SHERDOG MOVIE CLUB: Week 144 - Ready Player One

[europe1]

NOTE to NON-MEMBERS: Interested in joining the SHERDOG MOVIE CLUB? Shoot me a PM for more info!

Here's a quick list of all movies watched by the SMC. Or if you prefer, here's a more detailed examination.

Our Director

Steven Spielbergo

Did you know this guy directed the first Columbo episode?

Our Star
Tye Sheridan

​

Film Overview
​

Premise: When the creator of a virtual reality world called the OASIS dies, he releases a video in which he challenges all OASIS users to find his Easter Egg, which will give the finder his fortune.

Budget: $175 million

Box Office: $582.2 million

Trivia
(Courtesy of the IMDB)
​

* In an interview, Steven Spielberg said this was the third most difficult movie he has made in his career, behind Jaws (1975) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).

* Besides the obvious Bigfoot, Delorean, and Akira vehicles, other notables in the race were the Mach 5, Batmobile, A Team van, V8 Interceptor, Christine, the Porkchop Express from Big Trouble In Little China and the Trans-Am from Smokey and the Bandit.

The Zemeckis Cube is named after director Robert Zemeckis. When the cube is activated, the music playing is from the Back to the Future (1985) trilogy, directed by Zemeckis. Alan Silvestri composed the score for both the Back to the Future trilogy and this film.

* During the race sequence, when King Kong appears, the theme from the original 1933 film composed by Max Steiner is played.

* Parzival's belt in the Oasis has the Thundercats (1985) logo on it. The belt itself is the same style as Han Solos.

* During the first race, when the 1966 Batmobile comes to a skidding stop, the skidding sound effect is the same cadence as the Na na na na na na na na from the opening credits of the Batman TV theme.


Members: @europe1 @MusterX @Cubo de Sangre @sickc0d3r @FrontNakedChoke @AndersonsFoot @Tufts @chickenluver @Coolthulu @OMGstreetfight @Yotsuya @jei @LHWBelt @moreorless87 @ArtemV @Bullitt68 @HenryFlower @Nailgun @Rimbaud82 @BeardotheWeirdo @Zer

​

 

[SamSchmidt]

What? I thought you guys only ever did old obscure movies I've never heard of.

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

Enjoyable enough flick if you're in the mood for an adventure geared towards kids. Also pretty good for older folks who dig all the pop-culture references. Lots to look at visually and it opens the viewers' minds up to the potential of virtual reality. The protagonists were likable.

Funny how just a handful of drones could so easily keep finding people and vehicles in such short order. Cleveland should have been much bigger than that, I'd think.

 

[TheRuthlessOne]

5.5/10

 

[ArtemV]

Cool film, enjoyed it again with awesome visuals in the cgi segments. Still find it weird that a guy falls in love with a girl online though..

 

[Tufts]

Cleveland should have been much bigger than that, I'd think.

Columbus?

 

[Tufts]

My favourite part of the movie was the soundtrack. One great tune after another. Otherwise it was OK. Not great. Not bad. Wasn't too terribly invested in the characters IRL or in the Oasis. I don't play video games, so maybe that didn't help the movie resonate either.

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

Columbus?

Either way, they said it was the fastest growing city for years. Thought it was Cleveland though. Hmmmm.

 

[minute bull]

MIGHT be the best movie of 2018.

 

[Tufts]

Either way, they said it was the fastest growing city for years. Thought it was Cleveland though. Hmmmm.

I jut checked wikipedia and said Columbus....

 

[Coolthulu]

 

[MusterX]

I liked this film, I may even love this film. The entire movie is a tip of the hat not only to the 80's and 90's but to the transformative idea of technology as well. Its probably that I'm a little older than most of you which is why I liked this film. The 80's and 90's were the 20 years of my youth, and I don't mean I was 5 years old in 1985. By 1985 I already had a car and a job. Its more than its references to film, the gaming references and ideas expressed in this film lead me to believe Spielberg either knows a lot about gaming or hired someone that does.

One example of that would be how Halliday put a "zero out" function into the world. You die, you lose everything and its this very harshness that lends the world a feeling of authenticity and danger. As a walking encyclopedia of game history, I was immediately impressed by this detail. This is why, for example, when I-Rok tells the girls to get lost in the club they gasp and run away rather than not give a shit what he says because its only virtual reality. There is a real penalty there if they don't listen to him and he decides to kill them. This is how players gain power in the world and early in MMO history we saw this same sort of mechanic in games like Everquest.

