Ready Player One, the film of the book

To be frank, OASIS is basically just Second Life.

Except you actually live it.

It's nothing which hasn't been done in the real world and the premise isn't that it's one big video game, it's the premise of it being the interface for millions of video games as well as people using it as a substitute for the internet.

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

Eh, OZ seems like a nicer version of that. (Because seriously, OASIS looks incredibly dark and dreary in the trailers.)

Not Three Laws compliant.

I realize that the book SOMEWHAT deals with that. There are also explicitly 'chaos' zones that are mentioned to have both which means that, yes, there are times where a dragon and spaceship might actually have to function together. There's a lot of broad concepts, but we don't see much of the nitty gritty development of what half of that means and how it works in fuction rather than on paper.

What I meant by 'newer' trend was just merely that it has taken hold stronger in recent years, not that its a completely original concept thats never been done before. Yes, there are a lot of books that read as movies, not as novels. If Michael Crighton did it in the 60s, I don't care. And Ready Player One is one of them. This isn't some 'well, different stories don't work as movies/books' thing as that's an adaptation thing. This is 'this book was clearly written with a visual medium in mind and writing with a visual medium in mind doesn't make a well written novel'. Books =/= Film.

And just how many times can we say that a character was interested in "science fiction, fantasy, film, comics, and video games" ?

How did a book this awful get a Spielberg adaptation?

My various fanfics.

Because it got good reviews and sold really well?

Just because something is of a certain quality doesn't mean the success level will be equivilent. Look at twilight, a book that the internet loves to take a shit on as one of the worst books ever, but it also did get five big budget films that made a crap ton of money. It might not be good in either novel or film version, but it clearly connected with SOMETHING in its audience to become a success.

The same ends up being true of Ready Player One. It might have terrible prose and storytelling ability, but it connected on something with its audience that other books don't which made it an audience darling. I would assume the level of understanding of pop "Nerd" culture references is what propelled it to that place. Particuarly when fiction that specifically engages no only in that culture but the people raised in it isn't done to great success. It caught some people's attention with something.

On top of that, a bad book can make a BETTER adaptation in the long run because you can figure out what worked, what didn't, and move forward from there. Its easier to take a bad property and make it good than it is to take an already amazing property and make it better or more successful. This was the logic people felt about Cars 2 when it was first announced: "If a sequel needs to surpass the original in quality and Pixar doesn't want to do sequels otherwise, then making a sequel to its least successful film is the more likely to surpass the original than, say, Ratatoulie or Toy Story".

edited 13th Dec '17 6:20:08 PM by InkDagger

Yes, but what Cars 2 ended up being was complete drek, which is also what I foresee for this film, which I am henceforth going to mentally refer to as "nerd twilight".

"And when the last law was down and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat?"

Having looked at the romance subplot... you're not wrong.

Y'all realize that posting in a thread just to say how bad it is is literally against the forum rules, right? Seriously, if you don't have any interest in the book or the movie, just don't post about it. I'm ridiculously tired of dealing with people coming out of the woodwork to shit on it everywhere I try to talk about it.

edited 14th Dec '17 4:12:29 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Threatening people with mod action for reacting to a piece of art differently to you is not a classy play, dude. I mean, it’s not like you’ve never rendered harsh judgement on a work before.

When a work has significant and obvious problems, people are going to bring those up, and RPO is interesting because it’s a severely flawed work being done by someone who, while his best days are behind him, is a fundamentally competent director, so there’s a lot of discussion to be had in how you might go about turning something so messy into a functional story.

What's precedent ever done for us?

Massive rewrites.

I do genuinely believe the reason the book became so popular was the liberal use of nostalgia which masked just about everything else. It’s also why I think the reviews from people that don’t have any nostalgic attachment are the harshest. I keep going back to the “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back” podcast where the hosts admit to no nostalgia for these items, and then their initial optimism descends into sheer hilarious vitriol for the book. Without the nostalgia, the book doesn’t work.

The job of the film is to make the narrative flow in such a way that it requires more than rote memorization of 80’s stuff to win the day, and gives the characters a more active agency outside of repeating old pop culture properties and memes.

And don’t have A verbatim reading of lines from Monty Python and the Holy Grail as a major set piece like the book did.

