Post: #1

And not in a good way, either.

This is all Internet prognostication by me, and I have neither a degree in psychiatry or film reviewing, so having dispensed with the argumentum ad auctoritatem, have a think about the ideas and see where you end up.

We of course don't know what the film is going to look like. It's being adapted by Spielberg, of course, which gives it even odds of sucking, but my prediction is that this film has all the elements for cross-generational appeal to narcissists from the ages of about 50 down to 18 or so.

Since we don't have a film synopsis, let's look at the Dickipedia synopsis of the plot:

Quote:Teenager Wade Watts lives with his aunt in the "stacks," a poverty-stricken district constructed of trailer homes piled on top of each other. He spends all his spare time logged on to the OASIS as a "gunter" (a contraction of "egg hunter"), an avatar under the moniker Parzival, reading Halliday's journal Anorak's Almanac and researching films, songs, and TV series from the 1980s mentioned therein, as well as playing classic video games. One day, he realizes during a fit of boredom that the location of the first key is on the world of his online high school, in a re-creation of the Dungeons & Dragons module Tomb of Horrors. He meets Art3mis, a famous female hunter and blogger who had been exploring the place, but is then able to solve the puzzle first by defeating its adversary Acererak in the video game Joust. He is awarded the Copper Key, and Parzival appears on the "Scoreboard", attracting the entire world's attention.

Parzival completes the Copper Gate puzzles by playing through the Dungeons of Daggorath video game, and then role-playing Matthew Broderick's character in the film WarGames. Art3mis clears the gate shortly afterwards, as does his friend Aech. His fame enables him to make a living by endorsing virtual products. Nolan Sorrento, head of operations at Innovative Online Industries (IOI), a multinational corporation bent on taking control of the OASIS and monetizing it, attempts to recruit Wade to assist them in finding the egg, only to be swiftly denied. In retaliation, Sorrento attempts to kill Wade by blowing up the stacks under the guise of a meth lab explosion; he barely escapes death, but his aunt and neighbors are killed in the blast.

Wade lies low, taking up the persona Bryce Lynch and a residence near IOI headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. He briefly considers an alliance with Aech, Art3mis, and two Japanese gunters, Daito and Shoto, who have also figured out the puzzles. Instead, he and Art3mis progress in a friendship, but when he asks her out, Art3mis declines. IOI operatives called Sixers attempt to assassinate the two at the birthday party of OASIS co-founder Ogden Morrow, but are unsuccessful. Five months after the finding of the Copper Key, no one has made progress on the next clue, the Jade Key, during which Wade finds himself more isolated from both Art3mis and Aech.

When Art3mis finds the Jade Key, Parzival scrambles to planet Archaide, where he plays a perfect game of Pac-Man, only to receive an ordinary quarter as a prize. Aech provides a hint leading him to the planet Frobozz where he solves the text adventure game Zork. Sorrento, who had tracked Art3mis and Aech using a premium locator item, quickly establishes a base there to farm their company's avatars with keys, and soon unlocks the Jade Gate and acquires the Crystal Key. Shoto tells Parzival that the Sixers infiltrated Daito's real-life apartment and threw him out of the building's 43rd floor, killing him.

Parzival unlocks the Jade Gate, a Voight-Kampff machine in the Blade Runner universe, and completes the arcade game Black Tiger as a character from the first-person shooter perspective. Using his knowledge of Rush, and playing "Discovery", the third track off of their album 2112, he acquires the Crystal Key, but discovers a clue that Sorrento overlooked regarding the conditions to unlock the final gate. As he messages Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto with his solution, Sorrento publicizes the location of the Crystal Gate at Castle Anorak, but that he has an impenetrable force field around it.

In an elaborate plan to infiltrate IOI, Wade engineers his assumed identity and is arrested and placed in indentured servitude in tech support. While inside IOI, he uses black market passwords and security exploits to hack into IOI's intranet where he acquires a wealth of information including footage of Daito's murder and the attempt on his own life, as well as plans to kill Shoto and Art3mis in real life. After escaping the corporation, he shares his information with his friends, and publicizes a gathering of avatars to storm the castle. They are interrupted by Ogden, who offers them a safe haven at his home in Oregon. Wade meets the real-life Aech and Ogden, but not Art3mis and Shoto, who are already hooked into Ogden's immersion pods.

