the Oasis, just so I can go beat up some guys in a Gundam mech, then run over them with a DeLorean. Long live Nerd Culture.