Transcription
Hi. Do you like [music] familiar thing? Of course you do. Everyone likes familiar thing. Well, what if there was a movie where you saw a lot of familiar thing? Hey, it's that thing and that thing. So many things. This is a good movie because I have seen so many familiar things. That's Ready Player 1 directed by Steven Spielberg.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, they say. I wouldn't know. I only sniff glue. Looking back on the good old days isn't unique to any one time. But man, the 2010s just went overboard with the whole '8s nostalgia thing. For a few years, memories were marketable. Reboot, remake. Remember this? Remember that? It's something that was just so potent a decade ago.
I love the 80s back when we could legally drink and drive. >> Put in 11 12 hours a day and then get in your truck and at least write one or two beers. >> In my opinion, I think this whole phenomenon reached its zenith with one movie, one film that encapsulated this cultural rot. Ready Player One, >> Mecha Godzilla. >> The existence of this movie just fascinates me. It's something so of the 2010s, like after 2018, you just never heard about this thing again. I have never seen a Ready Player 1 fan online. Maybe they exist. I don't know. Nobody ever brings it up. Is this one of those things people enjoy and absolute shame? I want to know because the song making fun of Ready Player 1 has more cultural impact than the actual movie. >> Remember Tomb Raider? Remember Weird Science? Remember Battle Toads and the Iron Giant? >> This Spielberg film was kind of just swept away like an outdated Madden game. A disposable film. How could this have happened? It had all these recognizable IPs. It had the Iron Giant, Halo, Battle Toads. How could something that had Tracer from Overwatch be forgotten by 2025?
In the movie Willy Wonka in the Chocolate Factory, the titular character, an eccentric visionary, decides who will inherit his fortune in a battle royale where each child's sins become their undoing. Ready Player [music] 1 is just Willy Wonka, but in VR chat.
In the year 2045, the world sucks and it ain't getting better. People live in squalor and the only way to escape their miserable lives is to put on goggles and go into the virtual world. The Oasis, a metaverse. I I I mean a a universe where you can do anything and be anyone. Everyone is obsessed with it. It basically controls society. And now its creator, James Halliday, is dead. As his final act, he announces that his inheritance will be chosen by an Easter egg hunt. The person who finds all three keys and passes the challenges will inherit half a trillion dollars and own the entire oasis. There are whole groups of Easter egg hunters called Gunters who scour for clues. There's an evil company called Amazon, I mean Innovative Online Industries or IOI, who wants to disable ad block and milk the Oasis for all they can. And so far, nobody in 5 years has even found the first key. Not even IO's thousands of employees. Everyone is just stupid. So that's the basics for the original 2010 book by Ernest Klene and the 2018 Spielberg movie. Same general plot structure, same characters. There is however one big difference between these two. Execution.
The book is one of the worst things I've ever read in my life. I'm sure there are worse books out there. The rational side of my brain understands that worst novels do exist, but the rest of my brain just had to read a book which had quotes like this. Land of the Lost, Thunder, the Barbarian, He-Man, Schoolhouse Rock, GI Joe, I knew them all because knowing is half the battle. >> GI Joe. [sighs]
The term Reddit is thrown around a lot nowadays. This is Reddit. That is Reddit. It's a very versatile insult used by all sides of the political spectrum, used by any community. No matter who you are online, nobody wants to be accused of being a Redditor. Reddit is now just a catch-all term for a very specific form of lame, dorky, and nerdy. It's a term I've avoided using because it's an internet phrase and it'll just be outdated. So, trust me when I say this because I don't use the term lightly, but this book is like the most Reddit thing ever, man. Oh my god. And it's a very specific form of Reddit, like an extinct version of Redditor that doesn't even exist anymore.
I devoured each of what Halliday referred to as the Holy Trilogies. Star Wars original and prequel trilogies in that order. Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Mad Max, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. Halliday once said that he preferred to pretend the other Indiana Jones film from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull onward didn't exist. I tended to agree. I also absorbed the complete filmography of each of his favorite directors, Cameron, Gilliam, Jackson, Fincher, Kubri, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino, and of course, Kevin Smith. The whole book is like that. You'd expect this to be an adventure about a kid finding the three keys and saving the digital chalk zone world. And it's like that 20% of the time, but 80% of the actual text is just the author Ernest Klein going on weird diet tribes or listing off things he's a fan of. Sure, most of it's '8s references, but then they'll just have a random reference to Firefly because no nerd in the late 2000s could shut up about Firefly. >> I know what that is.
