‘Ready Player One’ Won’t Change the World But That’s Not Why You Went to See It Anyway

There’s a moment when you’re about to meet a friend’s baby for the first time and you steel yourself. You hope, if the baby is seven shades of hideous, that your face doesn’t betray you. If it does, which it might, you have a question to answer: do I have a way home if I tell them ‘bout this Chunk-looking baby? Such was my dilemma walking into a movie that celebrates nerds when all my friends are nerds. All. Of. Them. They all have collections. They all have encyclopedic knowledge of something. They all have a fan theory about “the” book/movie/thing. So, as you can imagine, I was standing in line for the celebration-of-nerd-culture-in-movie-form that is Ready Player One like: what do I tell them if the movie is trash? I was sitting in my seat waiting for it to start like: I mean, I only really see them in person like once a year so… Which is to say: I was prepared to trash this movie. The pre-release chatter hasn’t been great. Writer Ernie Cline’s past as a slam poet—and a few poems in particular–have been dug up and annotated like the research paper on that joint was due yesterday. But the biggest criticism is how Ready Player One fits into a post-GamerGate world, or more to the point, does it?

I’m going to argue that it does even though there are places where the adaption of the novel for the big screen could have—no, should have—better served the “nerd” demographic the novel so clearly targeted. Is it feel good nostalgia? Yes. Without doubt. If you collected anything …