Ready Player One.

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Ready Player One.

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Postby Princess Asuka » Tue Jun 19, 2018 10:08 pm

I never saw any trailers for this movie, but I ended up seeing it twice and loving it. Plus, I've got a crush on Tye Sheridan who plays Wade Watts too. XD <3 So, thoughts? I'm excited to buy this on bluray come July.
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Re: Ready Player One.

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Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Wed Jun 20, 2018 6:12 am

I did see the trailers, and they never really appealed to me. Maybe I'm missing out on a good movie as a result, I dunno. I hear Spielberg's treatment of the book from which it was adapted was actually better than the book, so I do want to take a glance at both for a side-by-side comparison of sorts.

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Re: Ready Player One.

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Postby The Eva Monkey » Wed Jun 20, 2018 9:16 am

I made a big entrance when I arrived in my flying DeLorean, which I’d obtained by completing a Back to the Future quest on the planet Zemeckis. The DeLorean came outfitted with a (nonfunctioning) flux capacitor, but I’d made several additions to its equipment and appearance. First, I’d installed an artificially intelligent onboard computer named KITT (purchased in an online auction) into the dashboard, along with a match red Knight Rider scanner just above the DeLorean’s grill. Then I’d outfitted the car with an oscillation overthruster, a device that allowed it to travel through solid matter. Finally, to complete my ‘80s super-vehicle theme, I’d slapped a Ghostbusters logo on each of the DeLorean’s gullwing doors, then added personalized plates that read ECTO-88.

Nope.

The whole thing just looks and sounds so... dumb... like bad fan fiction with an obnoxious number of pop culture references.

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Re: Ready Player One.

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Postby Chuckman » Wed Jun 20, 2018 12:56 pm

The book sucks, the movie is a mid-tier Spielberg movie that walks the same ground as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but without quite as much heart. It wants to be a stirring tribute to the power of storytelling and imagination but it can't escape the book's critical flaws, even when radically changing most of it. At points the script reached towards some bold moves but again, it's based on a book of lists of 80s pop culture objects in list form, roughly spun into a wish fulfillment story where the sad girl's flaw turns out to be a birthmark that actually makes her hotter.

The reference thing actually works better on screen, since it can be subtle. The book just lists stuff (and Cline's favorite phrase is "of course") but the movie can be sneaky and put *Christine* from the Stephen King novel/John Carpenter adaptation of the same name in the race sequence, and things like that.

The movie has a great "hey, that's cool" effect and the high from seeing the Iron Giant fight Mechadozilla lasts for a few hours but when you come down, there's no real impulse to watch it again. It's a visual feast, but it's a visual feast of Chicken McNuggets. You'll be hungry an hour later.

The best part of the movie is objectively Silvestri's score, which plays with medleys of various 80's and 90's movies scores and the Godzilla battle theme.

Frankly it felt like Spielberg jobbing. They could have done more with this. While the movie isn't as bad as was predicted by psychic hipsters who know how to hate movies they haven't seen, it wasn't much better.
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Re: Ready Player One.

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Postby VUX » Wed Jun 20, 2018 2:25 pm

Ultramans not in the movie, because of some stupid court cases with some Chinese film makers....GRRRRRRRRRRRRR! :irked: :irked: :irked: :irked: :irked: :irked: :irked: :irked: :irked: :irked: :irked:
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Re: Ready Player One.

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Postby The Eva Monkey » Wed Jun 20, 2018 4:50 pm

View Original PostVUX wrote:Ultraman isn't in the movie, because of a legal dispute between UM Corporation and Tsuburaya Productions (both Japanese companies) over rights to the character outside of the Japanese market.

Fixed, for accuracy.

Source: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites ... traman.pdf

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Postby VUX » Wed Jun 20, 2018 6:18 pm

I wonder how many companies Spielberg’s asked for permission to use their characters.
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Postby EvangelionFan » Thu Jun 21, 2018 6:06 am

I saw Ready Player One with my parents the weekend after it hit theaters. I think it's an enjoyable movie in the sense that though a lot of it is bland (and the protagonists are indeed on the bland side of things) it's visually inspiring and has enough good ides and set pieces to keep one interested.