I don't mind people with different opinions than me. You've seen me posting in enough threads to know that. But "I didn't enjoy the work and here's a discussion of why and here's what I think it should have done differently" is an entirely different beast than "it's a shit book and will be a shit movie, too". The former I may disagree with but can respect; the latter is legit against forum rules.

I was born in 1986. I don't remember any of the 80s, much less anything earlier, and most of the references in the book are either over my head or hold no particular nostalgia for me. I still enjoyed the book because I thought it was a functional-if-unoriginal story and the references gave it an interesting flavor, particularly as contrasted with the pseudo-cyberpunk thing it had going on at the same time. I find the claim that "without the references, it just doesn't work" to be rather spurious.

You could replace every real-world reference with a fake fictional reference and it wouldn't hurt the book much. It'd hurt it a little, as it's easier to get a mental image of what they're talking about in certain scenes if you're familiar with what they're referring to, but the book is generally pretty good about giving the basics of whatever reference they're making so that someone who's never heard of it before isn't completely lost. The entertainment value (for me, at least) is less "LOOK THEY SAID A NAME I RECOGNIZE YAY" and more that it's fun to see the characters having so much fun with it.

And to be honest, being repeatedly told that I'm obviously just enjoying it through nostalgia because there's nothing else worthwhile in the book annoys the hell out of me. Stop telling me how and why I feel about something.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

It's a book about an awesome kid who gets everything he ever wanted by being in love with trivia.

I can't imagine why this sort of fantasy wouldn't appeal to some people.

:)

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

I think that ‘without the references, it doesn’t work’ refers to scenes like this sequence◊. Like, c’mon, that is not how you write a big, spectacular fight scene. It’s a massive violation of Show, Don't Tell, with references papering over the minimum of actual description. If you don’t know what a Tyrell security guard replicant is, you don’t know what he’s fighting. Should we be scared for him at going up against such opponents? Impressed? Amused? Disturbed? As for the nature of the scene, if you’ve never seen a John Woo film, you’re similarly SOL. Yeah, he mentions he’s going around hosing (people? things?) with infinite ammo while they can’t meaningfully fight back, but without the context of knowing Woo does intensely stylised, glamorous action, you might be forgiven for thinking it sounds like something out of a horror movie. It drastically changes the tone. At the very least, it locks us out of Parzival’s head, making it far less clear what it feels like to be him in that particular moment.

What's precedent ever done for us?

I mean, yes? That's exactly the sort of thing I was addressing? I've never watched Blade Runner, Hard Boiled, or The Killer. I only know about them via Pop-Cultural Osmosis. That helps (I know what a replicant is and what a John Woo action scene is supposed to look like even if I've never seen the movies), but taking out those references and replacing them with basic descriptions (and/or fictional references) doesn't dramatically alter the passage.

As for the lack of Show, Don't Tell, that's true with or without the references. I'm fine with that — Ready Player One isn't really an action-oriented book. There's exactly one scene that I recall which is actually described blow-for-blow (the final battle). The rest are like the one you linked — they're described in terms of their relevance to the plot and how they made the protagonist feel, not in the moment-to-moment details of the action itself. The references aren't meant to "cover" for the lack of "proper" description — the story doesn't care about describing fights in detail, because that's not what the story is about. The references are only there because Parzival is a turbonerd and he thinks of everything in terms of pop culture references.

This is also why I think it's a good candidate for a movie adaptation — all those cool fights that are glossed over in the book would look great on the big screen without having to ditch the core character of the book. Hell, you can get clever with the references that way — don't just say "it was like a John Woo movie", actually have the scene choreographed and edited like a John Woo action scene. (Indeed, if they don't do that, and instead have a standard action scene and have Parzival say "man, I feel like Chow Yun Fat" or something at the end, I'd call that a bad adaptation. That's exactly what I'm afraid the movie will end up like, though with Spielberg directing, I don't think it's super likely.)

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I'm so confused by some of what you're saying. You haven't seen those movies, but you say you know the things the book is referencing and you say that having NOT seen them helps? I'm confused. Even if its via Pop Culture Osmosis, that's not a good rule to rely on for your prose since that concept isn't universal.