The day of the battle, Wade uses his planted hack to bring down the barricade, and a massive fight among avatars ensues. Parzival uses Ultraman to fight against Sorrento's Mechagodzilla Kiryu. After defeating Kiryu using Ultraman's numerous abilities, Parzival and friends unlock the gate, at which point the Sixers use an artifact called the Cataclyst to destroy the castle and all the avatars. Parzival survives from having an extra life (granted by the Pac-Man quarter), and declares he will share his fortune with his friends as he enters the Crystal Gate. With Sorrento and his Sixers on his heels, Parzival plays Tempest, role-plays King Arthur and various characters in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and finally retrieves the Easter egg in Adventure. His victory grants him control of the OASIS, including wiping out his enemies' avatars, resurrecting his friends, and a Big Red Button that would wipe OASIS once and for all. Sorrento is arrested for the murder of Daito and for conspiring to kill Wade and the others. Back in Oregon, Wade and Art3mis finally meet in person and rekindle their relationship with a kiss.

In the high concept meetings that undoubtedly took place within Warner Bros (probably the same afternoon that they pitched Suicide Squad as "Margot Robbie's ass meets Will Smith's default character") they would have pitched it as a combination: The Matrix meets Forrest Gump meets The Da Vinci Code*.

It is also not coincidental that Tom Hanks features in two out of those three elements. Most of the cultural references in this film date back to the 1980s, i.e. Generation X's formative years, the generation they seem to be planning on sucking back into theatres for this one. I think they'll be successful in that respect, but not because they're playing The Old Hits one more time, just like Forrest Gump played the old hits for its Baby-Boomer target demographic. It'll succeed because this story is an updated version of The Matrix ... an updated narcissistic fantasy, that is.

Why?

EDIT: I hit the Post button too early, fuck it. More details for why in later post.

* Scratch that. Not Da Vinci Code. Particularly given Spielberg's directing the film version, make that Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #2

1. Subtitle: You Are Special.
The fucking film's title is Ready Player One, for Christ's sake. That is, you. No, the studio is not just being true to the novel, they did this shit to Phillip K. Dick's novels all the time. You're not just a worker drone in a dystopian society, you are the quite literally a badass on the Internet.

Bonus points: you don't get your Call To Adventure because something outside comes looking for you, you get it because you happened to be bored one day.

2. Your useless special skill has consequences in the real world!
Insofar as you have a special ability, it's because you read old books. Not mathematics, not economics, not philosophy. Fuck, under TH White's The Sword In The Stone young Arthur was taught how to pull the sword from the stone by listening to birds and creatures of the forest. In Ready Player One, your skill is that you ... fucking read. And your esoteric subject of choice, your encyclopaedic subject is ... pop culture. And this knowledge actually works, actually means something substantial, in an online society that isn't real but somehow seems to overleap every problem a MMO that is basically cryptocurrency combined with Second Life implies, and turns out to be essential. Which brings us to the next element...

3. It lets Gen X and the Baby Boomers delude themselves that they've created a legacy.
This is the draw for the pot-bellied crowd. In The Da Vinci Code, Tom Hanks had to chase around looking for clues left in relics of the Renaissance, and doing so he elevated the significance and our attachment to all the statues and works of arts contained there. That's probably the one saving grace of the film and book: by highlighting them, creating conspiracy theories about them, he made people interested in them again.

Ready Player One is some Year Zero shit. There is not one reference to any history prior to about 1980. Even the King Arthur references are via Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And frankly, given the way our memes are turning over year by year, it would amaze the hell out of me if there was anyone left in 2044 who could tell you what Monty Python is or was.

But this is necessary because, by making this a sort of Da Vinci Code using the Baby Boomers' pop culture stand in for Da Vinci, it massages the egos of those world-wasting, world-destroying fuckheads that they haven't doomed the generations passing after them. It allows them the fantasy of being erudite, thinkers, legacy-builders.

4. Hot Chick with special talents and abilities chooses you.
TLP says it better:

Quote:Awesome. The Fifth Element, Alias, Ultraviolet, Underworld, Resident Evil-- all these movies represent the demasculinization of a decade of twenty-somethings, but lacked the most important element: you. This was fixed with Wanted. Angelina Jolie has all the necessary special powers and abilities, yet she chose you.

Back in the day-- e.g. the six thousand years preceding 1992-- the man had to earn the girl's interest/love/vagina by doing something extraordinary, or at least trying to be extraordinary, or at least being a good person, or at least paying her. Now, thanks to a lifetime of Captain Crunch, Coldplay, and institutionalized narcissism, a man can hope that a woman with special powers will want him precisely because these special powers allow her to see how awesome he really is. Not what he is now, of course, but, you know, what he really is. You know. Look past the XBox, you damn bitch.

Key point: even if he doesn't ultimately live up to his potential, he still got to make out with her. Nice!