I'm getting ahead of myself though, lets go back some. Somewhere around 1975-7 my dad bought me a Pong game, the first real video game for home use and it looked like this.

A little white ball went back and forth and 2 players would try to score points by turning the knob to move the paddle which hit the ball back and forth. There is no way to explain that we were blown away by this like troglodytes that were just handed a Bic lighter. What I wouldn't give to have that back. It was thrown away long ago. In 1978 the Atari 2600 released and by 1979 I had one in my possession.

The Atari 2600 was next level shit. Instead of just a knob it had 2 joysticks with a red button, usually for your fire button. This was the first console that made use of microprocessors and could be used to load different game cartridges. Once again, mind blown. In 1982 I had a TI 49/A which was programmable and was the next step beyond the Atari 2600.

By 1984 I had stepped up to a Commodore 64.

In fact, I could trace every step of the way from the birth of the gaming/computer industry to present. In the early 1990's I read a book by a man named George Gilder called Microcosm and my mind was blown away by the things he discussed in that book and the predictions that he made.

This was the first time I learned that electronics are called electronics because they are devices that control the flow of electrons. The idea that a machine could control the flow of electrons in the sub-atomic world was eye opening for me. This was during a time before smart phones and broadband internet. One of the things Gilder discussed in that book was the idea of Moore's Law which was referenced to computer technology doubling in power approximately every 18 months.

This idea of Moore's Law then spawned the ideologies of men like Ray Kurzweil who has predicted that at some point in the near future an intelligent A.I. will become so intelligent that it outpaces humanities ability to keep up with it. This is what he and others refer to as the singularity. Predictions have been made that at some point humanity will be capable of running simulations so real they would be indistinguishable from reality. This then led to the Simulation theory which is that we are in one of these simulations right now and just don't know it.

So from the mid 1970's to 2016 I waited for the first gen VR headsets to become available for purchase. I paid $800 for my HTC Vive, hapily, and unlike my Pong game, I've kept all the pieces and the original box. Someday my great grandchild is going to trip out that grandpa left him a 1st gen head set. <45>

I will tell you that VR technology is going to be transformative. Not just in gaming, but in medicine, in research, in engineering, in all sorts of industries. Its a game changer in the long run. And still, we creep ever forward, ever closer to the real life version of the Oasis. We get closer and closer, and I don't know if I'll be alive long enough to see it but my kids will. What Spielberg did with Ready Player One is not just a history of gaming and a non-stop stream of pop culture, its predictive, its something we are on the cusp of achieving.

As a film, Ready Player One is average, a 7/10. As a reminder of the life I've lived, its more like an 8 or 9 out of 10.

 

[Andersons Foot]

I had a good time with this movie. I don’t think it’s one that you should go into expecting to be blown away by the story or acting. It’s more about the references and adventure. Which I think it did a solid job with.

 

[Cpt Migraine]

I liked it a lot.. i'm a big fan of the classics.. sometimes the references to pop culture can be better than that specific piece of pop culture..

I liked the characters.. not blown away by the acting or originality but they were sympathetic..

It had a feel good vibe in a dystopic setting with a lot of adventure elements á indiana jones or star wars..

Maybe i'm old and nostalgic but i got a lot of enjoyment out of it..

 

[Cubo de Sangre]

Somewhere around 1975-7 my dad bought me a Pong game, the first real video game for home use and it looked like this.

At the time, Pong was the 2nd-greatest thing I'd ever seen (behind slot-car racing).

I will tell you that VR technology is going to be transformative.

Can't wait! Where we at with it now?

 

[Zer]

I will tell you that VR technology is going to be transformative. Not just in gaming, but in medicine, in research, in engineering, in all sorts of industries. Its a game changer in the long run. And still, we creep ever forward, ever closer to the real life version of the Oasis. We get closer and closer, and I don't know if I'll be alive long enough to see it but my kids will. What Spielberg did with Ready Player One is not just a history of gaming and a non-stop stream of pop culture, its predictive, its something we are on the cusp of achieving.

As a film, Ready Player One is average, a 7/10. As a reminder of the life I've lived, its more like an 8 or 9 out of 10.

