I could be wrong, but I think we have reached the height of 1980’s nostalgia. This nostalgia will probably maintain for a while, but with things like Stranger Things (which I talked about here), nonstop Star Wars movies, high rise jeans with ripped holes in them making a comeback, internet video games purposely designed to look and sound like 8 and 16 bit 80’s games, and now Ready Player One, I can’t imagine people getting even more excited about the 80’s than they are now.

I’m certainly not complaining. I’ve made no secret over the years in my blog and my books about how the 80’s was my decade, how I miss it, the special relationship I have with it, and how the 80’s formed much of my attitudes and viewpoints about independence, masculinity, fitness, wealth, happiness, sex, technology, success, and business. I read the Ready Player One book in preparation for watching the movie, just like I did with the Dark Tower series, since as always, I never want a shitty movie to soil my love of a book. If you see a movie before reading a book, and the movie is bad, you’re probably not going to read the book even if the book is amazing. Sadly, there is an entire generation of people who will never read the book Battlefield Earth because the movie was so laughably terrible, even though that book is one of the most entertaining sci-fi novels ever written. This system worked well with the Dark Tower series (which I reviewed here). The books were pretty good and the movie was absolutely dreadful, but that’s okay since I read the books first.

Thankfully, the Ready Player One book and movie were both fun, even though the movie changed pretty much everything in the book, though it did so for valid reasons. This is one of the rare times I will review both a book and a movie at the same time. Warning: massive spoilers ahead for both the movie and the book.

The premise of the story is that in the future, around the 2040’s, America has economically collapsed (yep, accurate prediction) and to escape their horrible, povery-stricken lives, most everyone spends most of their time in a hyper realistic virtual reality version of the internet (yep, accurate prediction) called the Oasis.

The creator of the Oasis (and the real life writer of the story) was born in 1972, the same year I was born, and grew up loving the same stuff I loved as a child and teenager in the 80’s. Tron, Dungeons and Dragons, Zork, Knight Rider, Blade Runner, and a billon other 80’s games, movies, and TV shows. Thus, the Oasis is filled with these references and characters. The plot is that the creator has died and left three magical keys that, once found, gives the owner half a trillion dollars in real-life money, as well as complete control over the Oasis. Just like Stranger Things, both the book and movie of Ready Player One is jam packed full of 80’s pop culture references, many of which people not in Generation X would be aware of. Yeah, most people my kid’s age or parent’s age could identify Freddy Kruger, but would they know the hero’s login password in the books is from the 80’s movie The Last Starfighter like I did? Or that the wording of the magic spell at the end of the movie was from the 80’s movie Excalibur like I did? Probably not. This story is a love letter to 80’s nerds like me, i.e. Gen X men in their 40’s.

The hero of the story, a young beta male, has to do things in the book like complete a realistic representation of a Dungeons and Dragons module Tomb of Horrors (a module I actually owned in the 80’s), complete a game of Zork (a game I played in the 80’s), go through a realistic representation of the movie Wargames (one of my favorite movies in the 80’s, and the movie that compelled me to get into computers), and so on.

In the movie, they change things around to make the story more palatable to a wide audience. Instead of the characters going into Wargames like in the book, they go into the movie The Shining instead. That makes sense; 80’s nerds like me are going to prefer Wargames, but most normal people of all ages and all nations would have no idea what the hell that movie was, but they’ve all seen The Shining, or at least are aware of what it is. This is one of the best sequences in the movie. Steven Spielberg actually re-created precise sets of The Shining, and the characters actually participated in real scenes from that move, including the hallway full of blood and the sexy naked woman in the bathroom who turns into a disgusting zombie when she kisses Jack Nicholson.

Instead of going through a Dungeons and Dragons module, the movie uses a race, full of 80’s (and prior) cars like the Batmobile, the A-Team van, Speed Racer’s Mach 5, Mad Max’s interceptor, and so on. The hero of the story drives the DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future (with a Knight Rider scanner mounted on the front), and the female lead rides the red motorcycle from Akira. During the race, racers are attacked by the t-rex from Jurassic Park (complete with his original sound effects), and then by King Kong.

In a bar scene, you’ll see people like Laura Croft, Ryu (from Street Fighter), Harley Quinn, Hello Kitty, Robocop, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and so on.

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