I'd say that it's at its best when the story keeps is aim on Bland Dude's group and their investigation into the Wizard-Avatar's mystery, Bland Dude's daily life in 'the stack' (which is perhaps more interesting as a setting than any of the digital OASIS set pieces, as it's appropriately grounded), the IOI 'gamer army' going at it (notably in the third act when Art3mis is hiding among them and using their tech to battle against them incognito, and also that brief scene that shows the IOI army attempting to solve the 'second trial'), and the 'second trial' (if there's any one piece of pop culture knowledge that this movie is right to indulge in, it's the first few minutes of the cast looking around inside of that one film, for that sequence).

I'd say Ready Player One is at its weakest when it is attempting to make the antagonist Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, who puts in what might be the best performance in the movie) actually appear threatening whenever he's on the screen next to the Bland Dude. And actually, on that note, the story appears to play soft on Sorrento being the head of the IOI - which is implied to have made its wealth in part by exploiting people to work in the IOI to pay back debt - in that it attempts at several points to play humour on Sorrento's inability to understand ordinary people as he all the while attempts to take advantage of their perceived naïveté (and although almost all of his actions in the movie seem to suggest it, Sorrento is never allowed to choke on his ambitions, as it's still a Spielberg movie, and so the antagonist's story must have a soft end to maintain the tone).

There's also weaknesses around Bland Dude having all of the skills and interests that he's shown to have, perhaps in the sense that it's a bit binary in how succeeds when he 'knows more' or 'thinks more' about the plot than others (for instance, the solution to the first trial: I think a good number of gamers would've arrived at that solution by accident simply by wanting to test the boundaries of the game, and one doesn't need to have heard an archival entry in which the programmer speaks in serious tones about driving backwards), and has shortcomings in the small areas in which he has to be naive because of the plot (surely he would've had the wisdom by that point to know that - as many of us do - telling someone his name would potentially be traceable, and the moreso if he were to do so in a in a popular nightclub immediately after becoming an instantly-recognizable celebrity ... I suppose the high of that, and the awkward but acceptable plot point of him being dizzily in awe of and infatuated with Art3mis trumped his better senses).

Speaking of Art3mis, I actually think her backstory is solid ... but the attention to the birthmark is a weakness, particularly in how the story plays it as though she sees her own birthmark as something to be ashamed of and hide from other people. It's a problem in that it's obvious to the audience that Art3mis is already attractive in the context of the story because of her personality, her openness to Bland Dude and to others, and her sense of agency about herself - all of which arise out of her experience of using the OASIS and also, arguably in surviving in hiding from IOI. It's therefore odd that the story appears to aim - if only briefly - at the stereotype of people who appear amazing online actually being bland and/or ashamed of being unable to accomplish similarly meaningful stuff in their actual lives. It's a little more odd once Art3mis/Sam is out and about in the IOI facility in the third act, as all the action stuff she does there pretty much spells out that her insecurity about her birthmark doesn't inhibit her from actually accomplishing what she wants, which makes me think that the scene where she's being sad about herself with Bland Dude up on the roof of her hideout is perhaps only there to make him help her be okay with it and help the audience permit the story to pair them together. Otherwise, Art3mis/Sam's backstory serves the same purpose: IIRC she's hiding from IOI because of her unpaid albeit inherited debts, it's her motivation to acquire the keys before IOI does, and she hid that information from Bland Dude because she was ashamed of it - and as others have observed, the actress who portrays her is obviously beautiful in spite of the birthmark, so that the film bothers with it is ... it's the sort of story beat you'd anticipate out of Saved By the Bell or any other 90s high school soapie.