Wade is an overweight recluse who sucks with girls and avoids people in real life. But on the Oasis, he's a somebody. He's parival, a gun, knowing pop culture is a superpower. There's an entire chapter where Wade wins a pop culture debate against some other guy. Like this was the Big Bang Theory. And he won it so hard that literally everyone clapped. Wade has the personality of a sheltered Gen X nerd despite being born in the 2020s. He has all the same opinions, too. All the same opinions. It only took 17 pages into the book for Klein to mention how life sucks and God isn't real. Wade has this whole inner monologue about how fapping is great and it makes you smarter. This type of person couldn't exist on the internet anymore. They all got wiped out like the dinosaurs. Like this is Will Weeden as a book. Hell, Will Weeden even narrates the audio book. And in the lore of the book itself, he's voted as vice president of the Oasis. The funny thing though is that when you remove most of the book, uh, you have a mildly interesting idea. And that's what Warner Brothers saw when adapting this thing, because they bought the film rights before the book even came out.
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There was a whole ass bidding war for the film rights before Klein even completed the book. According to this Deadline article, Paramount, Fox, and Warner Brothers all fought over this movie, but Warner Brothers won. So, like, how how did the guy who wrote the 33% on Rotten Tomatoes film Fanboys, a comedy about a bunch of nerds trying to break into Skywalker Ranch, end up becoming the bell of the ball for these studios? Well, all it takes is having a good idea, or well, you know, a profitable idea. Imagine a movie where the core theme is nostalgia and popular IPs. Even back in 2010, studios saw the money. In a way, the actual content and quality of the book never mattered that much. They picked up the rights a year before the book even came out. It's not like this was a New York Times bestseller, then a movie adaptation. This was a movie adaptation, then a New York Times bestseller, which uh it sure is a coincidence that happened. Sure was lucky. This book whose movie rights were bought by a major studio just ended up being on the New York Times bestseller list worked out for everyone. On an unrelated note, did you know that the bestseller list isn't actually reflective of any real sales? It's actually an editorial recommendation list where books are chosen at whim. Make of that as you will.
Yeah, it never really mattered how much Klene fumbled the story execution or ranted about jacking off. The concept alone was just so alluring to studios that it ended up becoming a movie directed by Steven Spielberg. Marvin the Martian. The fact this will always be in Spielberg's filmography is just hilarious. A movie with Clap Trap stands alongside Jaws and Saving Private Ryan. Do you think Spielberg knows about Street Fighter? When the art department put these characters in and he saw the final product, do you think most of these just went over his head? As shameless as this movie is, being a vehicle for nostalgia and all, even literally having nostalgic vehicles, I don't think anyone could have pulled off this adaptation as well as Spielberg. Apparently, the studios wanted Josh Tran to originally direct like fan forstick Josh Tran. That would have been hilarious. Why didn't we get that one? They should have done that. Subzero.
Ready Player 1 is really two different films happening at the same time. On one hand, we have the liveaction real world. It's like a traditional Spielberg film. These sections are very deliberate and readable. It has the energy of an older movie. The visual language is intentionally nostalgic. It's also helped that the score is done by Alan Sylvestri, composer for all the Back to the Future movies, Forest Gump, and The Cruds. The score is intentionally cheesy and emotional at times, almost too much. Like, by the end, it just swells so much. I'm just thinking, "All right, pull it back a bit." The other half of the movie is a blur Studios cutscene. Oh my god. After suffering through the book, I actually liked the start of Ready Player 1. Shows the dorkiness of everyone being obsessed with VR. I even thought, wait, why didn't I like this movie again? Oh, >> Lex Luthther. Cool. From a technical standpoint, the CGI is pretty impressive in 2025. But in that way, a video game commercial is impressive. And it's crazy to see characters in this movie look like Super Smash Bros. will in 2013. Battle Toads. That's really the most the Oasis scenes bring to the table. Like, if you wanted to see a photorealistic Iron Giant, then uh there you go. And hey, even on this last rewatch, I was not immune to seeing a CGI Gundam fighting Mecca Godzilla. I thought that was pretty cool. I know. I know. I fell for the propaganda. I recognized familiar thing and I liked familiar thing. I'm a hypocrite.
