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Ready Player One - SDCC Teaser

One of the best trailers I've seen in years, that intro with the piano playing Pure Imagination going into some bonkers shots with a million pop culture references.... just incredible.
 

black_13

Banned
That looks good actually. I read the book and while I liked the concept and many parts of it, I felt like the writing was pretty bad which is no wonder since it was the guys first book.

But with Spielberg handling the movie and him not afraid to make changes, it could have good potential.
 

Random Human

They were trying to grab your prize. They work for the mercenary. The masked man.
If this is a big hit hopefully we can get an Armada movie made and then a Fanboys reboot which can set up a six movie shared Clineverse. Where we're going we don't need roads!
 

Gnome

Member
That looks good actually. I read the book and while I liked the concept and many parts of it, I felt like the writing was pretty bad which is no wonder since it was the guys first book.

But with Spielberg handling the movie and him not afraid to make changes, it could have good potential.

This doesn't really matter all that much when it concerns someone's ability to be a good writer. Especially considering that everyone thinks his second book is even worse.
His post was "I don't like thing" and yours was "I like thing". You ain't any better. What does being passive aggressive get you?
 

JCHandsom

Member
Looks like this film has some visual flair going on. Also happy to see that the references have expanded beyond the 80s.

Now let's hope Spielberg can make something less pathetic than the book.
 

E-Cat

Member
Ok guys I see a lot of criticism over this book, so here is my take.

When it came to my research, I never took any shortcuts. Over the past five years, I'd worked my way down the entire recommended gunter reading list. Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny. I read every novel by every single one of Halliday's favorite authors.
And I didn't stop there.
I also watched every single film he referenced in the Almanac. If it was one of Halliday's favorites, like WarGames, Ghostbusters, Real Genius, Better Off Dead, or Revenge of the Nerds, I rewatched it until I knew every scene by heart.
I devoured each of what Halliday referred to as "The Holy Trilogies": Star Wars (original and prequel trilogies, in that order), Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Mad Max, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. (Halliday once said that he preferred to pretend the other Indiana Jones films, from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull onward, didn't exist. I tended to agree.)
I also absorbed the complete filmographies of each of his favorite directors. Cameron, Gilliam, Jackson, Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith.
I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue.
Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.
You could say I covered all the bases.
I studied Monty Python. And not just Holy Grail, either. Every single one of their films, albums, and books, and every episode of the original BBC series. (Including those two "lost" episodes they did for German television.)
I wasn't going to cut any corners.
I wasn't going to miss something obvious.
Somewhere along the way, I started to go overboard.
I may, in fact, have started to go a little insane.
I watched every episode of The Greatest American Hero, Airwolf, The A-Team, Knight Rider, Misfits of Science, and The Muppet Show.
What about The Simpsons, you ask?
I knew more about Springfield than I knew about my own city.
Star Trek? Oh, I did my homework. TOS, TNG, DS9. Even Voyager and Enterprise. I watched them all in chronological order. The movies, too. Phasers locked on target.
I gave myself a crash course in '80s Saturday-morning cartoons.
I learned the name of every last goddamn Gobot and Transformer.
Land of the Lost, Thundarr the Barbarian, He-Man, Schoolhouse Rock!, G.I. Joe - I knew them all. Because knowing is half the battle.
Who was my friend, when things got rough? H.R. Pufnstuf.
Japan? Did I cover Japan?
Yes. Yes indeed. Anime and live-action. Godzilla, Gamera, Star Blazers, The Space Giants, and G-Force. Go, Speed Racer, Go.
I wasn't some dilettante.
I wasn't screwing around.
I memorized every last Bill Hicks stand-up routine.
Music? Well, covering all the music wasn't easy.
It took some time.
The '80s was a long decade (ten whole years), and Halliday didn't seem to have had very discerning taste. He listened to everything. So I did too. Pop, rock, new wave, punk, heavy metal. From the Police to Journey to R.E.M. to the Clash. I tackled it all.
I burned through the entire They Might Be Giants discography in under two weeks. Devo took a little longer.
I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.
I memorized lyrics. Silly lyrics, by bands with names like Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, and Pink Floyd.
I kept at it.
I burned the midnight oil.
Did you know that Midnight Oil was an Australian band, with a 1987 hit titled "Beds Are Burning"?
I was obsessed. I wouldn't quit. My grades suffered. I didn't care.
I read every issue of every comic book title Halliday had ever collected.
I wasn't going to have anyone questioning my commitment.
Especially when it came to the videogames.
Videogames were my area of expertise.
My double-weapon specialization.
My dream Jeopardy! category.
I downloaded every game mentioned or referenced in the Almanac, from Akalabeth to Zaxxon. I played each title until I had mastered it, then moved on to the next one.
You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, is a lot of study time.
*tips fedora*
 
