Transcription
So I don't know if you guys noticed that like 100 percent of the internet content over the last month has been Ready Player One think pieces. There are so many Ready Player One think pieces that at this point you could remake Ready Player One and instead of '80s references, it's just increasingly meta references to the extended canon of Ready Player One think pieces.
Anyway, while I was watching Ready Player One, I noticed some stuff. Just like, just some things. I wouldn't call them plot holes, like this isn't CinemaSins. Just like when you invent a whole world, there are implications to things and things become strange sometimes, and it just kind of makes you go like, "Hmm, oh, that's weird." So I made a list for you guys of things that made me go, "Hmm." I can't even press my laptop keys with my big meaty gloves.
So they changed a lot of stuff from the book, which is really disappointing to me because I was personally looking forward to them attempting to recreate the scene where the protagonist is Matthew Broderick re-enacting the whole of Wargames. The villains are still called Sixers, but unlike in the book, they do not call them by the nickname "suck sores" because they suck. Which I cut that. It's like they're embarrassed or something.
Okay, so Wade's love interest, Artemis, she keeps rejecting his love because she's like, "You won't love the real me. I'm not hot like my avatar." Like she's got like a dark secret, and her dark secret is just she's got a birthmark and is sort of chubby. Because I guess that's the worst thing you can turn out to be, and then no man can ever love you. Oh well. The book doesn't call her chubby. The narrator refers to her as "Rubenesque." I think it's to sound more polite. I would just be mad. It's kind of a backhanded compliment anyway. You see her in the movie and she's just this like hot, skinny Natalie Portman-looking actress, and she's just like extremely conventionally attractive. But she does still have the birthmark, and the birthmark is like over one eye, and it's like this faint red, cool birthmark. And they still have a scene in the movie where Wade tells Artemis that he doesn't mind and he isn't disappointed. Like it's the scene in Shrek where he's telling Fiona that he still finds her beautiful. "It's okay, Artemis. I don't mind your face." It's what every girl wants to hear from her boyfriend.
There's this character in the movie, I don't think she was in the book, and her name is Finale. And she's like Sorrento's task force leader. So she's trying to catch the good guys, and she's just this like unstoppable action hero. She's like sprinting down the street, she's probably doing flips, I don't remember. And she's jumping between moving cars. And I'm just like, my headcanon is that she only seems like a superhero relative to everybody else in this universe. Like she's just fit because she's not really into the virtual reality thing. Like this is just, it turns out this is what the human body can do in the future if you don't spend 12 hours a day sitting in your gaming chair.
So the book tells us that a lot of manufacturers solely operate within the Oasis, the virtual world, now. And some of them just set up digital storefronts, but then you get their wares in the real world, like Amazon's situation. But a lot of them are just selling entirely digital goods. This is confirmed for being the case in the movie too, because we have Parzival ordering the haptic suit online and getting it in the real world. But then we also have H who builds and repairs vehicles entirely within the Oasis. The Oasis is such a big part of everyone's life that Oasis Bucks are basically just equivalent to real money. If you're rich in the game, you're rich in real life. And people place a lot of stock in buying their avatars' clothing and weapons and vehicles. But I'm like, who's regulating this? Part of me would say that to create an item in the Oasis, it would be as labor-intensive as making it in the real world. Like you're, you're spinning textiles or you're hammering away at a forge or something. But we know that's not true because Artemis totals her bike and H fixes it in ten minutes. So like, what is H doing to fix things or build things? Like, is it just coding? Like, if I learned to code, could I just make like a plain t-shirt that your avatar in the Oasis can wear? And then on the front is like, like my own crudely rendered crayon drawing of Crash Bandicoot? Because people like references. And then I'm just like, "This shirt is impervious to all damage because I coded it that way." And now it is. So why wouldn't every item just be as powerful as it's possibly allowed to be within the rules of the game? And then in that case, why wouldn't everyone just make every item the topmost power every time and then sell it for competitively lower prices to beat out the rest of the market, driving down the value of extremely powerful weapons until the currency of the Oasis holds no meaning and everybody has equally powerful avatars?