Look, I'm not above seeing recognizable thing and getting enjoyment out of that. I'd actually go against the grain here and say they should have had more recognizable characters in this movie because the original ones they created look absolutely horrifying. Uh, >> stop staring at me with THEM BIG OLD EYES. >> The visual style they went with for the entire Oasis is just baffling. I get it's a video game and that's the excuse for why the CGI looks the way it does, but did our main protagonists really need to have giant bug eyes? Did this need to be Alita battle angel but bad? Parsal and Artemis just look so off-putting. How am I supposed to feel any emotional attachment to these characters? How am I supposed to take anything this guy says seriously? The liveaction segments are ironically a reprieve from this ugly VR world. How does the virtual world meant to escape the depressing reality look just as bland as Columbus, Ohio? This is the oasis. People can go and do anything. And what do we see for the whole movie? Inception New York City, a dark club, The Shining, a depressing wasteland. And yeah, it's Planet Doom from Voltron, but that doesn't make this battle look any less like a visual mess. It's all technically impressive. I'm sure a lot of artists worked on this, but like what's the point if it's all a blur of grays and blues? The original characters look bad, the environments look bad, and the only interesting thing we get are the characters from things we actually like.
Kind of seems like the point of this '8s stuff is that it's just a cover for a dying society. In the book, the '8s stuff is just because the author likes the8s. >> Remember, Kira, that's from Japan. Remember Galica and Mrs. Pac-Man? Like Klene has Wade drive a Delorean with Ghostbuster decals on the doors and installs an AI kit from Nightrider. And it's not played up like a joke. Uh it's meant to be cool. He literally owns this exact Delorean in real life. So the movie does the 80s stuff a lot better by just having less 80s stuff. It had to appeal to more than just manchildren Gen Xers. It appeals to manchildren from every decade. '9s, 2000s, even the 2010s. All still equally as shameless. >> James Holidayiday's favorite first-person shooter. What? >> Oh, Golden Eye. >> I really want to know how this movie will be viewed in the actual year of 2045. It's not that far in the future. It's only like 20 years. That's the same span of time from here to 2005. I'm sure most of these things will still be recognized, but that broad generational connection to them just won't be there. I know what a battle toad is, but someone watching this in the 2040s will just be like, "What's that humanoid frog thing?" Who will be remembered and who won't be? I can't really predict. All I can say though is that this movie is going to be very baffling to people in 20 years because nobody will remember Tracer from Overwatch. >> Cheers. The cavalry here. >> Tracer shows up like four different times. It's so distracting. Sleeping in bathroom breaks. It's a constant reminder this was made in 2018. In two decades, people are just going to be like, "Who the [ __ ] is this? Why do they keep showing this girl? Is she an original character?" Uh, no. This was just a big game in 2018, and Blizzard dropped the ball so hard it's now the most poorly aged inclusion in a movie that has TJ Miller as comic relief. >> The Tootsie Pop. Remember that old commercial with the owl? To be fair though, at least I remembered Tracer was even in this. Did you know a Battlebor character was in the background? Remember Battlebor? [laughter]
Anyway, everyone is stupid in this world. In the book, it at least makes sense why it's been years and nobody has ever found the first key. Nobody even knows where to start. In the movie, the first key is locked behind this race and anyone who wins wins the key. Nobody has won the race in 5 years. They keep getting smashed by King Kong. So, what could the solution possibly be? Just go backwards. Yeah. In the movie, Weey gets the first key because he was the first one to go backwards. In our world where speedrunners break games just for a 10-second time save. Nobody broke this game with a half a trillion on the line. Spawn. If this contest was real, gamers would have cracked this egg hunt in under a week. Hell, someone would have gotten the first key in the same hour died. Going backwards is the first thing anyone would have done, even if by accident. Now, to be fair, I saw someone on the Ready Player 1 subreddit, the only place I actually see people discuss this thing, theorize that maybe somebody needed to see Halliday's old memories and figure it out in front of the butler because the butler is Simon Peg. Uh, don't worry about it. and then Simon Peg [music] would activate the trapoor to go backwards. I think that's giving the movie way more credit than it intended. If the movie really wanted the audience to know this very clever thing, then maybe Simon Peg would have told Wade that that's how the first key worked at the end of the movie. I just don't see Klene and the writer of Free Guy uh recognizing that this whole backwards thing is really dumb and they intended for the butler noticing to be the way that the first key actually worked. I think if that's what they actually intended, they would have just told the audience because they want the audience to think the movie's more clever than it actually is. From what we're given in the actual movie though, Wade was just the first guy to go in reverse. Not even the big bad Amazon company with their infinite resources has ever tried to go backwards at all. And this is a company that can dox people and bomb their house. Yeah.
