f13.net

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE71JOvLPvE

fuck this shit.

i'm like really upset this exists and is popular enough for spielberg to like, care about

Lucky Wander Boy would make the MUCH better movie. Also, DB Weiss should have that pull by now.

This is God's honest. The book was trite and boring.

+1 +1 , the movie looks even worse.

I never read it, the trailer makes it look like the tone is an out-of-touch Boomer's understanding of youth geek culture in the mid 2000's.

see, I thought it just looked like pandering fanservice garbage written by a moron

Same difference.

I disliked the book, and this looks faithful to it.

I don't understand why Spielberg is involved with this garbage. Did someone have blackmail material on him?

I think Spielberg's ability to choose good material has been suspect for years.

I genuinely thought I'd be in a minority hating on the book.  And yet here we are.

To say something positive ;  looks like it's more suited to being a movie.   :awesome_for_real:

I guess I'll be in the minority - I liked the book.

I have no real hope of it being a decent movie though.

This was The Davinci Code all over again for me.  At a base, simple level, the story is fun.  Puzzle solving mystery that is overall well paced.  Stupid old-timey adventure fun.

But both books were written at such a low level it was insulting.  It's like, grown adults recommending Goosebump books to read as the most amazing novels ever.  I mean, they are totally great if you have the brain of a third grader, but.......

The strange upside for me on this is that the movie has a significantly higher chance of being more enjoyable than the book.

What about grown adults recommending Goosebumps would surprise you?  Everything is Young Adult fiction these days.  I'll add that I'm of the camp that thought the book was a fine, quick read but have no expectations for the movie at all.  This is straight-to-Netflix for me.

I found the book fun because I understood most of the 70s/80s pop culture references. That said it was no great work of literature, just a quick summer read. I'll wait for the Netflix release too.

That's because most adults are dumb.

http://www.clearlanguagegroup.com/readability/

Not that that's "dumb", mind you. On the 40L Test (http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/Resources/40L%20Test.pdf), the words representing those grade levels are:
And either way, the vocabulary isn't as important to my enjoyment as the degree to which a book holds my hand while I follow the story. Ready Player One does a lot of hand-holding.

TIL I don't have a 12th grade reading level ... 

The thing I disliked about the book is that it thinks the basic set-up of the virtual world, its creator and the players is *good* (setting it against the dystopic failure of material life on Earth). Whereas it seemed to me that a virtual world that could be anything but is instead stuck in a nostalgic act of personal self-gratification and that uses a sick contest to compel the entire world to be stuck in that self-gratification is more dystopic than the trailer-park piles that people live in.

It's like if Elon Musk had himself frozen in a tube and promised to pay a zillion dollars to the first person who hand-built a hyperloop between San Francisco and Los Angeles and half the people in the country bled out or died of dehydration while trying. Doesn't matter that there's a Golden Ticket at the end, the whole thing is a fucking nightmare.

That's part of what I meant by "hand-holding". Better stories give their characters and institutions levels of conflicted truth. We make judgments based on subtext and complexity. Ready Player One is an ornate but simplistic fairy tale, with its thumb so firmly on the morality scales that there's no need to speculate about exactly what the writer wants us to think.

I like it when authors are comfortable with their own deaths (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author), rather than feeling it necessary to carve Egyptian murals all over the tomb to remind perpetuity of exactly how they wanted to be remembered. The best art, in my mind, is a unique conversation between its creator and every single member of the audience.

Writing is a form with all the flexibility required to turn that chat into a lecture.

The book was boring because it was essentially Charlie and the Chocolate Factory filtered through all the worst pop culture references of a stand up comic whose entire act is "remember Strawberry Shortcake? What was up with that?"

If you are going to read pulpy garbage please just get into the WH40k Heresey novels or Battletech not into whatever that book was. But I don't hold the kind of ill will towards the book that would stop me from saying a trailer looked good. This one didn't do anything for me until the end, bad voiceover saying really stupid shit, visuals that are supposed to wow me but didn't zzzz but the whole corporate drone racing bit into fun future bike racing was kinda cool. Can't be worse than pod racing.

