In general, there is strong correlation between the quality of the script and the quality of the review which results. I imagine this is why so much of the critiquing you find on sites like Scriptshadow is… forgettable. It might make you feel like you’re in the scriptwriting “know” to be reading the latest script to sell, but, in reality, you are wasting your time. Carson has put together several books worth of material on his website, and yet, unfortunately for him, it is all… forgettable.

This review will also be forgettable. [How are you still reading?] Ready Player One is not a great script, or even, a marginally good script. I would have avoided writing this review if not for the fact that I finally realized there is no point to my critiquing endeavor except that there exists a possibility [this possibility may be infinitesimal] that my efforts will endure over time.

The fact that no one reads these reviews RIGHT NOW, is not a premise that entails that no one will ever read them.

Toward that end, I will cease to review marginal scripts in the same way that I have ceased to comment on my own material. My commitment to both of these proscriptions is… memorable. Reading Ready Player One convinced me to finally be serious in my critical aims and, for that reason, I will only complete the process of reviewing extreme mediocrity one last time.

Ready Player One also allowed me to see that my method is obscure. It is causing my relational problem to the audience. My goal has been to produce a quasi-scientific assessment of writing skill. I realize now that the only one interested in that process… is me. When one produces material for an audience of One, then one ensures that only One person will ever read that material. What I have produced has been extremely interesting to me, but my taste is not really the point.  Is it?

All of which means, I have abandoned my five question analysis in its pure form. From now on, the discussion will be based, in an obfuscated way, on the analysis which actually provides the insights. This is not meant as a watering down of the insight so much as an accessibility tool. Hooray for me! It only took me six years to get here.

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Like all science fiction stories, Ready Player One has a massive exposition problem. It confronts this problem in the typical way. It inserts you into the story with no information about the world you’re inhabiting and hopes that world is interesting enough to keep you reading in spite of the lack of context. Of course, video game environments aren’t interesting to me, so in this case, I continued to read because Mr. Spielberg lent his name to the product on the pages. Given that he has a limited number of movies still to make before father time ends his prodigious career, one can justifiably infer that he wouldn’t want to lend his name to something unless he felt it would… you know… endure.

In other words, Mr. Spielberg has enough money to last him an extra lifetime, so why would he waste his time with something forgettable, especially considering that he must be aware his baseball is getting closer and closer to Homeplate.

This inference on my part did not turn out to be correct. The only reason I can see that Spielberg decided to make this movie is that he must imagine it will make him a bunch of money. Perhaps, he plans on earning an “extra” extra life.

Whatever Speilberg’s motivation, I won’t deny that this Sci-Fi provides an adequate solution to the classic genre problem. The massive exposition which begins on page 15 ends up being justified at the end when the reader understands that the story we have been witnessing is part of a virtual encyclopedia entry written by the protagonist of our story.

This does solve the problem of making the exposition organic, but it feels like this is a purely verbal solution to the issue. In other words, it feels like something that works a lot better in a novel. We will see if the theatre audience accepts it or not based on the box office receipts. As an aspiring writer of the next great Sci-Fi script, however, I wouldn’t look to this script to give you insight on how to build the context for your brave new world.

Even though Ready Player One does not enter 12 Monkeys territory in terms of its use of the genre, it could still position itself for that sort of significance in the delivery of its story. Unfortunately, the story is appallingly light on reveals. All You Need Is Kill has a more interesting story than Ready Player One. If you have read that, you know I am not complimenting either script by offering them as comparison stories.

All You Need Is Kill is another Video Game Story with very little substance. The difference is that it lacks the Fan Fiction feel of Ready Player One. As you read Ready Player One you become increasingly sure that the person responsible for the source material has sifted through his life as a massive [and quite literally obnoxious]… dork.

Granted dork is not a scientific term, it is also one that has no favor with the modern millennial crowd. I use it because the author of the source material will recognize it as a term that had currency when he was sifting through his life, forming himself into the person that would one day come to write a novel called Ready Player One.

I’m sure my assessment of the novel author is correct because, since writing Ready Player One, he went on to write a book called Armada. I’ve not read that book [as I understand it, it is in the process of being turned into a movie as well] but a brief description of it from Wikipedia convinces me that it is another entry in the fan fiction genre. In other words, Armada was better when it was just called The Last Starfighter. I loved that movie when I saw it as a kid. I’m pretty sure the author of Armada loved that movie when he saw at as a kid too.

The only interesting thing in Ready Player One [to me] is the lionization of the Steve Jobs character. If you read my review of Jobs, then you know I am fascinated by this lionization. Had Ready Player One contributed anything worthwhile to my understanding of the process by which humans, like Steve Jobs, become the subject of movies like Jobs, I would write about it.

