Books that are worse than the film (which was already bad?)
Books that are worse than the film (which was already bad?)
I've started reading Jumper by NameDoesNotMatter. I would like to formally apologise about all the harsh things I've ever spoken about that film.
Fine, the cast is unlikeable and the action scenes are just fisticuffs in the air, but my god, in comparison to the teenage dreck that is the book, it's a masterpiece. At least they tried to build a credible back story for the main character.
In the book, he literally thinks everyone is out to sexually assault him (and somehow they seem to), he solves his problems by throwing money at it, instead of any actual creativity, and the author desperately tries to portray him as a mature-for-his-age adult, despite the fact that his first reaction to anything is crying followed by petty revenge.
I'm just flicking through the pages, pausing at any plot bits, and then flicking on.
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Ready player one, though to be fair I didn't finish either version. I feel like percentage-wise I made it further through the movie, but only because the movie is less than 2 hours long. I made it to the 2nd chapter of the 2nd part and couldn't take the masturbatory prose any more. There's no self insertion on one side of the scale, Mary sue-ing in the middle, and ready player one sits on the far side of the scale.
I was going to say, Ready Player One is not a great movie, but it does at least have Spielberg at the helm, and while late-career Spielberg is a shadow of his former self, the movie is directed competently and interesting enough visually.
Not least of all because you can actually see and enjoy all the various IP in action, rather than just have them name dropped like in the book. When there's a sea of interesting or recognizable things on screen, that does a lot to help distract from how terrible the plot is.
But even at its worst, the movie is a tolerable popcorn flick. Turn your brain off and enjoy some pop culture references, then forget it all an hour later.
Because the book is just terrible. It's an absolute slog, a lot of the dialogue is embarrassing, the prose is uninspired, it's overloaded with explanations of UIs and unnecessary, long winded ramblings about the various pop culture references. The movie at least has the benefit of just putting a thing on the screen, the book has to describe all of this shit, and it's tediously done.
Which is to say nothing of just how terrible the plot is in general but more than enough people have gone off about that.
Twilight for nerdy boys is the best description I've ever heard of it, but at least Twilight isn't as gratuitously masturbatory.
The movie is so much better than the book because it drops a lot of cringe that the book has.
Ready Player One is the Skeet Ulrich of Snow Crash ripoffs.
I read the whole book twice. Its bad. The first time was fun because I was just looking for the pop-culture references, but thats the only kinda good thing the book has. The second time I focused more on the story and the characters and its just bad. There are no likeable characters, but you are supposed to like the main protagonist who is an antisocial creep. The setting makes no sense and the plot is just there to move to another place to show off more references stacked onto each other
Yeah, the book felt like I was being beaten over the head with pop culture references...but then you open up VR Chat...
I feel like there was value in the predictions RPO was making, particularly at the time it came out, just before Facebook became Meta and basically made it their playbook. If the world ever gets so shitty that the friction of putting on a VR headset actually becomes preferable to doing literally anything else, I think it's a pretty believable future.