Amph Ready Player One- book and film discussion thread

Ready Player One: when you want to experience the same kind of embarrassment you get watching The Big Bang Theory but in LITERARY FORM!

 

"the nostalgia factor is not in and of itself powerful enough to sustain a narrative"

coincidentally also the tagline for "The Force Awakens"

 

Also a review of TFA.

 

TFA

 

The point is, I'll be a bit sad when no one goes to see Ready Player One, even though it will be terrible. I miss the time when Spielberg had a faultless sense of what it was people wanted to see at the movies.

 

Why be sad now? It’s been well over a decade. The biggest clanger being Indiana Jones. Sure, we knew George had lost it by then, but there was at least a glimmer of hope.

 

Sad because this seems like such an obvious bid for a box office comeback, as misguided as it is transparent.

 

Transparent, or meta as ****? Think about it, it's chock full of arbitary, pointless rub-one-out references to an era when Spielberg was relevant.

 

What makes you think he has lost that sense? Munich, Tintin, War Horse, Lincoln and Bridge of Spies were all excellent.

 

Nobody saw those films?

 

Really? Munich was nominated for five Oscars, War Horse was nominated for six and Lincoln was nominated for twelve. Oh, and he directed Daniel Day Lewis and Mark Rylance to winning performances in Lincoln and Bridge of Spies. They also have really high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.

 

Oh come on, really?

I enjoyed Munich, I really did. But these are not in the same league commercially or culturally as his earlier works.

 

I’m not sure I’d agree with that sentiment. Rylo Ken’s comment implies that Spielberg is no longer a reliably good film maker. I disagree with that sentiment. Yes, his his creative output from 1975 to 1993 heavily skews towards genre films ie Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders, Jurassic Park, many of which are masterpieces and seminal films in the geek film canon. Having said that, however, from 1993, starting with Schindler’s List his output has gradually skewed toward more serious dramatic films. Many of his dramas ie Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, Lincoln, are also regarded as masterpieces and considered by film critics and serious film buff as seminal additions to any film collection. Finally, when you consider the fact he’s made something like 50 films over 40 plus years, he’s had an unusually small number of misfires. There is always a basic level of uncertainty as to how a particular film will be received by the public, but I don’t have any sense that he has somehow lost the ability to sense what his audience wants.

 

Rylo Ken was simply talking about the Spielberg blockbuster. He even said "at the movies". None of those movies you listed were blockbusters.

Don't be so sure. If TFA is any indicator, people want empty nostalgia, and apparently this Ready Player One delivers. Maybe this will make a billion dollars. You've been wrong before.

But I don't think you're wrong this time. I think this will be terrible, like Adam Sandler's Pixels (directed by Chris Columbus, formerly of Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, writer of Gremlins and The Goonies, director of the first two Home Alone films).

 

I do disagree that TFA is empty nostalgia. It's clearly trying to inorganically create a very organic moment, but I don't doubt their intent here is to create that generational phenomenon akin to what we had as kids in the 70s and 80s (I don't count you prequel kids, because you're the root of all evil). It's not a case of saying "look, I'm a wonderfully awful writer whose narrative lacks purpose, whose characters lack depth, and whose gimmick is clearly very limited in range, look how much I can shoehorn into a "novel"".

EDIT: To be clear, TFA et al intend on being the OT for a new generation (lol @ PT and its generation) and so anyone seeing it with cynical eyes as an adult is missing its entire point in ways and means that are beautiful and frustrating in equal parts.

 

Right, you don't actually like TFA, you don't actually think it's any good, you never actually defend TFA itself, you just go "but the kids!"

I heard the exact same defense for the prequels, Ender. You adults are just cynical! Star Wars is for kids! Kids love Jar Jar! You're now the prequel defenders from 15 years ago.

Meanwhile, JJ is an awful writer, Rey has no depth at all, his gimmick is just cheap inversion/"subversion", and he shoehorns references to basically everything that ever happened in the OT into one "movie". Instead of the son saving the father and succeeding, the father tries to save the son, and the son kills the father! What a twist! Instead of x/y, it's y/x! I, like, totally turned it around on you!

But 'member stormtroopers? I 'member stormtroopers.

 

Welcome to the JCC. Every thread is a TFA debate thread. Have fun.

 

*puts on helmet* i saw alot of shade throwing and thought i would drop in

 

I mean, you could also point to KoTOR as being that same story if you were so inclined:



But you already know that my point wasn't to say the ST wasn't about nostalgia; it was a different kind. You just figured since Wocky's gone quiet someone had to post esoteric goal-post shifting nonsense and well, when there's a challenge that's when you find out who can step up or who can sit the **** down, eh CT?

 

Still haven't actually defended TFA, and you never will, because you don't actually like it. You sure think it's great for the kids, though. Every post you make about TFA is about it being Star Wars for the next generation, with nothing about any of it actually being good or you actually liking it. Because you don't.

 

TFA and the PT are totally different animals: TFA may be a product assembled on a corporate conveyer-belt, but it's constructed by professionals who know what they are doing and are hitting the targets they are aiming for, even if those targets are not particularly ambitious. Rey, Finn, and BB8 all connected emotionally with their audience in a way that the PT's characters struggled to do. Lucas had forgotten everything he knew about how to generate chemistry between actors by the time he made the PT - yes, he did some original things but he had forgotten the basics; JJ and Disney may have needed Star Wars to hit a home-run so badly that "play safe" became their mantra, but at least they knew how to work a formula to their advantage. TFA may not have depths you can dive into, but the general audience had a great time paddling around in its shallows. People weren't coming out of the cinema making excuses, I think people in general really liked it. Disney have given their cast a springboard to launch their careers higher, with Daisy Ridley catapulted from unknown to rising star, and the other actors getting a nice boost; by comparison George Lucas gave his cast cement overshoes, and only the strongest swimmers survived.

As for comparisons between RPO and TFA, yes TFA uses things that were successful and popular in the other Star Wars movies: stormtroopers, tie-fighters, lightsabers, x-wings. But these things are not good simply because they remind the audience of better movies, they are not good simply because of the nostalgic emotion they generate, they are good because they are concepts that work and they are part of Star Wars' identity. Is Star Wars resting on its own laurels a bit? Yes. But... they are its own laurels. Not somebody else's. And that's the point I think Ender is trying to make. If RPO has a 2 second Terminator cameo where the killer cyborg says "I'll be back!", if the movie is relying heavily on a ton of those type of cameos to generate its emotional highs rather than using its own characters, then it really will be a hollow shell of pop-culture reference (and I'll say again, I haven't read the book so I don't know how much it relies on that kind of thing, or how much of the book's popularity rests on its own inventiveness).

If no-one had seen or heard of any other Star Wars film before TFA I still think it would have been popular: the Han Solo reveal would be a damp squib, and the final scene with Luke would lack punch, but everything else would work. In fact the trench run would have been better received because the main gripe about the whole Starkiller thing is that it lacks originality. It does the basics well, though, with good chemistry between the cast and some fun moments scattered between the action, and that is what went down so well with audiences. I think it would probably have been a Guardians of the Galaxy sized hit, maybe a little smaller.

 

By the way I'm only talking about Spielberg as a major box office force. I'm always interested in seeing movies like "The Post."

 

I rather enjoyed Bridge of Spies, and it was well received critically.

 

Still better than an earnest RPO thread.

 

More like "Ernest" RPO thread.