I saw it last night and loved it. Haven’t read the book and avoided all trailers, but it was a love letter to my childhood and, frankly, adult life Plus, I goddamn lost it at Key #2.
It doesn’t quite stick the landing. The ending is very Spielberg. But most of it was pure joy for me.
But it’s also a movie that anyone a certain age will not get at all. Spielberg is an exception among baby boomers because he’s been a die-hard gamer for decades. I’ve been in the room with him at E3. But my parents? Forget about it. They get confused about how to shut off Windows.
Just saw it. It was good, not great. I did think they worked in enough of the 80’s nostalgia stuff without choking the movie with it. Made good use of the source material without being slavish. I thought the script was a bit weak, though; the overarching story was pretty underdeveloped. It seemed like there were some references to deleted scenes. It was pretty well put together visually.
They replaced the WarGames section of the book with another movie, which I guess worked better but I’m not a fan of the movie they replaced it with. Fortunately it didn’t matter much (and of course they only lifted the good parts!)
I’ve never read the book (and don’t plan to now), so I have no idea how it compares or how this works as an adaptation.
Going in with only the vague expectations set by skimming this forum and some pull quotes from reviews, I got the opposite of what I expected. I enjoyed the non-stop references and the simple pleasure of not knowing what they’d throw at us next did not expect The Shining, but the story didn’t work for me on any level at all. It’s a weird experience to be smiling and having a good time watching a movie I’m also hating more with every story beat.
Key relationships seemed forced or underdeveloped, so I never really cared about any of the stakes or the characters.
Huge fan of the book, which is some of the most fun reading that I have had in many years.
The movie was okay but both my son and I agreed it was quite inferior to the book. The relationship between Wade and Samantha, unlike in the book, is forced and unearned. There is nothing to it in the movie where it takes Wade a long time to get Artie to come around in the book. Having them meet early did not help either because that is Wade’s entire character arc in the book that is simply wasted in the movie. This relationship is supposed to drive the emotional connection of the movie as it does in the book and it is a huge miss.
Sorrento comes across as an incompetent, mustache-twirling villain. Halladay may be a socially-awkward nerd in the book but he is not like that. He is more like Richard Garriott or even Howard Hughes in the book. Wade’s true poverty does not factor into his growth. Shoto and Daito just seem to appear without much explanation. The plot falls apart in places. In fact, any time the movie left the virtual world it simply did not work as well. Car chases and drones simply could never compare to the virtual one so it makes no sense to stage the action in the real world. Og feels pasted in and a wasted opportunity to give the movie some context about the larger world.
With all that said it was still fun for the virtual sequences. The car chase scene was really fun to watch. The Shining was simply Cinema Joy. The Mechagodzilla battle was epic. Those scenes were worth the price of admission. Turn off your brain, get the popcorn out and enjoy those visual spectacles for the fun romp that they were.
That 53M is a bit deceptive as it includes Thursday. Weekend was 42M. The domestic numbers put it in line with stuff like the recent Ghostbusters reboot (actually a bit below that one) but its international is much stronger. Have to watch drop offs, probably do ok next weekend with the next big budget action flick being Rampage due on the 13ths. Though A Quiet Place out the 6th could be the surprise hit of the year.
Funny thing, they were previewing this at the showing of ready player one, and I was thinking man this seems like it is a movie of that old videogame, and then they showed the title rampage.
Wait a minute, am I supposed to like the book or not?? Should I turn my brain off, or leave it on? And do I need popcorn?!?
Having recently read the book and seen the movie, I can’t say whether one is better than the other, but they are definitely very different. A lot of the references were changed (for obvious reasons), but whole plot elements were different as well. Around the middle of the movie, my wife leaned over to my son and said, “Why did we even bother reading the book?!”
Book > Movie:
The world is more fleshed out. The evil enemy organization seems actually evil, instead of just menacing and kind of bumbling. There are whole areas of the world (like the school system) that aren’t even mentioned in the movie. The movie also adds themes and morals that aren’t in the book at all. If you liked the book, there are plenty of reasons for you to dislike the movie.
Movie > Book:
The movie adds themes that aren’t in the book at all…but then again, the book didn’t really have much of an overall message, so I can see why they reworked things to give the story more of a through-line. The pop culture references work better onscreen, because you can have a bunch of details in the background, instead of describing everything in painstaking detail. The movie plays down the thing of, “I knew how to do X because I’d watch movie Y exactly 152 times!”
In all, I think I liked the book better than the movie…but the book also wasn’t one of my favorites. But I didn’t hate it. I’m the porridge that Goldilocks chose!
As someone who hates the book and questions the judgement of those who liked it, I’m having a hard time parsing criticism of the movie from those that think the book was better. Does that mean I’ll like the movie? Is the movie even worse? What do I do with that information? The answer is wait until it’s on a streaming service for free.
Some things are pretty easy to parse: Did you get annoyed at long, drawn-out lists of references? Did you get tired of the 400th time someone said, “I looked at the , and it was an identical copy of from <movie/game/album cover>”? The movie doesn’t actually have people describing things, so you’re safe there.
Did you feel like the book was shallow, without a theme? The movie has more of a theme. Then again, a movie is a lot shorter than a book, so it necessarily has to be more shallow to begin with. So it’s a shallower exploration of a theme that wasn’t in the book.
Do you like CGI? The movie has more CGI than the book (which has none).
Do you like reading words off of paper? The movie doesn’t have any of that.
Other than that, I can’t help you. But if you really hated the book, I don’t think the movie is going to change your mind.
The movie kind of feels like a good remake of Tron. Was pretty good, its totally Spielberg in that its all about imagination and how it can save you. Though the ending with 2 days off to force the shitty reality ‘cause you need to eat and sleep and have real love’ was forced obvious. Still enjoyable movie, but a little part of me thought the world REALLY sucks in this movie, blade runnerish dystopia… no shit people are wasting away in Oasis, must be free to play. loved the comment of the bounty hunter bad guy ‘I HAVE TEN YEARS OF GOLD ON ME NOW!’ so PvP mmoish.
Good books have been adapted into bad movies and bad books (well more mediocre generally)into good movies. Spielberg specifically has done it in the past with Jaws.
I didn’t read the book, but I was loving the Shining homage in the movie. I seriously think thats worth the price to see the movie. Was really really good and took me totally by surprise. Also, I just checked the cast, I thought the Irok guy was Jason Lee, but its TJ Miller… they sound so much alike.
