Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Nah, not really.

i don't know, i wasn't a kid in the 80's and while i grew up in the 90's i kind of had a different childhood i guess, where i didn't get exposed to a lot of pop culture? I don't really have a lot of nostalgia for that time, or at least not for the kind of things that the movie is about.

This is definitely a "nostalgia" movie for the Xillenial...

If that Netflix series Strange Things ambiance/nostalgia didn't work for you... Ready Player One probably won't work either.

 Alpharius wrote:

 amazingturtles wrote:
Erg. i will admit that i was not a big fan of the book in the first place, so i am biased, but that trailer looks... worse.

Well, it's not for me, that's ok.

So, it never really had a chance with you then...


...oh well!

Not even The Spielberg can tempt you here?

Whilst I loved BFG I think he's been awfully swingy of late

I think "Stranger Things" (which I haven't seen) is a fair measure.

It may not be a good test of, "if you like ST, you'll also like RP1" (my gut says, Stranger Things will be the superior entertainment), but I think overall, it'll be a good test of, "If you dislike ST, you'll dislike RP1."

 whembly wrote:
This is definitely a "nostalgia" movie for the Xillenial...

If that Netflix series Strange Things ambiance/nostalgia didn't work for you... Ready Player One probably won't work either.

Possibly because it is actually more Gen X than 'Millennial'?

Maybe?

I liked Stranger Things, but the 80s nostalgia was entirely irrelevant to my liking it.

 whembly wrote:
This is definitely a "nostalgia" movie for the Xillenial...

Side note, I really like this "Xillenial" thing. I'm a little too old to be a millennial but I never quite fit in with Gen X either, so Xillenial is a good fit.

 Ouze wrote:

 whembly wrote:
This is definitely a "nostalgia" movie for the Xillenial...

Side note, I really like this "Xillenial" thing. I'm a little too old to be a millennial but I never quite fit in with Gen X either, so Xillenial is a good fit.

Me too... I think you and I are part of that unique generation who grew up right before the dot.com exploded on the scene and work/live in the ubiquitous world of personal gadgets and online presence.

I mean, just the other day, my 12 yo couldn't give me directions off of a paper map... being so used to google "mapping the directions" for them.

...slackers.

I liked the book. Not a great story, but it tugged mightily on my geek heart. My memory of the book is a little foggy, and there are scenes in the trailer I don't recall from the book. I wonder how much they changed the story.

The trailer looks great, but I tend to give trailers a free pass. Bad movies can have great trailers, or vice versa.

I don't know if this is a necro, or if you can even really be guilty of doing that in this subforum, but I just finished the audiobook, as narrated by Wil Wheaton.

I wanted to like it, but I gotta say, I was kind of unimpressed. I felt like it was it was a desperate and sweeping appeal to anyone nostalgic for 80's nerd/pop culture, especially for how neoanarchist it tried to present the characters as. "We don't want to let the big corporation win because corporate control is the literal anathema to everything we hold dear, which is why we're going to byte by byte overconsume every last bit of culture every other big bad corporation dumped in front of the public's senses some 50 years before the story takes place."

The narration by Wheaton didn't help much either. I kinda felt like he was hamming it up in places, only to get monotone elsewhere, and it didn't really fit what was going on. Then again, I've never been a fan of Wheaton, so I might just be bleeding prejudice. The reading of the high scores lists were agonizing also, but I do recognize that this is a shortcoming with the presentation in audiobook format, and not necessarily anything to do with Wheaton himself.

And it's not like the story was bad. It just felt like it was literally drag and dropped in place. I felt like it was the literary equivalent of the Big Bang Theory. Wait, wait, let me explain! So, I feel like Big Bang is basically just any other sitcom with "because Xbox!" tacked on to the end of it. I base this on admittedly a small sample set of data, but I'm going to hang with it. In the same sense, Ready Player One had somewhat of a Dan Brown investigative story with awkward/creepy stalker/romance thing bolted onto the side of it while being forcefed a metric feth ton of 'memberberries... "Because trash 80s and Zork? Oh and you remember X-wings, and Back to the Future? Good, cause not only do we not actually have any original concepts in this story, we're using that as a plot point!"