Anyway, spoilers, but Wade's friend H looks like a big buff man, and then there's a twist that it's a girl instead. But when you listen to H talk, it's so obviously a female voice that's been modulated to sound lower, and like, it's not subtle. And it's actually kind of distorted and hard to listen to. And like, if they want it to be a twist, why didn't they just get like a man to do the voiceover? I mean like, it's, it's the future, surely tech has reached that level.
One thing I like about this movie is it contains multiple instances of characters crouching behind chairs to avoid detection and it being successful. Halliday's partner, Ogden Morrow, is played by Simon Pegg, but it's like Simon Pegg, cause plain as Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins in old man prosthetics.
Oh, there's this great scene where Sorrento, the bad guy, who knows what Artemis looks like in real life, knows that she's one of the people in like a VR suit running around his headquarters, and he wants to stop her. So he's, he's going crazy. He's running around and he's ripping headsets off people left and right, even people that clearly aren't her. Like he runs up to this like six-foot-tall stocky man, like, "Is that Artemis?" and rips the headset off. "Sorry, I'm a six-foot-tall Rubenesque man."
Another reason I like Sorrento is that his avatar is painfully corny looking. It's like this awkward, plasticky Superman avatar wearing a business suit. It's like it's way more embarrassing and uncool than he looks in real life, which I feel is kind of the opposite intent of an avatar.
So Halliday and his youth took a girl named Kira out on a date. She wanted to go dancing, but instead he took her to see The Shining. And apparently she had a bad time and didn't want to go on a second date with him. It happens. Halliday's best friend, Ogden Morrow, later dated and married this girl, and they were extremely in love and were a wonderful couple until years later, she tragically died in a car accident. Halliday remained obsessed over this woman that he had one bad date with until his dying day. He programs her likeness, without her blessing or the blessing of her surviving relatives, into his game as part of the quest for his magical Easter egg. Just this speaking, moving, ghoulish 3D puppet of this poor dead woman who probably doesn't remember or know Halliday that well and had no part in this, just part of his puzzle quest. And she must be danced with or kissed to get the magic key. Maybe some of you guys have had some bad first dates, but like, I promise you that Kira has got you beat there.
I didn't see a single furry in this movie. I'm not saying I went to this movie hoping to see a furry, but didn't it feel odd that there weren't any there? Yeah, I saw like three non-human avatars, but they looked like mythical beasts or like video game monsters. I'm talking full furry. I didn't see one avatar that was a grotesquely buff, shirtless male anthropomorphic wolf with like spiky bangs that are dyed like some cool ray of color and anime eyes. I've been on the internet long enough to know that in the interest of realism, at least 30 percent of these avatars would be furries, and some of them would be in diapers.
The avatar piloting the Iron Giant dies saving her friends. And at no point says Superman. Wade tells Artemis he loves her an hour into their first date. Like, what kind of socially awkward... Okay, that one checks out, actually.
I think the weirdest thing in this movie, and what it all comes down to, is Halliday. And more specifically, what the heck is Ernest Cline trying to do with Halliday? I mentioned that in the book, one of the eggs is that Wade gets sucked into a simulation of the movie Wargames, and he has to recite all of the bits that Matthew Broderick did. Like, the book spends a long time just recounting Wargames, and he's just able to do that on his first try. And then when Artemis gets there, you see that her score on the scoreboard is updated like a little bit after that. So apparently she also nailed it on her first try. Like, I'm not questioning that they've seen Wargames, but like, seeing a movie and knowing all the dialogue all the way through on your first try is like an incredible skill for everyone in your fictional universe to just have. And knowing all the words to Wargames is indicative of someone's worthiness to essentially just rule the entire world.
