Ready player one is a book by Ernest Cline and a movie directed by Steven Spielberg. Both the movie and book have some very glaring differences.

Ready Player One is set in the year 2045 where the world is obsessed with the online reality of the OASIS. The story focuses on a boy’s (Wade Watts) goal to find the easter egg put in by the since past OASIS’s creature James Halliday. Possession of said easter egg would make it so that you would control the entire OASIS. There are different challenges and riddles that they have to solve and Wade meets many different people on his quest for the egg.

In the movie version of this story Spielberg does many things different than in the book. A couple of these things like the differences between the challenges are not possible from a movie makers perspective because of the fact you would need to get the rights to the movie that is done in the book and all things of that sort.

There are other changes that have been made. Some of which don’t make sense to have happened. Like the change that was made to the character Shoto in the book. In the movie they changed his name to Sho. The also change entire scenes like Wade infiltrating IOI is changed to Art3mis being captured by IOI. Other things happen to make the movie simpler and easier for an audience to understand.

There are some scenes in the book that would not translate well into movies, because of this, spielberg had to take some liberties into making the book into the movie. Two of the challenges,

The first and second ones, were changed drastically to fit the movie more. The book had things like playing a perfect game of joust or walking through a movie word for word. These things would be terrible to watch so Spielberg had to change them.

Though some of those changes were needed as stated earlier a good amount was not. An introduction of a very important character was held off till the end of the book, a section worth several chapters was virtually removed. The entire introduction to the story and many of its locations were changed and some just outright removed.

As jarring as this sounds it is understandable why Spielberg did it but it does not change the fact that the story flow and progression have been changed greatly. If a viewer read the book first they may find themselves frustrated with the changes as though it is overall the same story the steps taken are vastly different.

The visuals that the movie put out were beautiful and portrayed the video game world of the OASIS about as realistically as any person who plays video games would expect. The cuts between the real world and the OASIS really show that although people live their lives through the OASIS, the people still have life and have to interact in the real world which really sets up Wade’s decision at the end.

The actors in this movie do a good job at conveying their goal and their motivation. The actor that does the best job at this is T.J. Miller playing I-R0k. I-R0k is a character that was added in purely for the movie but he adds both a level of fear and comic relief to the movie that both darkened the mood of the movie and lightened it through his comedic timing and abilities. After that the next best performance was done by Ben Mendelsohn as Sorrento. He excellently brings us the evil person who doesn’t give a damn about if anyone lives or dies. He is just as the book makes him seem and jumps right into the character of Nolan Sorrento.

If you go into this movie to see the book visually you will be very disappointed with what you will see. But the movie is a fine movie independently. It was well made and does not skimp on the pop culture references that would expect on something like the OASIS. The movie is very entertaining and that is all that you should ask for when going for a movie.

On the other hand the book gets you what the movie does with many other plot points that tell you more about what the world has become and who the characters are. There are not many situations where it is suggested to see the movie and read the book after but this is one of those situations because if you see the movie you will be entertained and enjoy the movie for what it is in its entirety. After reading the book you will then be able to appreciate that version of the story and see what happened and be able to compare them and still be able to enjoy them both entirely.