5. The Internet Ascends To Elysian Field.
I can't think of anyone who really enjoys their time on the Internet as such, or anyone who would rationally prefer an online world to a real one. But in this world, the Internet has gone from 90% bad porn sites to half Apollo, half Dionysius, a place where billions of people prefer to be, it's a place where the currency is the most stable in the world. This is magical technology, similar conceit and symptom to that of an old novel God Game by Patrick Greeley in which a 286 could simulate a world.

This is a troubling step forward from The Matrix. There, the simulated reality at least was seen as not preferable to actual reality, the desert of the real. That is part of the reason it's basically the schizotypal state, and the end of the film is promising the destruction of the Matrix.

Here we have precisely the opposite lesson. The protagonist's prize is not to destroy the simulated reality and thereby redeem everyone attached to it, his prize is to bring the simulation under his control, obliterate his enemies, resurrect his friends, and then use it to enhance his real life.

The Matrix's unspoken lesson was that self-deception is bad. This film's lesson is that nostalgia for a culture that holds no value is superior, that the simulated existence is more preferable to the real world and that controlling it is more desirable to controlling one's physical destiny in the real world.

6. Films like this influence the world.
It doesn't matter if you don't see it; everyone else around will, or does.

Quote:Someone says: oh, come on. There's no real philosophy in The Matrix, it's homeopathic doses of Kant and Derrida.

HA! What are you, German? No one's read Kant, what the hell is the matter with you? No one's even read A Christmas Carol. There was more philosophy in those two hours than people had passed in a bookstore over their entire lives.

If you're 50, you say: really? a movie is that powerful that it can affect the consciousness of people who didn't even like it?

I know, I know, such power is given only to the Beatles... or Pink Floyd... or the Dead... or On The Road. All these things are the same. They all say: stay young with me as your life washes away beneath you.

"But I didn't even see the stupid movie!" Look around: they did. It's enough. Or did you buy an engagement ring because of three thousand years of tradition?

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #3

Maybe I'm a retard but I have no clue what is going on in that plot. Is it about a crate of eggs in some beta's fridge getting past their expiry date while he's busy playing D&D?

Post: #4

(09-18-2017 02:57 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  Maybe I'm a retard but I have no clue what is going on in that plot. Is it about a crate of eggs in some beta's fridge getting past their expiry date?

I must admit I found the fucking thing eye-watering to read as well. More symptoms of the dumbing down of civilisation.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #5

I struggled to read through that plot. It sounds like a string of madlibs that doesn't make much sense.

Post: #6

Seriously, that is the most incomprehensive plot I have ever read. Only thing I get its about virtual reality. Btw, from the film wikipedia page, here is cast:

Tye Sheridan as Wade Owen Watts / Parzival
Olivia Cooke as Samantha Evelyn Cook / Art3mis
Ben Mendelsohn as Nolan Sorrento
Mark Rylance as James Donovan Halliday / Anorak
Simon Pegg as Ogden Morrow
T. J. Miller as "a bounty hunter with an amusing personality."
Win Morisaki as Daito
Lena Waithe as Aech
Hannah John-Kamen
Philip Zhao as Shoto
Ralph Ineson as Rick
Letitia Wright as Reb

Post: #7

SWML - The Movie!

I really do wonder if this is going to pull in massive audiences. Don't see the cross-cultural appeal and it only targets a niche population. Probably more of a cult hit.

It's like Pixels without Adam Sandler. How'd that do again?

Post: #8

I listened to the audiobook a while back and the story is interesting enough in that Im a bit older and the 80s was my early childhood and I played a lot of those games and watched movies/tvs they talk about.

Then the reveal is one of the main characters is a big fat, lesbian black girl who is a super amazing person who saves the day along with the other main character. Fat, black lesbian hid this fact from other main character then surprises it on him. Everything is cool they save the day. Because having a book about white people from Oklahoma or wherever would be an evil thing, need those black lesbians.

That's how the book goes.

Post: #9

That plotline sounds akin to what a hyperactive kid might think up.

"& then He-Man jumps on Optimus Prime as they race towards the Stay Puff marsh-mellow man, all the while the GI-Joe's ride in on captured TIE fighters to take down the horde of robot Terminators..."

Post: #10

I think there is a market for this kind of 80s nostalgia. (See New Retrowave). People are interested in a good story that lasts 2 hours or so. The Last Psychiatrist comes up with a lot of insightful interpretation of things, but the bottom line is many of Hollywood's recent offerings are variations of the "adolescent power fantasy", like the Marvel movies, American Assassin, Wanted, etc.

I read the book of Ready Player One and thought, 'this would make a good movie, if done correctly.'

