I was disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good movie. It just wasn’t what I was expecting.

I went into Ready Player One super excited, because I couldn’t put the book down. I read the book in preparation for the movie, which is a bad idea.

I wouldn’t recommend the movie to anyone that loves the book, because the movie just didn’t do it justice.

The first disappointment came within the first ten minutes of the movie. The beginning of the book explains the dynamic of education inside the OASIS. We meet Wade, or Parzival (his avatars alias), as he enters the school grounds on Ludus (one of the many planets inside the OASIS).

The book proceeds with Wade finding the location of the Copper Key on Ludus, then meeting Art3mis, a semi-famous avatar that Wade is crushing on, and clearing the First Gate. In the movie, it opened with the location of the Copper Key already known, found by another gunter. The way to obtain the key was by winning a race with several seemingly unbeatable obstacles, including King Kong and a T-rex.

The changes of the challenges isn’t really a big deal, it was just kind of a let down when I was expecting a game of Joust and got an action packed race.

The action sequences felt a little drawn out at points, as do many other scenes. I feel like the writers and directors could have cut those scenes down without losing anything important and added several things that were missed.

The scene in the nightclub was too long, and for me, was just somewhat cringey. We did not need visuals of Art3mis’s hands running up Wade’s body in a sexual way.

Something that really irritated me was the lack of character development for Aech, Wade’s best friend in the OASIS. In the book, Aech’s avatar was a caucasian male, and the big reveal is he is really a fat, black lesbian.

In the movie, Aech’s avatar was a large grey orc-esque cyborg. I feel as though this takes away an important aspect of Aech’s character.

In the book, when Wade finally meets Aech, she explains to him that she chose a white male avatar because her mother had done the same, and this made more people want to do business with her. All of this was completely omitted in the movie, with a slight mention of Aech’s family.

I did, however, like the changed to Og’s character. In the book, he appears to help the High Five to fight IOI in the final battle. In the movie, he officially shows himself at the end and reveals that he was the Curator. The Curator was a robot male avatar stationed at the Halliday archive building.

He is seen throughout the movie and helps the main characters search for clues in Halliday’s memories. At one point, he makes a bet with Wade and loses, giving him a extra life disguised as a quarter.

Movies tend to be different than their book counterparts, but this was almost nothing alike. I was frustrated by the lack of certain scenes but I appreciate what they did. I understand that many of the references in the book were copyright, but the trailers for this movie were misleading, giving the impression that it would have tons of 80’s nostalgia.

Overall, the movie doesn’t lose its main theme of living in the real world over a virtual one. I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’ve read the book, you won’t really like the movie but if you haven’t read the book, the movie is great.