I really feel like I read a different book than some of you.

A pity.

It's possible you like garbage, Soulflame.

The main problem I had with the book was the deux ex machina... that and the 'world' was so shallow as it not even exist.

I swear the author was under contract to make as many 80's references a page as possible. WE FUCKING GET IT.

Airport novel.

I actually enjoyed the first Space Marine novel..:P~~

No matter the source material, Spielberg will make a marvellous, entertaining movie that ultimately falls flat, leaves you cold, and disappoints you as a sci-fi fan, yearning again for what could have been, had Denis Villeneuve, Neil Blomkamp, Rian Johnson or even Duncan Jones directed it.

I thought the book was good fun, but obviously nothing serious. It felt like an American version of a Japanese Light Novel, and I'm ok with that.

Quick aside, Neil Blomkamp produces garbage and clearly got lucky with District 9 and even that was 2 hours of someone preaching at me.

Elysium might be the worst movie I've seen in years. I'm not sure but I think it was.

Or maybe I found it an enjoyable read, but nothing more than that.

Eh.  I'd think of all audiences, it would resonate with the one here quite well.

People here hate everything.

(I have not read the book and don't plan on it any time soon.)

Too much War Games, not enough Real Genius.

I enjoyed the book as pulp. They don't write great SciFi at nearly a fast enough rate to keep me in reading material. So I read a lot of pulp, and as pulp this wasn't terrible. Not worth re-reading, and I don't feel any burning need to see the movie, but I'm not going to hate on it.

--Dave

You must read a lot of total fucking garbage.

You'd think but instead of being right up my alley, it was actually almost insultingly pandering. Like, I might have loved it at 14 but as an adult, it just felt juvenile. Without the pop culture references, I don't think there's anything that rises above Choose Your Own Adventure level plotting. This feels like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World if that movie had not been directed by Edgar Wright but instead by some no-talent hack like McG or Zak Snyder.

I agree with Mahrin.  There's not really a lot of good sci-fi or fantasy available, so I read what I can get.

Yes. I can read a full novel in a day, less if I really have nothing else to do, more than 100 a year without even really trying. Maybe 6-8 really good SciFi writers right now, putting out maybe a book a year, each, and I have never been able to maintain interest in other genres. And I read the back catalog of everything marginally worthwhile before I was 18. Re-reading most of it is pointless, as I remember all of it (maybe I get halfway through the first chapter before the memory dredge kicks in and I have all the rest at my mental fngertips).

So I read a *lot* of total fucking garbage. RP1 isn't terrible, it just isn't very good. Decent pulp, but other than putting together tropes in a comparatively novel pattern, nothing really creative, either.

--Dave

Yeah, it's not terrible or anything. Just, smug and a bit tedious and not especially self-aware about the story it's telling.

The book was written for 10-15 year old kids.  If nothing else is has kids asking about Gary Gygax, so it can't be all bad. :)

I disagree it was written for ~40 year olds with 10-15 year old reading levels.

It was obvious and pandering throughout but that being said I enjoyed it on a purely nostalgic level.

anyone biting the bullet on this one this weekend? any reviews from trusted sources that point in one direction or another?

I know the source material is some of the worst young adult crap on offer but it still looks like it could be pretty fun.... ?

See, I even (or especially) hated the nostalgia because it felt evil--some billionaire forcing kids to relieve our own cultural youths rather than create their own culture, just for some desperate hope of overcoming dystopia?

Everything I've heard has been surprisingly positive. Since my move over to a smaller, more arthouse kinda theater though I don't get to see as much at work. Not sure when I'll get around to seeinf it.

The chat is that the utter fucking garbage in the book translates better as 'nods' up on the screen, mostly because there's not paragraphs and paragraphs of fucking wanking.