I thought they would never be able to do it because of all the licensing for disparate intellectual property. We will see how much is included in the final product.

Spielberg has a chance to do it right. It could be a combination of Raiders, Super 8, and Saving Private Ryan. Or it could suck.

Post: #11

Other than the nostalgia value (I also played many of the games mentioned), it was a cringeworthy tour de force for blatant SJW, anti-capitalistic, jack-offs, the world over.

The main character, Penisville or whatever his name was, never really faced any actual challenges. His entire victory was based on him simply buying information from magic super "hackers." And I have to say that, based on the "romance" part, it is very, very clear that the betamax who wrote this grade school level fiction has ZERO experience with women. Z.E.R.O.

Post: #12

"When Art3mis finds the Jade Key, Parzival scrambles to planet Archaide, where he plays a perfect game of Pac-Man, only to receive an ordinary quarter as a prize. Aech provides a hint leading him to the planet Frobozz where he solves the text adventure game Zork. Sorrento, who had tracked Art3mis and Aech using a premium locator item, quickly establishes a base there to farm their company's avatars with keys, and soon unlocks the Jade Gate and acquires the Crystal Key."

What is this shit?
Who would make this into a movie? Why would they make it into a movie?
It's like bad fan fiction.

Post: #13

(09-18-2017 06:10 AM)CynicalContrarian Wrote:  That plotline sounds akin to what a hyperactive kid might think up.

"& then He-Man jumps on Optimus Prime as they race towards the Stay Puff marsh-mellow man, all the while the GI-Joe's ride in on captured TIE fighters to take down the horde of robot Terminators..."

That sounds like a lot better movie!

Post: #14

I read the book a few years ago. It was fun, but felt like the literary equivalent of eating a whole case of Twinkies. The enjoyment it provides is extremely hollow, to say the least, and doesn't have any real depth to it.

The author, Ernest Cline, seems to somehow have made a career entirely out of 80s nostalgia. This works exactly once, but gets stale quickly (see Armada, his next novel, which did the same thing and got lousy reviews.)

Look, I like the 80s as much as the next guy, but the nostalgia overdose really highlights how shallow and devoid of purpose the modern Western existence has become. Pop culture is an awful substitute for religious faith.

Post: #15

Wait, so it's like a virtual reality but he's going into video games from the 80s? And how does that get him eggs?

Post: #16

Quote:He meets Art3mis, a famous female hunter and blogger…

Post: #17

The book was really enjoyable. Also, I found it really interesting how he was able to cram so much 80s pop culture references into the overall story.

The book also clearly states one of it's lessons. I can't remember it all verbatim, but it essentially says that living in the virtual world isn't really living at all and you're only hurting yourself by believing anything else. Also, when the hero gets the girl, the book makes a point to note that he stopped messing with the online world.

Post: #18

(09-18-2017 04:24 PM)Sombro Wrote:  

Quote:He meets Art3mis, a famous female hunter and blogger…

But does she have Red Hair?

*checks casting*





Gammas gonna gamma.

Post: #19

Not sure how I feel about this, but I'm super stoked for the Philip K Dick adaption series on Amazon helmed by Bryan Cranston. That's gonna be good stuff!!! Can't come soon enough!

Post: #20

(09-18-2017 05:32 PM)rapaz12 Wrote:  The book was really enjoyable. Also, I found it really interesting how he was able to cram so much 80s pop culture references into the overall story.

The book also clearly states one of it's lessons. I can't remember it all verbatim, but it essentially says that living in the virtual world isn't really living at all and you're only hurting yourself by believing anything else. Also, when the hero gets the girl, the book makes a point to note that he stopped messing with the online world.

This might be the case if the narrator was in the third person.

As you can probably tell, I haven't read the book, so I had to go and do some Googling. When I did, my suspicions were confirmed: the book is written in the first person, the narrator being the protagonist. And even Wikipedia says the author based the protagonist on a "mixture" of "himself and geeks he knows", i.e. he based it on himself, i.e.e. see AB's cheery prediction above of who was cast as the girl he wants to fuck.

Point being: he's an unreliable narrator ... whether he's using that device consciously (possible because it's his first novel) or unconsciously (probable, given what we know about himself and the book). Do a Google search on the narrator point of view in Ready Player One, and it doesn't take much to turn this up:

Quote:From the prologue of Ready Player One, we learn that the narrator, Wade Watts, is looking back on the events of the book from some point in the future, although we're not sure how far ahead. He says that pretty much every telling of his story has been wrong and we "want[s] to set the record straight, once and for all" (0.53).

