Ready Player One - Spielberg takes on the king of MMOs.

I resemble this remark. It’s an extra 15-ish minute drive for me…worth it.

For me I’d have to drive about 20 minutes further to get one without.

When I have three theaters with recliners and reservations 15 minutes or less away, why would I?

I thought that it wouldn’t make a difference…until I tried one for the first time. Now that they’ve added delicious Cinnabon, pizza, unlimited refills, etc., I simply have no reason to frequent the other theater that is also pretty close.

I also love showing up right as the credits are finishing. (Even if I do have to kick people out of my seat.)

Hated this movie. Validated worst parts of toxic gamer culture.

Maybe this deserves its own thread, but I would rather get the non-recliner theaters nine times out of ten. The theaters end up with fewer seats in the same amount of space, and you can’t get a good seat unless you reserve a week in advance. Being in a packed theater is part of the fun! Plus, less napping during the movie.

Man, I am exactly the opposite. I purposely go out of my way to hit the least populated showtimes.

I would rather hear people laughing and cheering and all that, at least for the big event movies. I have the rest of my life to watch the movie in the dark alone while eating ice cream and crying. What?! I’m not crying you’re crying!

We really should made a thread about this! It’s especially of interest to me as I’m attending more movies than in the past given the more-pleasant nature of some theaters these days.

I also listened to the audiobook recently. I’m most likely going to wait for it to be released outside of the theaters now. I’m glad I did listen to it as it allowed me to create this world on my own. The world that was created by Spielburg sounds quite a bit different.

To hear that he gutted all D&D aspects out of it really sours me, and that was in general the other major pillar of the movie (gaming culture/RPGs/etc — leveling up… yadda yadda)

In terms of painful parts of audiobooks read - I’ve listened to a fair number now, and so far, the readers always follow a book exactly how it is. if there is a series of 300 characters taking up a page, they will read them off exactly like that. One fantasy writer I know has a couple of really annoying chapter titles like this, They weren’t this long, but easily over 30 digits, and when the reader hit this it was painful to listen to. I went back and checked in the book and sure enough it was exactly like that. ugh

This caught me by surprise as I didn’t read up on the movie ahead of time. In a bad way…fricking Spielberg. I really wanted to see the Tomb of Horrors come to life. I thought other changes were pretty decent but the changes to the keys/gates was brutal for me.

There’s a little bit of distinctive D&D left in the movie. It’s so distinctive that it almost leads our heroes to disaster!

I’m disappointed he took it out also. It was one of my favorite parts of the book.

To be fair, the key/gate thing was a lot more complicated in the books, so I don’t know how you could translate that to the screen. Without spoiling anything, here’s what happens in the book:

  1. Figure out where to look for the first key.
  2. Complete a challenge to get to the challenge for the first key.
  3. Complete the challenge to get the first key.
  4. Solve a riddle to figure out where to find the first gate.
  5. Complete a challenge to open the first gate.
  6. Enter the first gate and complete the challenge to get a clue to where to find the second key.

Not counting the “solve the riddle” parts, that’s four separate challenges just to get past one key/gate! It’s no wonder they simplified the challenges to, “You won! Here’s the key! Now go find the next key!”

Honestly the biggest thing in the movie that stood out to me. One fucks around in The Tomb of Horrors at one’s peril. Attractive sphere of annihilation FTW

It is true the quest was radically simplified, and the movie is kind of delivering the tonal flavor of the book more than the actual story of the book… but I dunno, I liked it. Who better than Spielberg to deliver some signature Spielberg 80s nostalgia CGI / VR injections? It just makes sense.

I just wish it had been a little more…I don’t know, gritty? Maybe raise the stakes a little? There were a couple of specific things that happen in the book (no spoilers in case anyone is interested in reading it) that we left out of the movie, that would have made people go, “Oh crap, I guess this is for real!” I’m glad they kept the bombing of the Stacks there, but even then, in the book it felt much more menacing.

Watched it yesterday.

I can say it successfully… occupied two hours of my time. Yeah, that’s it.

I would say it had a few moments here and there where you can see how it could have worked better as an action/comedy film instead of a more straightforward action/adventure format they tried.
There is an inherent silliness in the premise and the setting, and total ‘tropeness’ in the story told here (boy meets girl, defeat evil corp), that makes it salvageable if instead of trying to tell something serious, you diverge into comedy.
So I think they should have used more comedy. It needed more lampshading, more irony (hot girls fawning over obscure 80s trivia!), more making fun of (and with) nerds saving the world, a main character with more bite and sarcasm (come on, if we are good with something, it’s with sarcasm!), more winking the audience, saying yes we are in the joke with you.
The best moments of the film were the scenes with the evil corp boss, from letting his password visible (total boss thing, they will have the super highend hardware, and then a sticky note with “password123” on top of it) to him trying to be ‘hip’ and in contact with the pop culture, to not wanting to use the (embarrassing) spell to activate the fortress shield.

Exactly what I thought after watching this yesterday. There was one single joke that made me laugh out loud (“It’s fucking Chucky!”) and I thought boy, this movie could use A LOT more of this, I mean all these references it could be having fun with instead of parading them for a few seconds, and instead it forces this semi-serious tone over the silliness and just wants to make me feel for this kid and his team of paper-thin, token companions as if they had any semblance of chemistry.

Never even heard of the book it’s based on, but as a movie this was pretty dire. The kids liked it good enough though, of course they got only a fraction of the references so maybe they had the advantage. I was rolling my eyes most of the time.

Watched as a rental. Other than the easter eggs/cameos, it completely did not work for me. Instead of exploring the social and economic implications of MMO or VR or video games, it is another hero-growing-through-struggles story, mixed with a bit of manic pixie dream girl and rosy nostalgia on all things old school. All tired tropes. Perhaps it is a commentary on the sorry state of blockbuster video game narrative of repeating itself ad infinitum? (CoD I’m looking at you.) The villain is a little more than a cardboard cut out. Ben Mendelsohn is completely wasted, having been a stand out in Rogue One as the over-ambitious middle manager.

Yes I agree it is pretty dire.

I finally saw this; it’s on HBO now. I am assuming guys are going to like this morning. This shouldn’t be a bad movie. The visuals are good, the plot is so-so, the acting is okay but this didn’t work for me at all. It’s about 10 years past the big MMO days, has all the stereotypes to give what I think a young guy might like, including his dream elder self except even better, with a girl! But really was missing was the emotional connects I think. For all the throwback 80s and nostalgia stuff… this was a spendy misstep for a lot of talent and money.