After putting it off for a few weeks, I finally got around to watching Steven Spielberg's latest blockbuster, Ready Player One. I was a bit curious how he and the original writer, Ernest Cline, would improve on the source material, which I saw as a tiring slog of 80s nostalgia combined with the cliches of modern dystopian young adult fiction. Thankfully, a lot of the ideas work better on the big screen than on paper, which is honestly to be expected from a story that heavily revolves around video games and virtual reality.
Despite the flashy effects and a healthy amount of homage to pop culture, I still believe that a few aspects of the plot fell flat and challenged suspension of disbelief. Firstly, knowing the nature of gaming aficionados today, it seems improbable that absolutely no one over the course of five years of this worldwide contest's operation tried the ideas that dawned on our protagonists, especially when one of those ideas was to simply go backwards in a race. On a related note, at first I thought it was improbable that the antagonists, a colossal company with thousands of employees at their disposal, were unable to crack the central mysteries, but now I see that as an indication of the rigidity of bureaucratic thought. In addition, I thought the revelation that the entire main cast, who met in a virtual world without ever disclosing their real-life location, all lived within several miles of each other, was a bit too unbelievable, although the plot admittedly wouldn't have worked without it. Overall, I do think that this movie was an improvement over the source material, and while it's certainly not perfect plot-wise, the visuals and referenced definitely make it worth watching.
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