Setting the record straight means making himself out to be an almost infallible hero. Any of his mistakes and flaws are glossed over and sugarcoated and Wade, in general, lacks introspection. He's also less concerned with telling us why the '80s were important to Halliday and more interested in just saying that they were awesome, period. Frankly, since his narrative is focused purely on himself, we have to wonder just how accurate his story really is.

"Living in a simulated reality isn't really living." Turn off OASIS, then. The character was even given a Big Red Button to do it. Because the author is stupid, there is no indication I can see that says you kill everyone if you turn off the Matrix, so, turn the fucking thing off and restore everyone to life if you really believe that. (Spoiler alert: he didn't, since Ernest Cline, the author, is writing Ready Player Two.)

"But I don't want to make the decision for other people, they have to choose to leave OASIS for themselves." Then why did you seek control of OASIS to begin with? Oh, because an Evil Corporate Overlord was going to take control of it and monetize it. Because monetizing something that was previously free has never done anything to convince people to stop using it.

Huh.

There isn't an actual choice here, you've said the simulated existence is not really living. You are pronouncing, presumably, that no matter what goods the OASIS does, they are outweighed because you are substantially dead while on it. This sort of decision gets easier as you get older, not harder.

"You only hurt yourself believing anything else." Turn off OASIS, then. That is the specific power he has sought and been granted by the creator of the game itself. Never mind that this moralism has never stopped any human being ever from doing something destructive to themselves.

It's rather like how alcohol commercials, after demonstrating the virtues of wine, women and song at around 60 fps and with old time rock and roll in the background, come with a solemn (and sped-up) intonation at the end of the commercial to "drink responsibly."

Nobody believes it, but the finger-wagging must be given so the author, er, the protagonist, I totally mean the protagonist, can appear like a good person who doesn't endorse people actually living in VR ... even when he's produced a many-hundreds-of-pages argument for why it's just totally awesome and cool to do so. He makes OASIS out to be a socialist paradise: all education there is free, and the currency is the most stable in the world.

It would have been edgy to flat-out proclaim that the virtual world was more preferable to the real world, but the author/the protagonist's narcissism won't allow him to say that ... the perception, ironically, matters more than the reality.

"When the hero gets the girl, he stopped messing with the online world." As said, the narrator is unreliable and I'd have a lot of reason to doubt this. That would require his identity changed, and given the topic, spirit, meat, and breadth of the book is narcissism, that's highly unlikely to have occurred.

Particularly when the author, Ernest Cline, is a fucking slam poet and looks like this at age 45:

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #21

(09-18-2017 02:45 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  Even the King Arthur references are via Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And frankly, given the way our memes are turning over year by year, it would amaze the hell out of me if there was anyone left in 2044 who could tell you what Monty Python is or was.

Post: #22

I see what OP means about being an unreliable narrator. While the narrator is still admittedly clueless about living in the fantasy world, the CREATOR of the world isn't; this being the reason that he lets Wade know about his regrets and his realizations.

And yea, he'll probably return to the world. The narrator doesn't see it, but my hope is the reader is able to see just how much of a terrible existence the protagonist leads. I can definitely say this book reinforced for me how sad it is to be a fat slob with no real friends having virtual sex in a weird suit.

Post: #23

I mean, the 80's were a bit fun in their own way.
But damn, it was an ugly decade...

Post: #24

As I was saying, Ready Player One is similar but even more pernicious than The Matrix in that it propounds Cipher's delusion, i.e. that the virtual reality is more preferable than the physical one.

This is also known as the schizotypal state, see The Last Psychiatrist for details.



This is basically the print advertising campaign for Spielberg's film, the last shot before the film opens. I won't say I was surprised when this image passed me on a bus two days ago, but my hand did twitch its reflex preparatory to a facepalm.

Marketers might not be psychiatrists, but then they don't have to be, any more than academics holding lectures on birds flying results in avian aviation or Dawkins' amusing arrogance that a ball player carries out physics equations in his head in order to catch a pop fly to third. Marketers and advertisers have just worked out following a lot of trial and error what works. And after much consideration, they have decided the most powerful message, the most powerful drawcard they can put out for this film, is the above.

Ask yourself: why this message? What part of the viewer's mind are they hoping to engage with that particular slogan? What kind of person finds appealing the idea that reality itself is under their influence? Indeed, note the first phrase: the word "your". What kind of person believes they have a reality particular to them?

Bonus points, what kind of person believes they can violently change ("fight for") a reality that is imposed on them from the outside, which is what the word "accept" is conveying?

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #25

Trainwreck incoming in 3... 2... 1...