And, yes, the references become too much of a short hand. There is an extent to which, yes, its in character for the references to be there because that is part of the character's voice. Fine, but there's a line to which it eventually becomes incomprehensible. I mean, I could create a protagonist that relates to everything via complex Quantum Mechanics and, while perfectly human, in character, and some people might get it, many wouldn't be wrong to call me out for it becoming impossible to understand and relate to.

A good book doesn't rely so heavily on other works. Sure, it can be dervitive and etc, but they should be able to stand on their own without having read what they are derived from. There's a certain extent to which 'It was like a John Woo movie' or 'He owned a Firefly ship named The Serenity' (THERE IS NOT THE THERE) becomes unknowable to the audience. It means nothing and quickly jumps to filler words that I end up skipping over because I don't know what they mean. If you get the reference, sure, fine, you get it. I don't.

Now, if you instead describe something normally like a book would, it can be BOTH a refernce that's subtle and understandable to people who aren't in on the joke.

As for the fighting, sure, the book might not be about fighting or combat, but that doesn't change that there is combat in the book and it gets ended almost as quickly as it starts. It shouldn't matter how heavily/lightly featured some detail is as to excuse the quality. People get tired of forced romances usually because they're specfically small parts that don't need to be shoehorned into otherwise fine movies or, in 5 mins, end up taking something away from the product.

Its fine if the book did it for you. I'm not one of those people who goes 'How dare you enjoy something'. But, its ok to also find it to be alienating and hard to follow. Its like that one kid in your class that makes references every other comment and you just don't watch the same shows and there's frustration when neither side get each other. Sure, the kid could be damn fucking smart or relatable, but the way everything is being communicated is creating a barrier.

edited 15th Dec '17 3:41:12 PM by InkDagger

I am suddenly reminded of when I watched the Honest Trailer for Pixel's, Honest Voice Guy called out Adam Sandler's character's attempt at humor by constantly calling people various pop-culture names as just not funny.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

I'm saying knowing what they are helps. I know what they are even if I haven't seen the movies.

Which I think Ready Player One does. This was the entire point of me saying that I haven't watched/read/played most of what the book references, but I still enjoyed the book. I probably would have still enjoyed the book even if all the references were stripped out completely, though the author would have had to do a little more work to make it clear what was going on in that case.

This is basically an aside, but if you're going to give the book shit for getting its geek trivia wrong, at least do so accurately. Parzival owns a Firefly-class ship, but it's named the Vonnegut, and when the book refers to the original ship, it calls it "the Serenity", which is correct.

This is a fair point, and I'm not saying that people who don't understand any of the references can or should enjoy the book. (I've said that the book would still be enjoyable — to me, at least — if the references were removed and the holes they left filled with conventional description, which isn't quite the same thing.) But this is true of a lot of things. The Thursday Next series makes constant classic literary references, and if you don't get any of those, then you probably won't enjoy it.

Not being accessible to everyone doesn't make a book bad, it just means it has a niche audience. If you're not part of the target audience, then you're probably not going to enjoy it, but that doesn't mean people who are in the target audience shouldn't enjoy it.

Eeeeh, I'm a bit leery on that. The book is in first person, and Parzival thinks in pop culture references. Yeah, you could change one or both of those things, but that would be a huge change in the tone of the book. If the author doesn't want to make a change that dramatic in order to make the book more accessible to a wider audience, then I don't think that's necessarily a bad call on his part.

I don't think that those two are really equivalent. Forced romance arcs are derided because they're done badly but get focus anyway. The fighting in Ready Player One isn't bad, it's just not the focus. The narrative tells us everything we need to know about what's going on, how it's relevant to the plot, and what the characters think about it. It just doesn't describe every fight scene blow-by-blow. That doesn't make it bad, it just makes it out of focus.

Agreed 100%.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I meant only to shorten the Firefly reference in the book, not to be incorrect. Though, referring to her as 'The Serenity' is a Beserk Button both in the Firefly series and with the fandom so that feels out of place even for RPO.

I wasn't trying to say forced romance arcs are equivilent, but I suppose I also wasn't entirely clear. There are some romance arcs that get a shit ton of focus and we're bored by them. There are some that get all of 5 mins of devotion and we don't care. So there are different types.

