For one thing, I don’t question the judgement of people who liked it. I wish I were one of them, honestly.
I did too! I have no idea who this TJ Miller guy is!
Insert image can’t tell if serious.
Give it up. Some people get their jollies from bashing people who don’t see as they do. You’re just feeding his need. Don’t worry, he will eventually watch the movie for the simple reason of slamming anyone who liked it. He’s a superiority addict and he can’t help himself.
Uh no.
Just because he is wearing a monocle and carrying around a highball glass with one pinky up does not mean he is a superiority addict. ;)
And I’m the one supposedly making personal attacks…
It was a joke. Lighten up, Francis.
The kid and I liked it a bunch. Had fun spotting game characters. Good, not great, movie.
That’s pretty much it. If you’re going to have fun, you probably will. It’s not deep, and there’s a layer of Spielberg sentimentality that is kind of hard to avoid, but it’s a good summer movie. If anything, it suffers from being a little too inoffensive.
So I hear that the bronze key Tomb of Horrors quest from the book has been changed into a race. Bummer.
I enjoyed the movie. It’s a classic fairy tale jazzed up with modern (virtual reality, income inequality) and nostaglic (all them 80s references) trappings. Rags-to-riches, hero’s journey, evil dark lord corporate boss, finding true love, and so on. Does it break new ground? Absolutely not. It’s reasonably well acted and the digital effects were great, which is enough for me.
Yeah. I mean, I understand that doing all the build-up to make the D&D stuff make sense would have taken too long. But what does a race have to do with '80s pop culture?
To be honest, almost nothing in the movie comes directly from the book. So if you go looking to see cool stuff from the book you liked up on the screen, you’ll probably be disappointed. The sort of general overall gist of the story is sort of the same, kind of.
That’s the point where my son leaned over to me and said, “Oh, so they’re EXACTLY following the book then!”
I hope this doesn’t go too far into spoiler territory, but the key/gate sequence is really streamlined over the book. In the book, it’s like this:
- Figure out a riddle to discover where the key is.
- Overcome some obstacle to get to the location of the key.
- Complete a challenge to get the key.
- Figure out a riddle to discover where the gate is.
- Overcome some obstacle to get to the location of the gate.
- Complete the gate challenge.
- Get a clue to where the next key is.
The movie sequence is basically 1-3-7. There aren’t any gates per se.
I haven’t read the book, but there’s also a super clear psychological element to the challenges in the movie that gives everything a thematic throughline, shallow as it may be. Is there anything like that in the book? Or is it all horrible DID YOU GET THE REFERENCE shit that drags down what should be a fun adventure movie?
I just came back from this, so I’m still sifting through my thoughts, but I’m fairly down on it, and it’s all because of all the DID YOU GET THE REFERENCE garbage. The core’s fairly ok, but not enough to get out of that morass.
The movie references weren’t even focused on the 80s really. It spanned everything from the 80s, 90s, 00s, and even later.
Gah! See what you people did?
That is the vast majority of the book. But in the book, it is frequently just listed, and always called out in explicit and pedantic detail. It sounds like the movie trusts you to get at least some of that stuff on your own.
Yeah, I guess, but all blockbusters have thursday showings included as part of the weekend nowadays.
Glad to hear that the movie fleshes out some of the themes of the book that I enjoyed. I always thought that the book’s themes were about the dangers of fandom, and the creator of the Oasis was a tragic figure, where his personal obsession with fandom lead him to the creation of a fantastic piece of technology, but ultimately left him a lonely life And that Wade’s obsession of the 80’s, both allowed him to win at the game and pull himself out from poverty, but also forge lasting relationships in the real world (which Halliday was unable to do), which were important in winning the egg hunt.
But, having read interviews with Ernest Cline, I think that I was thinking more about those kinds of themes than he was.