Better In Your Head?--READY PLAYER ONE

 

Spoiler Alert: my God, it's full of shit.

THE BOOK-Written by Ernest Cline, released 2011

THE MOVIE-Directed by Steven Spielberg, written by Ernest Cline & Zak Penn, released 2018

THE STORY-2045. Earth sucks. When people aren't playing roles in the robberies, rapes and murders plaguing the streets, they're playing inside the Ontologically Anthropocentric Immersive Simulation, a virtual universe created by late video game developer James Halliday, whose absurd fortune (including the OASIS) will be passed on to whomever can crack the "Easter egg" he's hidden within.

MIND THE GAP-Ready Player One is a cautionary tale.

Breaking points can be detected inside everyone and everything, including innocuous entertainments. For most of my life, I regarded instant access to the world's art as the fantasy. Ready Player One helped me realize the folly of my wish. Hyper-consumption, especially in hopes of acquiring some great reward, dilutes the power and purpose of whatever is consumed. Edification, meh. Enlightenment, no thanks. Endless fundage? Beam me up, Scotty! 

Really, a book that's basically a slobbery love letter to the 1980s should be thoroughly my shit. I'm talking bottomless sauces at the chicken tender buffet. Yet, no Cline reference-string matched the most '80s moment of my life: watching the MTV world premier of Prince's "Purple Rain" while devouring my first-ever McDonalds Value Meal. Cline's reference game is belabored and obvious. Give me Manimal. Give me Laughing Hyenas. Give me Charlotte's Web. Just, give me a movie/TV show/book/band not familiar to every fucking geek-ass with Monster Energy wishes and content creator dreams.

Players in the OASIS game are called "gunters," short for "egg hunters" (the closest thing to a hip-hop reference in RPO). Our featured gunter is Wade Watt, whose intake of Halliday's most beloved cultural ephemera is actually temporally impossible. With good friends and a brain of suddenly-useful trivia, he fights the good fight against morally-corrupt corporations out to plaster Mr. Yuk stickers all over the cool kid's rigs.

Of all the RPO's messages, none irritates me more than the implication that female-oriented pop culture isn't cool. Madonna, Whitney, Joan Jett, Kate Bush, weak. Ladyhawke, She-Ra, garbage. Not even acknowledgment of Ms. Pac-Man as the superior ghost-evading, pellet-eating arcade game!

A lack of diversity is not what handicaps the book. No, that would be Ernest Cline's incompetence as a storyteller. His talents are listing things, and writing scenes that leave rapt readers going, "Wow, this would look great in a movie!" Ready Player One is a flat line that fancies itself a trapezoid. 

"She let out what I can only describe as a howl of frustration." Hey, remember that scene in Back To The Future when the McFlys are eating dinner and George starts cracking up at The Honeymooners and the rest of the family look at him with immense disgust and disbelief?

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD?-Cline's insipid sci-fi nostalgia romp is prime for Spielberg's magic touch. While Ready Player One doesn't approach the likes of Jaws and Jurassic Park, it's a fair fling better than the other Spielberg adaptation starring Mark Rylance. It kept up the pace (and my interest) in ways the novel failed terribly at. Exceptions to the general rule of adaptation decay abound: dull descriptions replaced by stunning visuals, exasperating digressions excised in favor of action, copyright issues forcing new cultural references that prove integral to the plot, a likable protagonist. Yeah, making the Iron Giant a war machine was gross, but what'cha gonna do?