The action might not be a focus and I might not need a blow-by-blow, but I do need a bit of something more to give me some tension. If I can't get any tension or conflict from a fight, why even have it at all? What's the purpose? It just feels like filler at that point or holding the story for a bit longer. And short handing 'It was like a John Woo fight' is just too narrow as the audience will be split between those who go 'Oh. That's a cool fight I'm picturing' and those who are going to have to put the book on pause to pull out You Tube. References can kill pacing or tension.

The more I have to pause and think about what the book is asking me to describe to myself is another moment that pulls me out of the book and makes it harder to just sink into, I guess?

“It was like a John Woo fight” without any real description is a really bad way to describe it. Like, you don’t have to give a blow by blow description, but you need to give SOMETHING beyond a reference. You can’t just say “this action scene is like this other action scene”. You have to explain why the scenes are similar.

Not only that, it sounds really goddamned boring. It sounds like he’s literally just walking down a hallway pouring bullets into whatever rooms he passes without really doing anything else. Are the Replicants fighting back? We don’t know, the book doesn’t say. I know that’s not the intent, but that’s the actual description of the scene. The book even misses a really obvious joke. Where there random doves flying around everywhere? Instead it appears to be entirely building up to the not very good punchline of the bullet bill. It’s a little funny I guess, but it just adds to the strange approach to the scene.

It’s a book that is fundamentally about the references. Sure, you could strip them out, but way too much of the book would have to be rewritten from scratch and the result would be a not particularly good SF thriller about a huge MMO in a dystopian future.

edited 15th Dec '17 5:38:01 PM by Zendervai

Not Three Laws compliant.

Ready Player One at no point refers to the ship as "The Serenity". They call it "the (ship named) Serenity", which is correct.

It's describing a thing that happened. The story takes place in what's effectively a giant VR MMO. Combat occasionally takes place, but the story largely doesn't care about it. So when a fight happens, the story says "a fight happened" and moves on. The story also completely glosses over things like Parzival grinding to the level cap, because it's not important to the story except as "and then Parzival reached max level". Fight scenes get about as much attention as the process of Parzival flying around the galaxy to various destinations — because it's about as important to the story. It's just a thing he has to do to get where he's going.

The exception to this is, of course, the final battle where he goes after Sorrento. In that case, the fight itself is the point — he specifically wants to kill Sorrento — which is why that fight actually gets a real description.

I'll say it one more time — y'all need to stop just making shit up. The snippet that Iaculus posted literally includes the phrase "the guards returned fire".

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Then maybe show that it’s not interesting to Parzival? This is his story. We’re inside his head. The job of the writer is to get us to emotionally identify with him. As is, he’s just casually saying that he had a really dramatic, exciting experience, and that’s a weird disconnect. Either go into how exciting it was, and bring in the sensory detail that would let us live the fight with him, or show us a little more of his boredom and desensitisation that would make him gloss over something like this. Like, y’know, something like so:

“The third floor was more NP Cs, armed to the teeth. Blade Runner, I thought, by the uniforms. They raised their guns, yadda yadda, I bullet-danced through them like a star from a John Woo action movie, yadda yadda, I checked my guns, I moved on. I’d wasted enough time here, and I hadn’t even got any decent EXP from it.”

edited 15th Dec '17 6:40:45 PM by Iaculus

What's precedent ever done for us?

It makes for a lazy narrative either way. “Remember this better thing? Don’t you wish you were looking at that instead?”

I guess I don't really see that anything else needs to be done to show he doesn't care than the fact that he glosses over it. It's a first-person novel. The framing device is that it's Parzival telling his own story in his own words because everyone else has (according to him) gotten it wrong. If he doesn't go into detail about something, it's because he doesn't think it's important. You're basically saying the narrative should have violated Show, Don't Tell by having him say "I don't think this part is important", which seems odd when your complaint was that the fight scene descriptions (such as they are) violated Show, Don't Tell.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I'm at least hoping that the movie can be good, because the concept of the plot on its bare form is interesting, but I found the book to ultimately be a bit of a letdown and honestly kinda Snark Bait-worthy. Since it was meant to be a screenplay originally I'm hoping it translates as well into the visual medium more, and they probably could. I guess what I'd like them to do is find a way to make the plot stand up on its legs without relying on the references, and make the characters (heroes and villains alike) less flat.

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -Thomas Edison