I haven't seen the film yet, but it sounds like the Oasis is a positive spin on what's been shown as a pretty negative upcoming trend in society. I read that whole Mother Horse Eyes thing recently for example and one of its plot threads is that in the future people will just hook up into a virtual reality and stay there indefinitely while their bodies fester and decay in the real world. It's told from the perspective of workers who have to recover and clean up after these people when their life-support equipment starts malfunctioning. I suppose The Matrix is dat more popular presentation of people being blissfully ignorant and sort of abandoning their physical bodies (Not willingly in most cases there but you get the idea). I'm sure there are other depictions in media that I'm not thinking of right now. Gonna be interesting comparing the two different perspectives on dis shit

 

[Dinkin_Flicka]

I haven't seen the film yet, but it sounds like the Oasis is a positive spin on what's been shown as a pretty negative upcoming trend in society. I read that whole Mother Horse Eyes thing recently for example and one of its plot threads is that in the future people will just hook up into a virtual reality and stay there indefinitely while their bodies fester and decay in the real world. It's told from the perspective of workers who have to recover and clean up after these people when their life-support equipment starts malfunctioning. I suppose The Matrix is dat more popular presentation of people being blissfully ignorant and sort of abandoning their physical bodies (Not willingly in most cases there but you get the idea). I'm sure there are other depictions in media that I'm not thinking of right now. Gonna be interesting comparing the two different perspectives on dis shit

On the surface it seems like it, but in the movie they touch on how the Oasis is destroying society since no one wants to leave. In the book it's a lot more pronounced and the main character is very conflicted with his choice in the end. It was a lot to cram into a movie, so they only touched on it.

As someone who loved the book, I thought the movie was really fun. There was some things from the book I would have loved to see in the movie, but trying to cram everything into a single movie was tough. I would have loved to see it as a Trilogy with each movie tackling one of the Keys/Gates, but I don't think they wanted to take the risk of the first movie in a trilogy tanking and not getting the steam for the follow ups.

 

[breadfighter]

Watched it for the first time recently and really enjoyed it. The only thing that keeps it from being a great movie was lack of attachment to the core characters IRL. I found the interactions between the black girl and the main character to be super awkward, and not in that good natural way, and the asians were just wanna-be Datas from the Goonies. Other than that really cool movie with that Spielberg-esque production quality.

 

[Bullitt68]

Made it 22 minutes and 27 seconds in (the time it took for me to eat my dinner) and that was 22 minutes and 26 seconds more than I needed to waste my time on. Now that I'm done with my meal, I'm going to watch something that doesn't make me sad at the state of contemporary cinema and the pathetic level to which the long and massively overrated Spielberg has sunk.

 

[LHWBelt]

NOTE to NON-MEMBERS: Interested in joining the SHERDOG MOVIE CLUB? Shoot me a PM for more info!

Here's a quick list of all movies watched by the SMC. Or if you prefer, here's a more detailed examination.

Our Director

Steven Spielbergo

Did you know this guy directed the first Columbo episode?

Our Star
Tye Sheridan

​

Film Overview
​

Premise: When the creator of a virtual reality world called the OASIS dies, he releases a video in which he challenges all OASIS users to find his Easter Egg, which will give the finder his fortune.

Budget: $175 million

Box Office: $582.2 million

Trivia
(Courtesy of the IMDB)
​

* In an interview, Steven Spielberg said this was the third most difficult movie he has made in his career, behind Jaws (1975) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).

* Besides the obvious Bigfoot, Delorean, and Akira vehicles, other notables in the race were the Mach 5, Batmobile, A Team van, V8 Interceptor, Christine, the Porkchop Express from Big Trouble In Little China and the Trans-Am from Smokey and the Bandit.

The Zemeckis Cube is named after director Robert Zemeckis. When the cube is activated, the music playing is from the Back to the Future (1985) trilogy, directed by Zemeckis. Alan Silvestri composed the score for both the Back to the Future trilogy and this film.

* During the race sequence, when King Kong appears, the theme from the original 1933 film composed by Max Steiner is played.

* Parzival's belt in the Oasis has the Thundercats (1985) logo on it. The belt itself is the same style as Han Solos.

* During the first race, when the 1966 Batmobile comes to a skidding stop, the skidding sound effect is the same cadence as the Na na na na na na na na from the opening credits of the Batman TV theme.


Members: @europe1 @MusterX @Cubo de Sangre @sickc0d3r @FrontNakedChoke @AndersonsFoot @Tufts @chickenluver @Coolthulu @OMGstreetfight @Yotsuya @jei @LHWBelt @moreorless87 @ArtemV @Bullitt68 @HenryFlower @Nailgun @Rimbaud82 @BeardotheWeirdo @Zer

​

Gotta say I found this to be an enjoyable movie. Is it non-sense and silly? Yeah but so are most video games if you are a gamer (I'm 28 and still play games every week). I liked the music and the adventure of the whole thing. I certainly thought a good majority of it was corny but I felt it was supposed to be honestly.