With the film coming out soon, I thought I would give Ready Player One a try. The Mr. listened to it on audio book during a road trip and disliked it severely.

I have to agree.

Ready Player One

Ready Player One is written at young adult level, which was grating because the breadth of vocabulary was pretty lacking. I know our main character is supposed to be a teenager but that doesn’t mean the way he speaks needs to devolve to that low a bar. The book is clearly for us Gen Xers who grew up in the land of the nerds but it doesn’t really hit the mark.  The mish mash of characters some would find cool, I found more than a little annoying. I will admit, that it might be partly because of Wesley Crusher’s horrible pronunciation of some of the Japanese names but all I could think was, “shut up, Wesley.”

Ready Player One however, genuinely makes me angry. Not only does the author systematically over simplify EVERY teeny, tiny bit of geek culture, he put together the most ham handed and predictable story I think I have ever had the displeasure of reading.

I won’t watch the film in the theater and I probably won’t watch it until it’s free on Netflix. Maybe not even then…

Ernest Cline

I wasn’t a huge fan of his to begin with…

Back in “the day,” he wrote a really bad script for a sequel to Buckaroo Banzai, one of my favorite films of the 80’s. That script got all of Geekdom riled up at the time and severely disappointed that there really wasn’t anything on it’s way soon.