Starring Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Simon Pegg, TJ MIller, and Mark Rylance.
Based on the novel by Ernest Cline.
Oh shit. Wow. Super interested. The book was good, I mean any self-respecting nerd/geek would agree. I was hoping it was going to get a bit darker into some of the rather dystopian aspects of the world the protagonist inhabited, but it was still a pretty fun lark.
Why is he standing in Wall-E’s home, though?
I read this book in about 3 days, due to having time off work for a baby. I loved it. Spielberg is kind of the perfect person to direct this, because the kind of nostalgic sentimentality of this particular dystopia is something he can absolutely nail.
Better yet, zoom in on the newspaper on the upper left.
“SINCE 2021 MORE THEN 20 MILLION VR HEADSETS SOLD”
And yes, that’s a “then” used incorrectly in the headline.
The scuttlebutt is that Spielberg had to cut a ton of the pop culture and gaming references out of the story due to licensing issues. Additionally, he made the decision to not reference his own movies, which book readers remember as being pretty prominent, with the exception of Back to the Future.
I presume the author did not need several dozen licensing agreements in place, how can that be fair use, but a movie needs to bow down to license holders for pop references. Fuck capitalism, sometimes. Without all the references, this may just end up rather lack luster VR flick with little to make it resonate with audiences. Weird.
Yeah, it’s sort of like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? which similarly had a bunch of licensing issues in the Toon Town scene. Partnering with WB for Bugs and Daffy and the other Looney Tunes charcaters was easy, but they were never able to get Popeye from the Fleischer Studios folks.
If you remove the pop culture references, you’re removing a lot of the book. You can put in fake pop culture – Pizza-Man instead of Pac-Man – won’t be quite the same, though.
I also want to know how the kid does his VR without tripping over stuff in his hideaway.
The other way to look at it is that even with cutting “a ton” of references from the book, you’d still be left with a ton. Some parts of the book were non-stop callouts.
I mean, somehow a shit movie like Pixels was able to secure the licensing needed for its crap story.
I’m more puzzled by the scenario of an under-50-year old possessing newspaper clippings in post-2021.
Because the children of the future were consumed with the trappings of the past?
That’s an important part of the plot of the story. The “gunters” are completely focused on the past and collect its paraphernalia.
Spielberg is going to fucking ruin this. It’s going to be Jurassic Park, but instead of dinosaurs, it’s dinosaurs in VR.
The book is a love-letter to 80’s-obsessed millennials, and a deep respectful nod to those of us who actually did spend a good chunk of their wasted youth in smoky, dark arcades playing Pac-Man while drug dealers sold pot over by the PinBot machine.
Spielberg, now wholly a part of the Hollywood machine, groks none of this.
I think the opposite. I hate the book, find it full of empty nostalgia, geek affirmation, and pandering. It’s also a total Gary Stu story.
Om, not really. How many of us here have not gotten, like, totally ripped and 0.5% body fat, because we’re treadmilling whist catassing on Warcraft? Don’t cast your negative body self-image on us, buster. Oh wait, that was Reamde. I forget, I forget again
One man’s empty nostalgia is another man’s “Dude, he referenced Zork correctly. One of us, one of us.”
This podcast echoes my feelings pretty well
I recognized it as an image from Scrubs, which was a comedy about a hospital from the 2000s, of which I was familiar.
IMO not true of this book, but true in spades of his followup book Armada which I really… didn’t like. Total geek fan service in the 2nd book with nothing substantial behind it.
https://www.amazon.com/Armada-novel-author-Ready-Player/dp/0804137277
RP1 is clearly terrible as a piece of literature, but it’s also really fun. I have room for that. I can’t see the author ever producing anything remotely worth reading ever again, but he’s made bank on this one and can retire, or just churn out the same shit over and over until everyone stops buying it.
Lots of people in their 20s buy vinyl records nowadays, and they were pretty much replaced by CDs before most of those kids were even born. So a kid having newspapers in the future? Totally possible, if it becomes “trendy” enough.