Welcome back to Sound Off!, a semi-regular column where members of Speculative Chic gather together to chat about the latest BIG THING in entertainment. This time, log into the OASIS and discuss Ready Player One, which premiered in the United States on Thursday, March 29, 2018.

Sound Off! is meant to be a reaction, but not necessarily a review. After all, while we are all individuals, even mutual love of something (or hate) can come from different places: you may find everything from critique to fangirling to maybe even hate-watching.

Now, join Howard Kleinman, Nancy O’Toole Meservier, Casey Price, and J.L. Gribble and Bach as they talk about Ready Player One. [Note: Spoilers after the big red warnings!]

Howard: Ready Player One was a movie squarely targeted at me as a child of the ’80s film, anime, and video game nerd. So of course I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was Steven Spielberg’s first unapologetic adventure film since The Adventures of Tintin a few years ago, and it was a good deal more fun.

As to whether the movie deserves much of the post-gamergate criticism it has gotten, I think I’ll have go back to Yoda’s warning to Luke Skywalker on Dagobah. It’s there if you bring it with you, but it’s not terribly noticeable if you don’t. I didn’t find the movie reprehensible the way I found Man of Steel. I mean, if I were to use that lens to view the film, I might’ve walked out angry, but the film itself was good-natured and generous enough that I found that those parallels didn’t pop up naturally. But then again, I am the target audience. Other peoples’ experiences may vary.

If I have a big complaint it’s how they used the Iron Giant. On the one hand, if even one person who hasn’t seen that movie sees it because of Ready Player One, I’ll be happy. On the other, using an iconic anti-war character as basically a beat ’em up mech is really out of sync with the source material in a way that the hundreds of other pop cultural figures certainly aren’t. I’m sure they used the Iron Giant as a love letter to the film, but it didn’t work for me, and I wished they used Optimus Prime or Bahamut or something.

If you do see the movie, I do recommend seeing Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining first. It’s worth it.

Nancy: Over the years, we’ve come to align a good book adaptation with a strict (albeit abridged) adherence to the source material. And with good reason. If a film adaptation goes off the rails, it’s easy to look at the book and go, “oh, this was so much better! Why didn’t it do this?” But perhaps one of the most interesting thing about the movie version of Ready Player One is the fact that diverges quite widely from the novel, and is in fact a stronger movie because of it.

Don’t get me wrong. The broad strokes are all there. Ready Player One is still the story of Wade Watts, a young man living in a dystopian future where a jaded populace chose to escape into a virtual world known as the OASIS rather then deal with the world’s problems. When the owner of the OASIS dies, he creates a series of complex puzzles, rooted in his favorite media, in the OASIS itself. Whoever solves the riddles will inherit the company. That’s all still there. But the actual puzzles that they must solve have been changed, and the grander story has been simplified. And whether these decisions were made for purely practical reasons (maybe they just couldn’t get all the rights?) or more creative ones, the result is a far more streamlined, less dystopian, and more hopeful story, which I found suited the format of a popcorn flick quite well. That, and it gives the movie the time to really delve into the elaborate set pieces of the OASIS, which is where Ready Player One really shines.

I suppose the marketing team had their reasons for not putting more of the OASIS into the trailers (maybe the CGI wasn’t done yet? Maybe they wanted to save it for the film? Maybe they thought that general audience wouldn’t be able to connect to CGI characters?) because they are jaw-droppingly good — serious props to both the effects team and the director Spielberg. My favorite sequence has to be the car race in the beginning: how the course was laid down, the Easter eggs in the background, and how your perspective was later changed once Wade solved the riddle (although I remain skeptical that it would take puzzle-addicted gamers FIVE YEARS to figure something like that out).

But I would be remiss if I discussed this movie without going further into those Easter eggs (especially given that the film was released on Easter weekend, when children are literally collecting a very different type of Easter egg). Ready Player One is up to its eyeballs in references to other media, from ’80s music to modern video games. And the great thing about them is they can be appreciated if you’re already in on the joke, but even if you’re not up to date on your classic Atari games, you can still enjoy the movie. I really appreciated the fact that Ready Player One wasn’t just a checklist of Easter eggs, but instead served as a genuine love letter to media we fall in love with, and the pieces of its creator that they end up carrying. Similarly, I love the fact that the film clearly saw the value in escapism, while gently reminding the audience that every now and then you need to experience the real world.

Ready Player One is a fun popcorn flick that’s smart enough to know when to embrace its source material, and when to diverge. I had a lot of fun watching it and felt like it was well worth the price of admission.

~MINOR FILM SPOILERS~

Casey: I learned a long time ago to enjoy adaptations for what they were, instead of resenting them for what they weren’t. So, it was with almost zero expectations that I went in to see Ready Player One on Thursday. I was 100% satisfied with my viewing experience. Almost a year ago exactly, I pleaded with Hollywood to do anything but this adaptation. I have been proven wrong.

Was it like the book? Nope. (Now, watch as I summon the wails of anguished fanboys around the world.) The book was extremely problematic. I acknowledge this, even as I enjoyed my reading experience. Spielberg and company didn’t precisely burn the whole thing down and start fresh, but they may as well have. This is not at all a bad thing. The film captured the spirit of the best parts of the book while leaving the oogey problematic parts out.

