I took off the afternoon today because I am maxed out on PTO, so I had to take some time off because I otherwise I was going to lose it. So we went to see Ready Player One.

Since the movie is both new and ridiculous, it is showing in the special auditoriums at the movie theater. But because I have neurological issues that are connected to my visual system, and I get motion sick, and my eyes are too close together (so the standard assumptions about 3D glasses don’t work for me), we opted for the least absurd showing that we could find. This was in the “Dolby” theater, which had assigned reclining seats (like I imagine a true first class cabin would be, and not the sorry J-dressed-as-F that I sometimes got upgraded to on domestic flights) and was really loud.

OMG, it was so loud. The demo reel at the beginning that showed off the benefits of the Dolby theater was really, really loud. It also was unapologetically catering to a demographic that I do not belong to. LOOK HOW COOL THE CGI FIRE IS! LISTEN TO THE LOUD EXPLOSIONS THAT RATTLE YOUR CHAIR. CGI fire is not the only thing that has fine details. Explosions are not the only things that are loud. My mother loves marching bands, and they can be pretty loud. But, then again, she rarely goes to first run movies.

(Also, full disclosure, I do understand the appeal. Many years ago when I got my first surround-sound system, the first thing I did was go to the video store and rent something with a lot of helicopters in it.)

The movie was really different than the book. Both had a post-apocalyptic future. Both had a quest carried out in a virtual reality world. Both had an evil corporation as the enemy. Many of the characters had the same names. But they diverged substantially on a large number of key plot points.

In some sense, the movie had to be really different from the book. Because the book itself would have made a terrible, terrible, terrible movie without significant changes. I really liked the book (Am I allowed to say that? I think that I’m not allowed to say that, but I am going to say that anyway.). The entire book was told from Wade’s perspective, and his online friends were – understandably – cagey about sharing anything at all about their lives with him. So no matter what you suspect about the author’s ability to write fleshed-out characters, key features of the plot prevented the only point-of-view character from making real connections with the other characters. Could the author have carried out a GoT-style structure where the story was told from various characters’ points of view? I am skeptical that he could have done it successfully, but he also had the good sense not to try.

By changing the structure around, stremlining the quests, and causing the team to get together earlier in the story, the movie definitely exceeded my expectations. It was a good, straightforward story.

But the movie was also not obsessively immersed in the world of my childhood! The characters made their way through their quest based on a study of some key events in the life of James Halliday. Sure, there might have been a glimpse of the Garbage Pail Kids, but the only people who would pick up on that already knew about the Garbage Pail Kids. None of the characters in the movie expressed having any interest in developing an encyclopedic knowledge of which cards were from which series!

I am only a year-and-a-half younger than the author, so the features of his childhood align pretty well mine. He probably had more money than I did growing up because I could not afford to spend a lot of quarters in the arcade. My parents had a rule against watching R-rated movies, so I was not allowed to watch Blade Runner. But these were all the things that my friends and classmates were talking about all the time! I hoped that my parents would not notice how late it was so that I could stay up and sneak an episode of Max Headroom! OK, I never had the patience to get interested in Zork. But I did spend enough of the summer of 1981 playing games on an Apple ][+ hooked up to an old TV in our basement (our house did not have air conditioning, so I spent most of my summers playing with the various computers that took up residency in our basement because it was several degrees cooler down there) that I wore out the button on Paddle 0. I was so proficient at Galaxian that I was the undisputed champion of my elementary school. I understand what it is like to devote months of full-time effort to mastering the technical skills of a video game. But was there room for this level of single-minded obsessiveness in a two-hour movie? No. I still would have appreciated more nods to the key artifacts of my formative years. One of the scenes near the end of the movie? I am certain that I caught a glimpse of a Macintosh IIsi, the first computer that I did not need to share with anyone else. I loved that machine, and I would recognize its curved front anywhere. But, that was definitely from the ’90s, not the ’80s.

What the book had but the movie lacked is the redemption arc that so many of my students believe in: That through hours and hours of focused study, you can achieve your dreams. In the book Ready Player One, it was the relentless study of 1980s pop culture that was the ticket to the good life. For my students, it is a search for the right theorems, the right study strategy. Will it be Wilson’s Theorem, the Chicken McNugget Theorem, the Hockey Stick Identity, Simon’s Favorite Factoring Trick, trig Ceva or something else that unlocks the needed score on the math contest that they believe will propel them to that elusive tier of success? And the tension that the book shows between the lone-wolf protagonists and the corporate sell-outs of the “sixers” reminds me of the the fights that the students pick with each other on our message boards: Are you competing in math contests because of your true love of the subject or because someone has told you that being a USAMO winner is important for being admitted to Harvard and attending Harvard is important because that is an assumption that can not be questioned.