Fourth Wall Breach

How else would you describe this film other than as a retro-rollercoaster no nerd could resist? (Meant in the best possible way.)

I couldn’t resist it.

I am a nerd.

You don’t need to be a gamer to enjoy Ready Player One either, which is a good thing because my gaming experience is mostly limited to GoldenEye on Nintendo 64, Alien Resurrection on PS1, and LEGO Indiana Jones on Xbox360.

None of which I completed.

But…

Because this feels like a classic Steven Spielberg family sci-fi with all the nostalgia you can imagine, but modernised with CGI and FX.

It’s no surprise that incorporating these throwbacks into the film was no easy feat…

Apparently, it took years to secure the rights and licences to include all the pop-culture references we see on screen, such as The Iron Giant, Back to the Future‘s DeLorean, and this little guy:

Chucky has never been so brutally buoyant. What a cameo!

For those of us who read the 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, there are also many differences between the book-to-screen adaptation.

In Cline’s book:

• The tone is grittier, bleaker, and more dystopian in both the OASIS and IRL.
• The first Copper Key quest takes place in a Dungeons and Dragons-style location, not a road race in reverse. (Plus, Art3mis finds the ‘dungeon’ first, not Parzival.)
• The clue-solving and key-sourcing timeline isn’t so streamlined or time-efficient. When Wade-Parzival becomes the first to win the dungeon quest and claim the key, his fame catches fire, motivating him to move, get a new apartment, and land a job in OASIS tech support.
• Daito and Sho are not related, they don’t even meet, and Daito is killed by Innovative Online Industries (IOI). (I was shocked when it happened!)
• The Shining sequence was actually a WarGames sequence. (The one starring Matthew Broderick.)

There are more…

But, underneath all the VR wonder depicted in the book and film, there’s a fundamentally smart concept:

People don’t just want to watch experiences anymore, passively. They want to participate in them, actively.

This is a big inspirational shift for brands to adapt their traditional marketing, Ready Player One-style.

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