And in response to all those questions above: Yes, I do remember all of those things. A story does not become more compelling merely by going down a checklist, referring to a couple walkthrough, and maybe metrolyrics..


Paradoxically, I expect the movie to either suck or be amazing, for all the opposite reasons everyone else things it's going to suck or be amazing. If they managed to license even half the things in the book, it'll probably be horrible, but it will be super interesting to me if they managed to license as little of it as I hope they could.

After reading Armada, I am reasonably sure Ernest Cline is a one-trick pony.

Isn't Armada more or less a copy of the Last Starfighter?

 BrookM wrote:
Isn't Armada more or less a copy of the Last Starfighter?

I haven't seen that, so I can't say.

Well, it's out now.

Pretty solid movie. I think it's legitimately one of the better Spielberg movies.

They did greatly simplify some of the book to make a streamlined movie, which worked out well.



Most of the stuff you see in the trailer actually happens in the first like, 10 minutes.

Biggest disappointment is

I'd give it a 8.43 out of 9.75.

 Ouze wrote:
I'd give it a 8.43 out of 9.75.

Is that a reference to something? Those are fairly specific numbers.

I have a question.

 Lance845 wrote:
I have a question.

Spoiler:

Is the coin from the pac man machine in the movie and central to the climax? I have a bet going about it.

Yes, but the exact circumstances through which it is acquired is substantially different.

Thats good enough. Im pretty excited about me winning this bet.

Saw it last night...

100% what Ouze said.

In the book, there were TONS of pop culture references that I think would've been economically implausible to transcribe to the screen... Speilberg did a great job of showing many of those pop culture stuff obliquely that really did work.

Also, it's 2 hr 20 minutes long... however, it didn't seem that long.

My favorite part?

Does he still have the Firefly ship and Falco?

I would have never seen this movie if it was solely up to me. But my office had a "fun day" excursion to the cinema and the boss chose this. I'm really glad to have had that excuse to go see it because it was thoroughly entertaining. I didn't think I would care for the reference-heavy/geek chic gimmick - and I was mostly right BUT plus I liked and cared about the characters and was interested in the plot, so it met my threshold standards.

I don't think this is a movie anyone will talk about by next year.

I saw it today. I enjoyed it. Book miles and miles better. Fun stupid movie.

 BrookM wrote:
Isn't Armada more or less a copy of the Last Starfighter?

Yeah - with more geekery.

What was that suggested at the end with that moment with the Oasis creator? Querying whether he was actually dead, any why his avatar was like his real form. Seemed implied he’d done something like upload his consciousness into the Oasis prior to dying or am I misinterpreting the scene?

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
What was that suggested at the end with that moment with the Oasis creator? Querying whether he was actually dead, any why his avatar was like his real form. Seemed implied he’d done something like upload his consciousness into the Oasis prior to dying or am I misinterpreting the scene?

I don't think you're misinterpreting it, I think he was implying exactly what you say, which is of course something that didn't at all happen in the book; so who knows where that was going.

I thought it may have just been an extension of the idea that ‘reality is real’, but for him the Oasis became his reality where he was comfortable as himself, and it was the real world in which he effectively wore a mask/avatar.

My wife and I saw it. Work had an event for it because we're a library, it was a book-turned-movie and tickets were free. Never read the book but from what I understand, better off.

It was a fun popcorn flick. Like popcorn it had no nutritional value but was still tasty.

I hope the special features for the DVD has a feature that tags and names all the pop culture references/cameos.

Any 40k references? Raynor and Tracer from Blizzard properties are in it, was wondering if my other nerd thing made the cut.

No 40k I saw. But there was an exo squad!