Seriously, fuck this book.  Movie could be ok, but FUCK THIS BOOK.

Lol, that was exactly my take when I saw they were doing this.  The book was fucking painful, but somehow I was actually a bit excited for the movie.  It seemed like the rare exception where the book to film translation/filtering could make a far more enjoyable story than the source material.  Still holding my breath until everybody starts confirming its not robot Hitler.

I'm not even looking back to see if I said it in this thread (i'm sure I did) but everyone should just read Lucky Wander Boy to see nostalgia done right

i have absolutely zero interest in nostalgia for nostalgias sake

What the Scottish cunt said. I care not one whit for seeing this movie, though the one review I read said it was an enjoyable mad mess.

The guy who made Jaws and Jurassic Park might know a bit about making movies that are better than the books.

both of those were excellent books though

this is circlejerk garbage

I never understood the extreme reactions to the book on either side.  It makes great fodder for a summer blockbuster film, why not leave it at that?

Garbage books can make for great films if the director knows how to extract the worthwhile material from the crap and develop it.  Look at Die Hard, and to a lesser extent, The Godfather.

no one likes it when objective shit gets popular

see: 50 shades of setting women back 20 years

The book deserves the visceral reaction it gets because it is literally a mediocre rewrite of the movie version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, only with pop culture as the treats instead of candy. I don't think there's an original or interesting idea to be found in the entire thing.

Mediocrity deserves a visceral reaction now?

For me at least, it's because everyone was praising it so highly and saying that it was so relevant to my interest that it transcended just being a spectacularly artless book, and became a crystallized representation of the stupidity of large portions of my social group/culture as a whole.

Also, yes, all of the usual reasons where when something reaaaaaally bad gets popular, dissenting voices feel the need to be ten times as loud to balance all the voices in praise.

You must be new to the internet.  Everyone has to be outraged at something all the time.

Also, obligatory: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/excerpts-from-my-upcoming-novel-ready-player-two-girl-stuff (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/excerpts-from-my-upcoming-novel-ready-player-two-girl-stuff)

I was getting ready to type out a full paragraph defending a book that I only kind of liked.  What have you people done to me?

Still a better love story than Twilight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWPMJwHrWFU

I thought the book was alright; not great, but certainly not as awful as most here seem to think it was. I'm waiting for Netflix/Hulu/yarrr for the movie though.

I saw this today.  It wasn't bad.  The movie was better than it probably should have been but it was pure Gen X nostalgia wank, which has more to do with the source material than Spielberg.

If it's offensive, yeah.

When I was reading it, all I could think is 'This is what this guy thinks of himself.  This is what this guy thinks of his peers.  This is what this guy thinks of us.'

Fuck him.  I doubt anyone on these boards wouldn't be able to get every single fucking reference and understand it, but that doesn't make us the utter fucking wankstains that he is and his characters are portrayed in the book.  He was kicking cripples for the entire length of his novel and he didn't even fucking realise.  Fucking Gamergate as fucking hero and don't even get me started on how women were portrayed.  "Hey, my characters are entirely BROKEN both objectively and subjectively as people, yay !"  This is what I really think, yay !  I have Wil Wheaton on my side, yay !

Fuck this asshole  Fuck his book.  Fuck anyone for making a film out of it and giving him any more money.  Like Notch, I hope he just fucking dies painfully.

But overreacting ?  Nah, I don't think so.   :why_so_serious:

While I might not go so far as Ironwood, I was just offended at how goddamn lazy it was. There wasn't anything redeeming about the book if you removed all the references to '80's pop culture. Then it was just young adult wish fulfillment, which is fine but completely throwaway. If he had been sued by all the copyright holders of the references and forced to remove them all, the story would have been bland, trite and utterly forgettable, and he's not nearly a good enough writer to have made it interesting without any of that. As a writer, I'm mostly offended that this guy got hype and sales for such a shoddy, lazy piece of shit.

