Hey guys. I apologize but I’m running all over town today. Here’s a re-post of my Ready Player One review from my newsletter. This movie’s going to be awesome. Enjoy!
Genre: Sci-fi/Adventure/Comedy
Premise: An eccentric game developer leaves an Easter egg in his massively popular virtual reality game. In his will, he announces to the world that whoever finds that egg will get his entire fortune.
About: Ready Player One was a hit book back in 2011 (it’s currently $4 on Kindle!), which Warner Brothers quickly snatched up the rights for. They’ve been slaving away on the script ever since, and only recently did they feel confident enough to send it out. The patience paid off in a big way. None other than Steven Spielberg himself signed on to direct the film. In retrospect, it’s a perfect fit. The book is built around 80s nostalgia and pop culture, when Spielberg cemented his dominance in the industry. I’m sure a trip down memory lane with his earlier movies doesn’t hurt. This most recent draft is written by Zak “The Closer” Penn, whose impressive skills always leave the studio heads happy. Although he and original writer (and author) Ernest Cline didn’t work together on this draft, they did work together on a documentary that was ALSO about 80s pop culture (Atari: Game Over). That’s streaming on Netflix at the moment if you want to check it out.
Writer: Zak Penn (previous drafts by Eric Eason and Ernest Cline) – based on the novel by Ernest Cline
Details: 121 pages
For all the crap screenwriting gets – for all the times it’s deemed inconsequential compared to all the other elements of filmmaking – the truth is, a good screenplay is very powerful. One needs look no further than what happens to screenplays that AREN’T good. They don’t go anywhere, even if they have substantial intellectual property behind them.
I mean sure, you can get an eager young director or a C-grade guy like Alan Taylor (Terminator: Genysis) to direct anything. But if you want one of the big players directing your film, you need a good script. And this is why, even though they bought the rights to this book 5 years ago, they only recently sent it out to directors. They knew they had to get the script right.
Ernest Cline, the author of the book, is also a screenwriter. So he was the first one to adapt the novel. What I’m guessing happened is that he was too close to the material. I mean, Gillian Flynn adapted Gone Girl, but usually, when you’re adapting your own stuff, it’s impossible to see what can be cut. Everything is just so damn important in your eyes.
In comes Penn, who claims that it “just came to him how to do it,” and he simplified the sprawling story so that it could fit into a single film. And now we’re off to the races.
Literally.
Ready Player One starts off with the race of all races. I’m talking through Times Square. With the Delorean from Back to the Future. And the hover car from Blade Runner. Oh, and a dinosaur pops out and eats one of the cars during the race. Yes, this is that kind of movie. The kind where once you see the trailer, you’re going to walk out of the theater, start a line, and wait until opening day.
Wade is a nobody. A poor kid living in the Portland Stacks, what amounts to a bunch of trailers stacked on top of each other. It’s the kind of place even trailer park kids make fun of. But Wade isn’t sweating it. That’s because he’s really freaking good at one thing – The Oasis. That’s the virtual reality game that everybody in the world jacks into. It’s what allows you to race in Times Square and get eaten by dinosaurs.
In Oasis, Wade is known as Parzival, and he’s searching for what everyone else is searching for – the hidden Easter Egg. 20 years ago when Oasis creator James Halliday died, he announced in his will that whoever could find his hidden egg not only got his entire fortune, which is like a trillion dollars, but also became the owner of the Oasis. Halliday has left three keys people must find to get to the egg, with a riddle accompanying each one. The first clue was cracked early on, but no one’s been able to find the second key for 10 years now.
The big companies who profit off the Oasis aren’t taking any chances. The biggest, IOI, has hired thousands of egg hunters known as “Sixers” to look for the egg. That way, the Oasis stays with companies who can continue to commercialize it. Individual hunters are rare and aren’t taken seriously. They don’t have the resources these IOI drones do.
That all changes when Parzival cracks the second clue and becomes an overnight superstar in the game. Ironically, he’s still a nobody in the real world who can’t even get his Aunt to loan him a few bucks. When IOI finds out who Wade is, they put all their resources into stopping him. Him owning the Oasis would be a disaster. And they will do anything to stop it.
Parzival teams up with his best friend Aech (who he’s never actually met in the real world) and his longtime crush Artemis, and it’s a race to the finish line, a race that hopefully won’t end with the dreaded “Game Over.”
This one’s going to be big folks. I mean, how are people going to see the Back to the Future Delorean, the Blade Runner hover car, and roaming dinosaurs and NOT want to see this movie? At one point in the script, we actually go INTO the Blade Runner film – like become a part of it. Because in the future, they have “immersive cuts” of movies.
It makes me laugh because these are the types of things that if an amateur were to write into a screenplay, everyone would say, “What are you doing?? They’re never going to clear the rights to that stuff! You have no chance of getting that in the film. Everyone’s going to think you’re an idiot.”
Yet as soon as Spielberg is attached, everyone’s like, “Oh my god, what an ingenious way to get a top director on board. What director isn’t going to want the challenge of recreating Blade Runner?” There’s a double-standard out there, sadly, and while it kind of makes sense (if Warner Brothers is giving you the okay to write these things, it’s a little different than writing them on your own) it seems unfair.
The real power of Ready Player One, though, is that it’s audience proof. It is basically impossible to dislike this movie. A lot of that’s because it has the Four Staples of Spielberg – a secret formula Spielberg uses to create his string of hits.
1) Make your hero an underdog. It’s impossible to dislike underdogs.
2) Create a mystery. Find the mysterious hidden Easter egg!
3) Include adventure. Who the hell doesn’t want adventure??
4) Humor. Everyone loves to laugh!
Ready Player One has all these things which pretty much covers any reason anyone would want to see a movie.
The only slip-up the script makes happens to be the same issue I had with the book. The riddles (behind where the keys are) just aren’t that engaging. They’re based on this unique universe, so when the characters talk about them, it all sounds very “inside baseball” and after they figure out where to look next, you’re not really sure what they’re looking for. There was a 20 page sequence in the second act where I had no idea where we were or why we were there.
But races with T-Rexs kind of make up for that. Oh, and did I mention Ready Player One has samurais too?
I give Penn a lot of credit for wrangling this story into shape. The book wasn’t exactly Lord of the Rings, but the mythology was very extensive and required a lot of explanation to figure out how we got to where we were. That’s usually the challenge with these adaptations and maybe why Cline was having trouble nailing it. You gotta get rid of a lot of the backstory and make the present story more action-based. Indeed, that’s what Penn did. And if Spielberg stays on this project,then we’re going to get a hell of a movie in 2017.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you have a TON of exposition, you might want to just go with a voice over. We’re all taught to hide exposition. Which is good advice. But if you have 10 times the amount of exposition as a normal story, you’ll have to hide exposition in almost every scene. And when you do that, the scenes never feel natural (“Hey, how you doing?” “Oh fine. I mean, I’m upset that I only have 4 days to steal the Tesserect or else the Barleycorn Canyon blows up my dad but other than that, I’m cool. How bout you?”). It’s in your best interest, then, to just do a big voice over sequence and get your exposition out in one fell swoop. Here we get about a six page scene of Wade explaining, via voice over, how the Oasis works and how Halliday’s egg came to be. It was long, but this way, for the rest of the script, Penn could just focus on the fun stuff.