Yo, Iron Giant is in this?

fvJxbRW.png



So, it's mostly a CGI movie? Some of the action looked like Tintin.

I thought this was suppose to be an 80s wankfest. Get the Iron Giant outta there.
 
This is literally a cornerstone of cyberpunk so I'd say this came first.

I mean historically yes, no doubt. But did it come first for the author of the book? The 80's nostalgia storyhook seems to be the main element of the story.
I feel like it's important to know, but I don't know why it should be important, because it's kinda trivial and doesn't really change anything in the end.

When I think about it, you can't really use made up nostalgia with fake movie references and fake music and games for this idea as the audience couldn't relate to anything that appears in the story. Which is a bit problematic, it links the story to our real world culture of movies and music etc. In any other sci-fi story such things would usually get decoupled from real life cultural media and the focus is put on the protagonist and his struggles with his situation on a more basic and broader level so we don't have to know real life references to appreciate what is happening.

But it seems that in Ready Player One the choice is deliberate. It looks like it assumes that the reader/viewer knows as much about the 80's (and the time after that until today) as the character in the movie.

I'm not even really against doing something like that but as someone who grew up in the 80's I somehow feel like I'm getting specifically targeted here lol... don't know why I have a problem with this really but I somehow do.
 
Ready Player One is literally the only piece of media where if someone mentions to me that it's their favorite book I genuinely start to think less of them.

/edge
 

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
Grabbing a bunch of pop culture references and filling your book with them, even directly, isn't exactly breaking new ground. If anyone read the Dark Tower Stephen King did this all the time except he pulled it off far better and the Dark Tower series wasn't all about pop culture references but more incorporating them to expand on a lot of the themes King was using. It didn't always work out either but still.
 
I read the novel in high school, and at the time it fight my nerd-persona perfectly.

I loved it back then, despite the ending feeling a bit of a mess.

Nowadays I'm not sure about it, and there are parts of the book that just scream lonely nerd fantasy and eh.

But if anyone will make this decent, it'll be Spielberg.
 

vatstep

This poster pulses with an appeal so broad the typical restraints of our societies fall by the wayside.
I was hopeful but that looks... kinda bad. I'll reserve further judgment until the next trailer or word of mouth.
 

Oersted

Member
The first time I watched a trailer and didn't dislike it or anything, but wondered what is the point of all of this.
 

Toa TAK

Banned
Eh. I'll probably go for it since it's Spielberg, but the only part of that whole thing that I thought was neat was the trailer's rendition of Pure Imagination.
 

Shrennin

Didn't get the memo regarding the 14th Amendment
Ready Player One is literally the only piece of media where if someone mentions to me that it's their favorite book I genuinely start to think less of them.

/edge

Ready Player One is definitely not my favorite book.

That would be Armada.
 

ZoddGutts

Member
Wasn't the book written by a fake nerd that has nothing but a bunch of references ala Family Guy? At least that's what I've heard whenever someone brought up this book. As for the trailer, eh, didn't wow me. Looks like a higher budget Spy Kids film with no color, just saturation, wish movies would get away from that.
 

RS4-

Member
Read the book again over the past week, yeah still pretty bad.

Maybe I should read Armada again too.

Trailer looked..ok. Dunno about the death race shit though.
 
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