Here's the thing. Because it's a book, and because in books and other stories, usually things matter, I was like, "Okay, why is it Wargames?" Like, the book does go to the trouble of recounting the plot of Wargames, and they make a point of repeating the line, "The only winning move is not to play." In the context of Wargames, that line is obviously about war and not about video games. But this is a story about video games, and they have selected that line to highlight. So your first logical leap is that the point is that this line is going to help them drive their intended message home. Because the Oasis, on the whole, it's a bad thing. Like, Earth has gone all dystopian now. We're specifically told that people spend so long in the Oasis, they're not even trying to fix problems in the real world anymore. And people live in slums, everything's all junky and sad. Like, the world is just a big old trash pile now. People go hungry. There's a scene in the book where Wade has to travel across the country by bus, and he tells us that these buses are equipped with armed guards because there are just roving packs of bandits out on the highway waiting to ambush travelers.
I think it's also significant that the movie decided to replace the Wargames simulation with a The Shining simulation. Like, people have attributed a lot of symbolic meanings to The Shining, but if you want to strip it to just its bare-bones, one-sentence description, it's about a guy who has a creative career and is driven crazy by isolation. But is that what they're trying to tell us happened with Halliday? In everything we see of him in the movie, and in things that he actually says, he seems to have social anxiety or some form of it in like a very clinical and unambiguous sense. And based on the performance, it also kind of unsubtle. He seems like he's supposed to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. Is the movie trying to say that him spending all this time on the computer games caused this, and it's his fault? Because that's not great. What are you trying to tell me, Ernest Cline? What message are your scary eyes trying to beam into my brain? Halliday was uncomfortable trying to socialize with humans and only interacted with people through his avatar. But his avatar was like this freaky, ancient Gandalf wizard. He tried to tell me that that that avatar had like a kick in social life. That that Anorak, the wizard, was partying it up at the nightclubs every Friday.
From just an objective standpoint, the Oasis seems like it would be a whole lot of fun. But in the context of this world, it's created all these horrible problems that no one is addressing. As a counterpoint, in the book, we're told that Ogden Morrow and his dead wife spent their lives creating computer games that would teach kids reading and writing and math. The narrator even says that this is how he learned as a child. So it's kind of replaced elementary school. You even have that scene in the movie where Ogden Morrow is trying to talk to Halliday and he's like, "Hey man, this thing you invented, it's, um, it's carrying some serious implications with it for the future of the world, but maybe we should regulate it or think about this for a second. You know, maybe just put some boundaries in place or think of some regulations." I mean, this girl's been selling like thousands of Crash Bandicoot t-shirts, and suddenly no one can sustain damage. It seems like a reasonable thing to bring up. But Halliday just goes insane. He's like, "I didn't want this. Things were simple before. I don't want to think about it. Can't we just go back? We can be like Bill and Ted, man. Get my fresh references." I don't know how anyone watching this scene wouldn't hate Halliday and feel very frustrated with him and just wanna like take him by the shoulders and shake him. Like, people are dying, James. People are living in piles of trailers, and regularly those trailers just fall. We have trailer avalanches, and they crush people. They get crushed in their trailer slums, and you're quoting Bill and Ted at me right now.
Heat is reverently whispering along, but like, that's his character, and he's a kid. So it's fine. I mean, he looks and he mostly acts like a grown-up, but I think he's supposed to be like 17. Anyway, it's not his fault he's obsessed with Halliday. Like, it's literally by Halliday's design. But after seeing this scene, you, as an audience member, or at least I, start to think that, "Oh, they're setting it up for a reveal at the end, or at least like a realization that Wade could have about Halliday and all of his flaws." It's like, "I Don't Meet Your Heroes" moment. But instead, Wade meets Halliday, and it's almost beat for beat exactly like that scene where Harry Potter talks to Dumbledore in the train station, right down to the part where Dumbledore's like, "Oh, I may or may not be a ghost, Harry. I don't know why I'm playing coy about this, because we live in the Wizarding World where ghosts are just a thing." But you know, oh no, now I'm referencing pop culture. Like Ernest Cline is winning. He's getting in my head.