Wade gets doxed. Director Krennic finds out where he lives. And after Wade turns down their offer to find the egg, they just blow up his trailer. This scene is really all you need to know about just how different the book and movie are. In the movie, Wade reacts like, "Holy [ __ ] things are real." He panics. He calls up the trailer, sprints to the stacks to warn people about the bombs, but it's too late. His aunt and her boyfriend are dead alongside like 30 other people. He wants vengeance. In the book, Wade does not give a [ __ ] They blow up the stacks and it's just waved away by Wade himself. He hates his aunt and boyfriend. Uh, he kind of seems glad they're dead. And it's kind of more [ __ ] up because in the books, full families live around their trailer. Like actual children die in this because of WDE's actions and he never remarks on this at all. Wade is more sad about fumbling his internet girlfriend than the death of 30 people. Chest burster. Yeah, I are not playing around. There's a lot on the line here after all. The entire fortune of Holiday plus ownership of the Oasis. And if I takes over, they're going to flood the entire [music] thing with ads. Milk the Oasis for all the money they can make. You know, however the Oasis makes money, considering it's essentially free to play, but somehow Holiday made billions. Uh, wait, how did Holiday make billions? The Oasis is really just a standin for the internet. I get that. This is an absolute wild west of digital space and the corporations are trying to take it over and commercialize it. The world and lore is written in the way that it is because this is fundamentally a plucky underdog story. A David versus Goliath situation where the gamers have to fight to protect the internet from the big bad corporation. The story only works if everyone is fighting over something incredibly valuable, something that I would kill for. The story also only works if Halliday is the one who personally offers up the reward himself. It's a simple, fun concept that you just forget about after watching the movie. You just saw Chucky stab a guy you didn't think about the plot. >> [ __ ] Chucky. What the hell?
But then while I was writing this, I started thinking about it and I kept thinking and I kept thinking even more. So like the Oasis is basically free to play or well it only costs a quarter to start an account. There are no visible ads anywhere. So how did Hall become the richest man on earth? Like really half a trillion dollar is Elon Musk's size. It's almost double the net worth of Jeff Bezos. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Except it does. Holidayiday probably got a lot of his wealth through the stock of his company, Gregarius Simulation Systems, or GSS. And GSS is wealthy because of the Oasis. By the time of 2045, the Oasis has existed for decades. Funnily enough, it actually formed this month, December 2nd, 2025. It isn't just artificially pumping up GSS's stock like Nvidia. This is a real operation creating a profit for shareholders that keeps getting bigger. So, the real question here is how does the Oasis make money? This is a virtual world and a virtual world is such a good idea that of course it would be profitable. But how? The metaverse tried the exact same thing and and that failed. There has to be a reason why Holidayiday's fortune is as big as it is. It's the coin. You can buy anything with coins, virtual gear, cosmetics, weapons, and even real items. >> Oh, yeah. So, stick with me here. There's a scene in the movie where WDE's aunt's boyfriend gets pissed because he zeroed out. In the Oasis, a character can die and respawn, but they'll basically be a new character, like a rogike. He's mad because he spent real money on virtual upgrades and gear just to lose it all. That artifact is going to pay for the house. >> Wait, how much of our house money did you spend on upgrades? >> Well, all of it. >> So, we know that real money is going into the Oasis every day and being transferred into coins. A movie from 2018 might have a scene like this and it's just people spending their money on video game coins. But someone from 2025 would look at this and go, "Oh [ __ ] this is just crypto." Because not only can you buy virtual gear with the coins, you can buy real items, too. Oh yeah. But even then, just because something's digital, it doesn't mean it's not as valuable. There's an entire underground black market for just Counter Strike skins. Real money being made on virtual stuff. Real lives being ruined by people spending actual money on digital stuff they might not even get. Oh [ __ ] this is just online gambling.