But then J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer and that Fifty Shades bitch annoy me for the same reason.  :why_so_serious:

as far as I'm concerned Harry Potter is just Dragonlance fanfiction

So, I was bored and wanted a decent late lunch, and watched this at a 'dinner theater' type place. The burger and fries were good, the movie was a beautiful hot mess.

--Dave

Spielberg knows how to shoot action scenes and this is one long action scene with a bunch of movie and video game references.  Fairly entertaining and not the massive turd that the book was as it cuts out almost all of the exposition. Zach Penn basically rewrote the entire story with the only real consistency being the basic plot and characters.  Best part of it was probably Mark Rylance as he actually puts some pathos into the thing.

Ready Player One gets a solid C. Basically a kids movie from dream works, there's a moral lesson, a happy ending and even a moment where the villain finds the shrivel remains of his heart. I'm going forget I saw this and was mostly disappointed. Having only heard about but not actually read the books, I'm not really motivated to dig into it but from what my wife tells me the world built in the books is far less shallow and the book doesn't beat on a higher moral principles as the characters seem to oppose the evil corporation because they want to (and eventually have to) and not because its an evil corporation and their the resistance.

So yeah, on one hand I was almost excited to hear that there is a movie that was better than the books but on the other hand now that I've seen the movie I'm left wondering if the book is garbage or people have shit taste.

Your wife never read the book.  Or you have no wife.  One or the other.

Mark Rylance?  Considering he appeared in two of the shittest films I've had to sit through in recent times (BFG and Dunkirk) I'll take that as fair warning. He's the good canary actor of bad films.

See, I actually want to clarify something.  I do not viscerally hate the book for its plot or nostalgia like many here.  I mean, its a more simple retelling of Charlie and the chocolate factory with lots of nerd references.  Very basic, but hey, I can an read that and throw it away.  It was fine in that regard, and would have just been a forgettable thing I never thought about again after reading.

What pissed me off is how badly the book was written.  It was recommended to me by a ton of adults, and it was written with the prose of a retarded 12 year old.  Now, maybe, posssibly, thats all intentional because the main character telling the story is a retarded teenage script kiddy.  But fuck it, I had a visceral reaction to just how terrible the writing was, and that adults recommended it to me.

It was the DaVinci code all over again.  Everybody I know praising it.  Fuck the plot, who cares if it was basic and not all that deep.  I honestly don’t care like many here, I just read the story and walk away.  But holy hell, the prose was awful.  Written at a 5th grade level, and everybody is going Gaga over it.  That pissed me off for the same reasons as Ready Player One.  It was jut painful to read, and not for anything in the story.

It's both.

You bastard, that's what I was going to say.  :mob:

First, go fuck yourself.

Second, I think this movie is getting a pass because its basically an indictment on the gaming business and culture and lots of member-berries.

"Member when we plays games for fun and not for loot boxes that help us feel superior to the unwashed casual gamers?"
"Member when companies designed games as games instead of casinos for 12 year olds?"
"Can someone arrest the CEO of EA already?"

Literally the main characters of this movie are taking a stand against lootboxes and micro-transactions while relearning the value of actually interacting with humans because escapism and relaying on your l33t skills is not healthy  :awesome_for_real: Talk about literally preaching to your audience.

I'm with this arsehole.

The book was Twilight tier bad writing.

This is an easy to watch summer movie without too much baggage a few cool scenes, a general feeling that the story boarding wasn't well executed (you know when you get to the end of a movie and you feel like every part of it was rushed even though there wasn't that much to get into?) but all in all it did what it set out to do well. I think.

It's akin to Valerian 10,000 planets, but a fair bit better. I'd say thats because its not bogged down in quite so much who gives a fuck sloppy world building. Instead its basically a teenager movie, but with video games and mmo's and vr as the setting/core of it, tack on two huge action scenes and a story that doesn't shit the bed and you get a decent movie somehow.