From what we see of hologram/slash maybe ghost Halliday, he seems to have achieved some level of clarity in his dying days. He regretted a lot of his choices and the chances he didn't take and the life he didn't live. And the main wisdom he wants to impart to his successor is, "Don't make my mistake." So on one hand, he's like, "Don't be like me, kid." But then on the other hand, he designed this incredibly elaborate contest specifically to ensure that an entire culture and whole generations of people would live and die obsessively memorizing every minutiae aspect of his life. I mean, a lot of the challenges aren't really a test of character. They're like testing your ability to solve wordplay and know things about Halliday, and in some cases, just your ability to play video games. Halliday's contests ensured he would be elevated to legend status, and especially in the book, would be completely unwinnable without an encyclopedic knowledge of nerd pop culture. So like, he learned his lesson, or did he not? Like, does he regret his life, or does he want people to worship him as an idol? And like, all of the same movies and games that he likes. Even the use of the Easter egg from Adventure in the last challenge feels deliberate. The creator hid his name in the game so even when he left the company, people would know he was the one who made it. Halliday's Easter egg hunt was about knowing Halliday. It's the same thing. It's a desire for recognition. But admitting that Halliday deliberately, calculatedly designed it so that a population of poor people living in trailer stacks would obsessively research his life for a one-in-a-billion chance at solving his puzzle. Like, it just seems a little sinister, right?
I'm not even saying that Ernest Cline chose that game because he wanted to evoke that meaning because like, he probably didn't. Because like, I don't think he thought about the meaning of anything he used in the whole movie. Which is weird if it's supposed to show Ernest Cline's pop-culture savvy or read as a love letter to any of these things. I mean, The Iron Giant is an anti-war movie, and particularly an anti-gun movie. And it was made after the murder of Brad Bird's sister, and the film was even dedicated to her memory. It's not a movie about how cool it is to drive big robots and shoot people with the guns hidden in your eyeballs.
There's the scene in the movie where the villain Sorrento is trying to sweet-talk Wade into siding with his company, and he's waxing on about how he just wants the world to be like in those classic '80s movies. And Wade's trying to spar with him a little bit. He's trying to trip him up with trick questions, kind of to prove that Sorrento doesn't actually understand the things he's referencing. And you find out that yes, Sorrento isn't really knowledgeable about this stuff. He's actually being fed all his talking points through an earpiece by an actual nerd that has researched all this stuff. And the point of this moment is to get us to dislike and distrust him because you're supposed to be like, "Yeah, he can regurgitate all these facts. He can parrot back the names of movies that are being fed to him, but all these references are unearned. He's just making these references to manipulate nerds like Wade into liking his company." This man, this whole company, they don't even engage with these materials. They don't understand the heart and soul of what they're really about, and what it really means to love them. And that's wrong. And that was just, I just found it a little ironic. It made me go, "Furnace Klein's writing is so funny to read."
It's like, first challenge of Ready Player One, all in a row. Here is how it's revealed. Oh, I didn't tell you until now, but the first clue is that the challenge is something about learning. I already solved the rest of the puzzle before you got here, but not the part about learning. Oh, hey, my Latin teacher just said to learn in Latin. That made me think about school. Hey, I'm at school. Oh my god, what if the challenge is on a school planet? But what are the odds that would be on mine? Out of all the school planets. Oh, it is on mine. But how would I ever find it? It could be anywhere in the forest. Oh, wait, I know how to make a program that can find it for me, and I already did that. It looks like a Dungeons & Dragons thing inside. It could be pretty dangerous. Fortunately, I memorized this whole thing, so I know exactly where to step. Oh no, in the final boss, I have to play him at Joust, the arcade game. Fortunately, before the book started, I spent like a whole summer playing Joust with my best friend, and I'm really good at it, so I'm gonna win on my first try. Like, is this satisfying? I don't understand. It's like watching a speedrun of a book.