Once again, the script says nothing interesting about how this process occurs. The only addition to the discussion is the idea that those who lionize become a Xerox of what they worshipped. Even that isn’t in the script. I infer this from the type of man Halliday is described as, and the type of man we actively see Parzival be. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen [with the intention of being exactly as mean as he was being] Parzival is no Halliday in the same way the writer of Ready Player One, is no Steve Jobs.

If there is to be no genre contribution AND no thematic contribution, Ready Player One could still deliver a plot punch. An example of a story which ONLY packs a plot punch is The Sixth Sense. Denigrate everything else about that movie and I will sit idle as you work. Give any premise which suggests that the twist at the end was not sculpted from the frame of Story Itself, and I will argue with you until you submit. The Sixth Sense is not a great movie, but it’s manipulation of the architecture of reveals means that: whatever else it is, it is not forgettable.

Ready Player One has a generic reveal structure overall. Solve three puzzles and claim your prize. However, the way these three puzzles get solved does not arise organically through the architecture which contains them. For instance, it takes 27 pages to get to the first reveal about going through the race backwards.

Because I have only read the script once, and don’t want to go back and read it again just to be sure, I can’t tell you exactly how many years it takes our protagonist, Parzival, to solve this first puzzle. Let us settle, for simplicity’s sake, on a safe, round, number and say, 10. Keep in mind that the prize for solving this puzzle is billionaire level wealth and sole ownership of The Oasis [the virtual reality world that defines the context of the overall story]. A rough comparison to our world would mean that YOU, and only YOU, would own the internet.

Naturally, Parzival is not the only one trying to solve this first puzzle. EVERYONE else on the planet is also trying to solve this puzzle too. It reminds me of the situation which obtained in the early 1700’s when the British Government offered millions of [today’s] dollars to anyone who could solve the problem of longitude at sea. I imagine that any decent cartographer born near the beginning of the 18^th century spent as much of every day as possible dreaming up ways to pinpoint location within an accuracy of 30 minutes.

I mention the Longitude Problem as a way of disparaging our story. Our collective imagination has really dimmed, hasn’t it? We used to think to give great rewards for puzzles that moved the world. Now we imagine giving them for the person with the highest score in a video game.  You can see how I’ve come to wonder if A Ceresian Complex isn’t… proper.

The problem with this first reveal, architecturally, is that it doesn’t really make sense by the end of the story. If it takes 10 years to solve the first puzzle, why does it only take a few days to solve the other two? Either Halliday is a super genius who was eons smarter than the rest of us or he was a regular genius who was just a little bit smarter than the rest of us. He can’t be both.

A meager defense could be made from the idea that the three actual puzzles which Parzival solves are encapsulated in a larger puzzle about the personality of Halliday himself. In other words, once Parzival understands the nature of the challenges, he is better equipped to solve them more quickly. You might start your defense with this line from page 101:

MORROW

The contest is his confessional.

He wants someone to fix the

mistakes he made. Or simply not

make them again.

I will grant this possibility to anyone who wishes to defend it in an organic way. In other words, the writer of the script did not develop it and, therefore, should not receive credit for any explanation which derives from it. If you go this route in defending this script, you are basically acknowledging that you agree with me that the script needs major revision.

The first puzzle is an oxymoron of logic. The second puzzle is silly and invokes an 80’s movie as though the invocation self-solves the puzzle. The final puzzle is… Honestly, I am uncharacteristically at a loss for words.

It literally deadens my soul that this story resolves with a game of Donkey Kong. I don’t know how I am supposed to continue in a serious vein after reading something like that. It feels like it makes a joke of the artistic endeavor.

It further deadens my soul that this this game of Donkey Kong is only made possible because our Protagonist has been given an “extra” life.

Someone might choose to make a metafictional argument that there is a theme lurking in this extra life that speaks to the way the audience relates to the characters in a story. Such a theme would be a purposeful use of the Sci-Fi genre. Any story which contained that theme would potentially be a Great Story. All I can say to Mr. Spielberg is:

I know Great Stories when I read them, and Ready Player One is no Great Story.

By now, you see why this review was a waste of your time as well as mine. The last ten to fifteen sentences have become increasingly choppy and hard to read. The source material is so bland nothing interesting can be made from it. In that sense, the review did end up teaching me something,  which is how I justify persisting in writing it.

I won’t waste my time anymore.

If a script isn’t good, I will cut my losses in terms of number of pages read and move on. If necessary, I will expand beyond the world of scripts in order to find something worth reading. Why will I do all of this? Because…

In the real world there are no extra lives.