Ready Player One

((NOTICE: I started writing this post in March but school got in the way again and I couldn't get around to editing this until now so some things might not be time-relevant to now))

It's been so long since I actually went to the theater to watch a movie! Like I can confidently tell you that the last time was when I saw "The Last Jedi" I think like two days before Christmas. I think that's when I saw the trailer for this movie and thought, "Man, I really need to see this"

The concept was so interesting: The world sucks, so people use the Internet for what they've always used it for: To escape reality. Except you can literally do whatever you want, be whoever you want to be, it's a complete free-for-all. And the creator of it all is dead. He left a note with a riddle to unlock three keys and now it's an all out war between the regular users of this Internet wonderland and a massive corporation trying to take over it.

((Just a heads up: For this review I'm going to be talking a lot about the book and the movie, so if you haven't read/watched one/either of them, avoid the commentary because there WILL be spoilers. I need to get this out of my system ok))

The cover:

((There are so many reprints of this book it's actually insane and it's not even that old))

The story:

In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. People use the Internet to continually avoid the problems that they are facing in the real world and corporations have risen to take advantage of it. Wade Watts lives an average life in "The Stacks", a poor neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio of stacked up trailers. The only he really feels alive is when he's jacked into the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. Wade's devoted his life to studying the puzzles hidden within this world's digital confines—puzzles that are based on their creator's obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power and fortune to whoever can unlock them.
This doesn't come without an adversary. The corporate giant IOI rules the entire Internet, except the OASIS. News of the creator's death has led them into believing that they can outsmart the dedicated people vying for the prize.

My thoughts: 

I'm just going to talk about the differences between the movie and the book and what I liked and didn't like about both. First of all, I wasn't born in the 80s, nor do I really know much about it, apart from Gundam and really that's where my knowledge ends. ((Speaking of Gundam, when I was in the theater watching the movie, there was this group of (college?) students sitting in front of me and they were all East Asians and so that scene comes at the end where Daito becomes one of the Gundam robots and he goes through the whole transformation sequence and the Asian group literally starts bursting into laughter like I was smiling because it's Gundam and I know a little about it but they were like dying and my mom and brother were just looking at me like "spill it. You know something that we don't."))

Also, the movie makes the whole Parzival/Art3mis thing so damsel-in-distress-y? Like what was the reason for that? Art3mis' character starts out strong in the movie but when she meets Parzival (aka Wade) in the real world, she's suddenly head over heels in love with him and they've never even seen each other before. Well that's not exactly true-- Art3mis has a popular gunter blog that he frequents and she's just a gunter celebrity in general. Even Parzival didn't come to know of her existence until they "met" at the race in the movie and at the dungeon in the book. Ok that was a weird inconsistency that could really just be summed up as the dungeon scene was good for a book but would've been weird in a movie so they changed it to a race and honestly it was well-executed and I liked it so why not? Also the scene at the end of the race where Merlin gives Parzival the first key reminded me so much of the color palette for the scene in the Ender's Game movie in the video game where the Formics basically insert Valentine and Peter into the game to communicate with him. I don't know I think it was that fall leaves lush red colors palette that was making me nostalgic for being 13 and actually excited for that movie even though it really wasn't that good ((I think I'm the only person I know of who gets nostalgic about being 13 and getting hyped over movies that are actually pretty bad)). BTW it was WADE'S plan to get captured by IOI and destroy them from the inside out and not Art3mis getting caught and dragged away and somehow making it out.

Also on that note, I'm going to go off probably about the characters being represented in the movies as they were in the books. The most interesting commentary about Internet camaraderie that I've seen in this book is that often times your best friend on the Internet might be someone you completely did not expect them being. The obvious example is Parzival and Aech-- the most surprising of which is that Aech is actually a girl. She says that she originally made a male avatar because she watched her mother gain customers at work from posing as a white male, so that's what she did too and it just became her identity (she's a black female btw). That and the other one is Daito and Shoto who describe themselves in the book and the movie as sworn brothers, although the movie takes that a step further and makes them blood brothers. In the book though, Daito is the only one of the main group (Parzival, Art3mis, Aech, Daito, and Shoto) to actually get killed in the real world (He does have a symbolic "death" in the movie where he sacrifices his avatar for his friends' survival and I guess that might be a nod at his fate in the book but I might be reading too much into it). The best part is that shortly after Daito's death in the book, Parzival and Shoto talk about it, where Shoto admits that he has never seen the person that he called his "brother" for so many years in real life and the only reason he figured that Daito had died was because 1. he wasn't logging into the OASIS anymore so something had clearly happened to him, and 2. He stumbled upon a recent article from a news group in Japan about an "otaku suicide" and was certain that it was him and that IOI had framed his death to look like a suicide. He basically told Parzival to put it up on all of the major news outlets in the OASIS to rally support against IOI because if a prominent gunter (egg hunter) had been killed, a lot of the amateurs that looked up to them would be motivated to do something absolutely crazy like a full scale takedown of IOI.

Wade's plan in the book to completely destroy IOI from the inside is so out of character that it made me crazy for a little while but oh my God it works so well. Well it's kind of out of character. Even though he's known by then as a role model to all the amateur gunters and part of an exclusive squad, he's basically the same from the beginning. I feel like the movie takes too much advantage of his awkwardness and after reading how masterful he is in the book, it made me feel like the movie ran with his awkwardness to the point where they just made him unable to do anything (he basically needs Art3mis to save him like every couple minutes and it's a bit tiring to watch after a while) He figured that IOI would come after him in the real world even though he had gone through the effort to transfer his biodata (fingerprint, medical, personal stuff) to a fake person and keep his profile as Wade Watts different. Even still, he couldn't erase his data from his school's database and that's how IOI found him (by bribing the principal to hand over his school records apparently). But the book does an awesome job of setting up a situation where Wade doesn't know how to react when he's taken to the IOI center to slave away and he seems genuinely scared. Then it shows off the facade of "he's just pretending because they're watching his every move and he's actually slowly making his way through the system to make note of its faults and how he can bring it down from the inside" which is actually pretty interesting and gives justification to him being a bit out of character.

Age Rating: 15+ 

Yeah there's a lot of cursing in this one. Literally my last review was on The Martian which is hilarious mostly because of its "bad" humor and space jokes, but this is just worse. I'm surprised they were able to tone the movie down as much as they did because even if the book isn't incredibly violent or heavy on adult situations, but some of the stuff they talk about.... oof. Though thankfully it's not very persistent. Honestly what more could you expect from a teenage narrator?
This is definitely a book for all ages-- even though it's mostly centered on video games and the way that they affect our relationships with each other and the world, the other side is full of 80's nostalgia that pretty much flew over my head but would be very enjoyable for someone who experienced it and is looking back.
It's a really fun read that will get you hooked quickly even though the exposition is really detailed.

((I went on a spree of reading nonfiction books after this so I'll have at least two more nonfiction reviews! Happy Reading!))