I really liked what I saw. By tossing my expectations out, I was able to thoroughly appreciate the film. I loved the updated pop culture bits (because it’s entirely impossible for everyone to be 100% obsessed with the 80s, no matter what Mr. Cline would like to happen). Even though I don’t play their source games, I was delighted to see the glimpse of the Minecraft planet, the Overwatch characters, and…was that a herd of Master Chiefs (of Halo fame) running into the fray? I’m sure that there are plenty of others that I missed. That’s part of the fun of this movie: spot the pop culture! I also loved the entire The Shining portion of the film. I’m not a big fan of that movie, but the integration here was excellent. Good call to use this rather than the films that were featured more heavily in the book (War Games and Monty Python and the Holy Grail — the former is a little obscure, and the latter a little overrated *ducks*).

I was very pleased that Art3mis (the 3 is an E, because l33t) was an actual, integral part of the story. I loved that she had an important story line of her own. After she was captured and sent to work for IOI, I was absolutely terrified that she would be a victim of the fridge, especially after I saw the tiny cubicle she was trapped in. I should have trusted Steven Spielberg more. He didn’t go that route, and Art3mis was as fully realized as any of the other characters.

…Which is, unfortunately, a little shallowly. All of the side characters suffer from this. So do the uglier parts of the story that Cline created in the source material. Sure, we hear that the world is in very bad shape, but it’s really, really glossed over. There is such a thing as being too happy-go-lucky sometimes, and this movie comes perilously close.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it enough to want to watch it again. Sometimes you need a little bit of predictability and happy-go-lucky, and Ready Player One delivers.

~MAJOR BOOK AND FILM SPOILERS~

J.L. and Bach: We laughed. We had a good time. We found a movie worth watching in 3D. But did we love it? Unfortunately, no.

We went into this film knowing that it would not be exactly like the books. And that’s a good thing! Watching a single character play an old-school video game is boring. Watching an epic race and an exploration of a film classic is interesting. But there were some aspects of Ready Player One that could, and should, have adhered more to the soul and themes of the book. And that’s where things started to fall apart.

On a more general level, this film was a whirlwind of activity. And not in a good way. Even though we sat through an initial 20 minutes of exposition, Wade’s voice-over did very little to impart a true sense of how fucked up his world is. And exposition does not make world-building, despite the spectacle of a nausea-inducing whirlwind tour of the OASIS that focused more on showing off all the licensing rights the studio acquired rather than showing how the OASIS actually functions as an escape from a decaying society. Immediately afterward, the rest of the story felt incredibly rushed, and unfortunately, this significantly reduced much of the tension. Even when the characters were shown to be in physical danger outside the OASIS, we never had time to absorb it as they careened from one situation to another. As viewers, that left us kind of “meh” to the entire story. For example, every member of the High Five finishes this movie living happily ever after. IOI could still have killed off Daito in real-life…but they didn’t. We’re not sure why destroying an unknown number of extras by blowing up the part of the Stacks was acceptable but killing a top-tier character, which would have significantly upped the stakes, was not.

The opposite side of danger is love, and the love story in the film adaptation did nothing to fix the issues of Parzival and Art3mis’ relationship in the book. They tried! But with everything so rushed, the characters falling in love felt just as contrived as the threats they faced. The actors (and their avatars) had no chemistry between them, but they were professing love 15 minutes after meeting. (And let’s not go into how the avatar of Art3mis is a twig, and the real-life version of Samantha is just as skinny.)

The reveal of Aech’s character was one of our favorite parts of the book. We got not one, but two, versions of that reveal in the movie, as Parzival and Art3mis both meet Aech/Helen. And both reveals fell flat. Again, we think this lack of emotional impact was due to there being no time to explore how an OASIS friendship develops in the real world when you have to rush the characters off to the next scene to further the plot. The film does get major props for casting Aech as a black woman, staying true to the book. But in the book, Aech is a queer woman of color, and thus Ready Player One continues a long and disappointing tradition of queer erasure in film. (Bach argues here that J.L. may have missed part of the movie. J.L. retorts that if it was so small that she missed it, it still counts are erasure. Bach notes that actress Lena Waithe is gay, but J.L. was avoiding all discussion of the movie to avoid spoilers and had no idea. Then we devolved into what counts as gay representation and yelling about privilege, so we’ll continue with the review instead.)

The final, and most disappointing, change from the book to the movie was the escape from IOI headquarters. On one hand, it could be said that the film’s version gave Art3mis/Samantha’s character more to do. But on the other, the book’s daring escape-slash-heist turns into yet another rushed act of saving the girl from the Evil Corporate Empire. Even when Art3mis is focused on accomplishing goals that could only be performed from inside IOI, Wade/Parzival makes it clear that he cares about her, first. Which isn’t romantic when their entire “romance” doesn’t feel real to the audience.

We didn’t totally hate it. Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, and Lena Waithe absolutely nailed the voices of the three main characters. T.J. Miller transformed I-R0k from a generic internet troll into an hysterical villain much more developed than IOI’s Sorrento. But we can’t recommend the movie as a suitable replacement for the book. Go see Black Panther while it’s still in theaters instead.

Bach is an IT professional in the U.S. Air Force who has been playing video games since he could hold a controller. He read Ready Player One in one sitting and listened to the audio book three times, which is why he has OPINIONS. He is married to regular Speculative Chic contributor J.L. Gribble.