5 best page-to-screen changes in Ready Player One
By Erin Qualey
Ready Player One is an exhilarating popcorn flick that’s very different from the book it’s based upon, and some of the changes are downright delightful.
How’s that old saying go? The book is always better than the movie? Well, Ready Player One is no exception to the rule. Even with celebrated director Steven Spielberg at the helm, the magic of pure imagination can’t quite be captured from page-to-screen.
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But with a screenplay co-written by original Ready Player One scribe Ernest Cline, the movie unfolds almost like another interpretation of the beloved novel. It’s still the story of a nerdy kid named Wade Watts attempting to save the digital universe from corporate overlords, but now with more peppy visual twists. Since the film version took place mostly while Wade was by his lonesome in small spaces, hooked into the OASIS, concessions obviously had to be made when translating that story into visual form.
As a super-fan of the book, I have to admit that some of these changes are disappointing. My biggest qualm is that Tye Sheridan was woefully miscast. Real talk, the kid has an absolutely adorably stunning face, but he’s not the best at… um… acting. Book Wade is Sheridan’s polar opposite. He’s a regular-looking – and rather rotund – kid, but his personality is magnetic as all get out.
I could go on about the alterations I didn’t love, but I won’t. Spielberg’s version of Ready Player One is a fun romp through a fictional virtual land, and I’m more than happy to revisit the interpretation he created over and and over again. If you’re a huge fan of the book, there are five specific changes that improve upon the original story and make the film worthy of devotion in its own right.
n00bs Beware: Spoilers follow for the entirety of the film.
i-R0k as Villain
In the book, i-R0k is an annoying solo gunter who happens to travel in Wade and Aech’s orbit. The dude is a loudmouth jerk, but he’s a loudmouth jerk with a heart. The film disposes of any heart and gives the guy a generous dose of humor.
On screen, i-R0k as a hulking orc-like creature, complete with a creepy, hollowed out skull body cavity. As voiced by comedian T.J. Miller, he’s very funny – he got some of the biggest laughs in the theater I was in – and provides some much-needed levity to heavy moments involving Big Bad Sorrento. Miller’s personal character in Hollywood has been under fire for the past few months, following reports of his unseemly and unprofessional behavior on the set of HBO comedy Silicon Valley, but shifting i-R0k’s character from annoying side player to a remorseless villain happens to jive with that persona, alleviating any negative impact the story could have had on his character’s role in the film.
In the movie, as in the book, we don’t actually get to learn about i-R0k’s real human form (a true bummer), but one can easily imagine that some version of T.J. Miller is actually behind the guy, trash talking, fast quipping, and snarling about what the world owes him behind closed doors.
Art3mis to the Rescue
While the novel focused mostly on Wade’s daring efforts to save the OASIS, the film was better at sharing the love. In the book, Wade intentionally enters into indentured servitude at IOI in order to disable the powerful Orb of Osuvox. It’s a thrilling and tense sequence in which Wade spends several sleepless days hacking into the internal IOI system and extracting important information.
Not so in the movie. Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) gets a chance to shine as a fearless heroine. When she introduces herself to Wade in the real world, her motivation for engaging in the OASIS revolution is made clear with a brief backstory about her father. Book Art3mis lived life as a normal girl in the suburbs, but movie Art3mis (aka: Samantha) is out for vengeance after her father was involuntarily entered into IOI service. So the parallels are earned, and when Art3mis begins to take risks within the IOI walls, it’s thrilling to watch. She flies around the giant building like a woman possessed, her quick wit and ballsy energy leading her all the way to the gooey center of IOI’s Oology department.
In the end, Art3mis’s actions prove instrumental in nabbing the win out from under IOI’s nose. She’s a heroine in her own right, even moreso than everyone else because she’s willing to risk it all in the real world.
The Meaning of the Hunt
As played by the indomitable Mark Rylance, James Halliday is everything the book promised. Magnetic and endearing, the real Halliday is a sweetly shy genius who lived vicariously through the best that 80’s pop culture had to offer, but never truly stepped outside of his comfort zone with others. Except with one person. His bestie, Ogden Morrow.
It’s somewhat perplexing that the film has Ogden (Simon Pegg) stealing Kira away from Halliday after he knew the two dated, but I guess the heart wants what it wants. In the book, Halliday always loved Kira from afar, never daring to voice his true feelings. While this was the regret that Halliday’s hunt was built upon in the book, on screen the final Easter egg hinged on his lost friendship with Morrow. It’s a much sweeter moral that encompasses the general spirit of the film. Friends and close relationships are what feed our soul and keep us afloat, even when all seems lost.
The Great and Powerful Og
Ready Player One tucks in a few genuine surprises for book readers as well. The story of the extra life coin is a bit different in the book. Bumbling around the OASIS, Wade stumbles upon an old Pac Man arcade unit and makes it a goal to play a perfect game. He does, and for his efforts he’s rewarded with a single quarter. The movie integrates this pivotal moment into a much more interesting exchange between Wade and the Curator of Halliday’s archives. Wade bets the Curator that Kira is only mentioned a single time in all of the material stored in the building, the Curator is dubious of this claim, but Wade is ultimately correct.
Fans of the novel knew what the coin was all about, but what we didn’t know was that Og was hiding the whole time. In the novel, Og reveals himself in the actual OASIS and provides help to our heroes at a crucial moment in time just before the big robot battle. Here, book fans had every reason to think that this plot line had been scrapped, but, behold (!) in the last moments of the film, Og and the Curator are revealed to be one and the same. It’s a fun and pleasing twist that’s sure to deliver a smile to fans of both the book and movie alike.
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Flicksyncs Level: Expert
Ready Player One contains what is perhaps the most exhilarating moment of any movie this year. Well, at least for fans of Stephen King and/or Stanley Kubrick. The original hunt has Wade playing what are eventually termed “Flicksyncs”, in which your avatar has to play through a movie as the main character, saying all the lines and executing all the movements perfectly. War Games and Monty Python and the Holy Grail are the two movies played in the book, and while I adored the idea of Flicksyncs as a whole, I don’t really love those two movies. (Don’t @ me, Monty Python fans.)
Above everything else, I wondered how Spielberg was going to interpret the Flicksyncs within the movie, especially given that watching a character’s POV as they enact a movie might ultimately be boring. Boy, did he deliver.
Enter The Shining. Almost everyone has seen The Shining, or at the very least knows the visual references within the film. Those two little twin creeps and the elevator full of blood have been parodied absolutely everywhere, (yes, everywhere) and the classic Kubrick film is at peak pop-culture saturation for almost everyone. Watching the slightly animated characters work their way through the halls of the Overlook Hotel and encounter the horrors within is worth the price of admission alone. Spielberg’s is so clearly having a ball with interpreting these iconic scenes in a different context, and his creative joy is so palpable that this sequence alone is worth the price of admission.
Oh, also, if you haven’t seen The Shining, you should probably get on that. Your life might just depend on it someday.
‘Ready Player One’ is currently playing in theaters worldwide.