I read Ready Player One last year and loved it. I was very excited about the movie coming out.
I saw the movie last night and–as many critics have pointed out–it is very different from the book.
I won’t offer any critique or analysis here. What I find interesting, though, is that the author of the book, Ernest Cline, is listed as one of two screenplay writers. In other words, he was on board with the many changes in the movie.
I imagine myself working on a script that turned my book into a movie. I can see all the angst that might come in trying to depict on film exactly what I had originally intended in the book.
The alternative approach would be to have fun making a movie for the sake of itself not the sake of the book.
That’s what the movie turned out to be. It was a good movie based loosely on the book with significant changes. Rather than focus on 1980s nostolgia as the book did, the movie expands nostalgia to 1990s and other decades, too.
It must have been fun to create and fun to think of all the new pop culture references and Easter eggs to put into the movie.