I have to admit, there's also something slightly unsettling about people in the mid 2040s obsessing over the pop culture of the 1980s because they were the obsessions of a gifted programmer who invent a popular virtual social media MMO hybrid. How that virtual social media MMO that is still somehow the most popular one after fifteen years - in which there would have presumably have been a market with other, similar games, and presumably a lot of technological advancement in software and hardware capability - is somehow unexplained. It's as if World of Warcraft still had the same player metrics and market influence today that it had back in, say, 2006-2008. Or Minecraft having the same amount of players and influence in 2026 that it had in 2011-2013. My point is: there's an issue of suspending ones' disbelief about massive numbers people in the mid 2040s still playing a vr second life that came out in the mid 2020s. Unless it's meant to be more of a Facebook similie, in that though Facebook has barely advanced in ten years, most of us are still using it ... but then again, is OASIS necessarily equivalent to Facebook in that interpretation? Isn't it arguably more likely to be in the position of Friendster or Myspace, both of which were on the scene earlier but became irrelevant in around ten years after hitting the market? It's wobbly, but Spielberg still makes an enjoyable movie around the premise even as he sidesteps those kinds of details.

If there's only one other issue I've got with the film, it's that the more recent pop culture influences/references are too selective and arguably over-saturating. I am speaking primarily about the amount of screen space provided to Overwatch, which appears both in the opening exposition (Tracer cameo), the OASIS store (purchasable Tracer skin), and in the battle in the third act (again, Tracer); and the Halo series, whose weapons appear in the opening exposition and in the store, and in the third act (a Spartan Squad, which is actually appropriate and kind of awesome as Bungie-era Halo admirer, but I'm skeptical of whether it needed to be its own shot for several seconds of our attention). And there are no memes. Memes have become a significant aspect of people's interaction on social media (even if you aren't making or posting memes, you probably see other peoples' memes somewhere), memes are missing in this movie (the Minecraft-themed world shown briefly in the opening minute of the movie is nearly a meme, if only because it's Minecraft, and there's something memetic about it showing up as product placement here), so I'm left with the impression that apart from all of the 80s/90s Pop Culture references, the only other ones that made it in are the ones that Spielberg's generation are aware of (movie execs. are well aware of Halo), the ones that the studio implicitly sponsored (your Overwatch, your Minecraft, etc) and the ones that had to fill the place of something that the studio was unable to acquire (e.g. the Iron Giant supplanting the role that Ultraman had in the novel, though it's more appropriate in the movie anyway as the Western audiences are arguably more aware of Iron Giant, and therefore it would be a better selling point in the Western market in a movie which banks more than most on nostalgic value).
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Postby Chuckman » Thu Jun 21, 2018 10:34 pm

It’s not as pronounced in the movie, but I thought the logic of the Oasis as presented in the book was solid; its more of an OS than a game, it’s a game that contains all other existing and possible games. Cline could have thought that through and had companies buying real estate in the simulation, so to speak, rather than simply selling their licenses to the name of the Oasis company that eludes me right now.

The way it’s described in the book where every other game developed must gave up on every platform explains why it’s so stagnant; game development has been totally supplanted by the Oasis, so it’s effectively the last video game.

Plus it’s the final word in social media. People go to school in it. Of all the silliness that was the part I had the least problem with.

I just wish that Cline and Spielberg could make a point other than “lootboxes suck” with the material. The moral of both versions of the story is that commercialization of everything is fine as long as it’s not too expensive and everybody takes Thursday off.
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Postby C.A.P. » Mon Dec 03, 2018 5:15 am

Don't have much to say, but I saw this one recently and was delightfully surprised on how not terrible it was. Spielberg's gone on record as to saying he loved the book, and if you watch a lot/all of his movies--like I have--you can easily why it would appeal to a guy like him. Think it helps that the movie isn't really focused or about the pop culture stuff.

For what it is, it's basically two hours of a 70 year old man embracing the pop culture that he had a huge part in, and for a movie that could of easily been terrible, it's saved by many factors. And Spielberg was one of those directors that could of pulled it off.
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