In the story of Ready Player 1, James Halliday is this Willy [music] Wonka figure. His biggest flaw is that he's too obsessed with pop culture and never really lived a real life. He's kind of the emotional core to the film where the entire Easter egg hunt is just him expressing his greatest regret where he never told his crush how he really felt. [music] >> She wanted to go dancing so we watched a movie. >> But if you wanted to be a little [ __ ] and overly dissect the story like I am, you could say James Holidayiday is not a good guy at all. In fact, the game he and Simon Peg invented is kind of evil. >> Those are tickets out of here. >> In 2010 terms, Holiday made a very cool MMO. In 2025 terms, Holiday and GSS created a microtransaction free-to-play game that runs its own crypto economy and constantly enables online gambling. We can go even deeper. So, the characters can just die and lose everything, right? That's established. Really, that was just a way for the story to have any stakes because if someone responded, none of this would matter. But man, the real world implications of this would be horrific. We're shown people spend their whole lives in this digital world. Hell, TJ Miller's character has a decade in this game. Now, imagine spending real world money on this massive collection. Your character is your literal identity, something you attach your worth to and then you just die. How many people off themselves in this world? I bet TJ Miller did. How many people are psychologically destroyed every day by the gameplay loop the OASIS CREATED? NOT ONLY THAT, THE invention of the Oasis was what facilitated the creation of IOI, which hey, to be fair, it's pretty clear GSS and Holiday didn't like IOI at all. But at the same time, they didn't ban them or anything. You're telling me Halliday coded in this entire Easter egg hunt in this virtual world? GSS constantly is running the Oasis servers and nobody acted when II literally started enslaving people and using them for manual labor in a digital world. >> Those are explosives. Even if this was a dystopia cyberpunk world where the government really didn't exist and I could kidnap people and make them indentured servants, why would GSS go along with this? They're the bigger company. Why wouldn't Hall or Simon Peg see that people were being enslaved in their video game and not just straight up ban II? We know they can do it because that's what happens at the end of the movie when the kid takes over. Our second move was [music] to ban any loyalty centers from accessing the oasis. >> Why did it take Wade Watts winning an Easter egg hunt to end slavery? Was Hall complicit? Did he just not care? Oh yeah. So yeah, that's kind of funny. Holiday made his fortune from a video game that encouraged the worst aspects of the modern internet. Like hell, in the books it's even worse. WDE's mom was a virtual uh escort. That's a thing that exists in the Oasis. You can also buy virtual land. So, to sum it all up, James Holidayiday got rich off VR chat that was run with a crypto economy fueled by online gambling, led to certainly the ruination of many people's lives, all while turning a blind eye to digital prostitution and slavery. Hey, it's a Delorean.
Ready Player One is fun. All right. Like the book is [ __ ] terrible and I hate it with all my being, but the movie's fun. I'll never watch it again. Everything about Ready Player [music] 1 will age badly, except for one thing. When this movie came out, a lot of the criticisms were about how the references just felt tacked on. Like, why is a Battle Toad here? Who goes into combat as the Joker? Yeah, man. I can't imagine a digital world where someone would willingly go into combat as the Joker. What's a Fortnite? >> Back then, I remember people complaining about the way the Iron Giant was used. Man, the point of the Iron Giant was that he didn't want to be a weapon. And yet, here he is being used as a weapon. And I can see that complaint. The irony was certainly lost on the filmmakers who just wanted to do a reference. But in 2025, this is kind of funny. I don't see the Iron Giant anymore or any of these characters. I just see Fortnite skins. Yeah, the Iron Giant wouldn't do this, but this isn't the Iron Giant, just like how Batman wouldn't kneecap Bruno Mars with an assault rifle. While the Fortnification of culture is a discussion in its own right, uh, rest in peace, Magic, for this movie specifically, it is now incredibly funny because we know this is 100% what people would actually do.
But yeah, um, I guess if there's a lesson to this video, nostalgia baiting is bad. especially nostalgia baiting over the 80s. Thank god we're done with that. Now everyone's moved on to nostalgia baiting over the uh 2000s. I mean, I am certainly seeing a lot of familiar things popping up or the resurgence of The Office. There's a Scrubs reboot. I guess if you think about it, the 2000s are just as distant to us now as the 80s were when Ernest Klein wrote the book. Are the 2000s becoming the new8s? Imagine 2000's nostalgia being used as a replacement for actual personality and substance. [laughter] Uh [ __ ]
Once again, special thanks to today's sponsor, War Thunder. Uh if you didn't see Billy SEC's whole spiel, uh click the link in the description or the pinned comment down below. And new players and those that haven't played in six months will receive a massive bonus pack on PC or consoles. And that includes multiple premium vehicles, the exclusive vehicle decorator, Eagle of Valor, 100,000 Silver Lions, and 7 days of premium account available for a limited time only. Man, it really hurt doing this voice. Ow. Ready player one.