Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Ernest Cline’s fast-moving novel was a treasure trove for pop-culture junkies, but the endless references work better on the screen
There are legitimate reasons to hate Ernest Cline’s bestselling 2011 novel Ready Player One, and many of them are summed up in the paragraph where the teenage protagonist, Wade Watts, describes the virtual car he constructed for himself in the vast online world where he spends most of his waking hours:
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 matching 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 gull-wing doors, then added personalized plates that read ECTO-88.
That is a lot of very specific verbiage to say two pretty basic things: people in the online world can express their personal tastes in hyper-specific ways, and Cline is so obsessed with the culture of the 1980s — the geek-fodder of his youth — that he thinks it’s compelling even in the form of a shopping list. The book is a fast-paced adventure, but this kind of unwieldy lump of cultural references acts as a roadblock. There’s no attempt to consider why Wade finds these specific objects appealing out of the billion options available to him. The book assumes up front that readers find everything in this list unbearably cool, jealousy-worthy to the extreme, and that just running down an exhaustive list of Wade’s favorite things is enough to make him appealing, relatable, and enviable.
Steven Spielberg’s new film adaptation of Ready Player One prominently features that same car, but in a context that improves it immensely. Spielberg doesn’t have Wade talk audiences through it, and he doesn’t spell out the references. He just slaps the car down in the middle of a tremendous early action scene, where it’s prominent, distinctive, and memorable. Fans who want the full nostalgia trip, who want to wring every Easter egg out of the experience, will eventually be able to pause the movie and frame-by-frame through it, looking for the flux capacitor on the dashboard, checking the plates, and scanning for extra bonus material. But in the middle of the action, even to people who’ve never seen the Back to the Future movies and aren’t vibing on the connection, the car doesn’t need explaining. It’s just a sleek piece of visual energy, one breathless element among dozens of others. It’s not a citation or a list. It’s an effortless, integrated piece of the action.
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Source: THE VERGE