Also, how were we expected to keep our lunch down when the girl revealed her horrible disfigurement. My gawd, that birthmark. Good thing she found love in the game and someone who can find her attractive for who she is inside.
That last line was sarcasm.
Right there with ya on that one. Also, Wade was supposed to be rather fat. And he was a lot more of a creeper. Glad they downplayed that part. But seriously, I was expecting something a lot more drastic about her appearance (not having read the book until after).
The thing I found most unrealistic, were how everyone from in the game just happened to all be living close by in the real world.
This is touched on, but not heavily. The city is changed from the book, but it's the fastest-growing city in the world, due to being where IOI and Gregarious Games both are. The OASIS is about all anyone has left, so they're migrating/congregating to where the businesses most directly involved in making it all go are.. The rest of the High Five might have started out elsewhere, but they've been in town since they all became Gunters.
I think they trimmed the stuff from the book that didnt need to be there, but seemed like it was mostly focused on other types of nostalgia, not just 80's, which I cant remember if it was in the book or not.
Yeah i just ended up reading the book a month or so ago. The book was more heavily 80's nostalgia. There were alot more elements and references to Dungeons and Dragons and text based games and that sort of thing. I think the Zork part of the book was a missed opportunity though.
There was a brief mention of the Zork mines, but no real elaboration. And yeah, they worked in some of the newer stuff, like Daito deploying from
Serenity. But Halliday was born in '79 (god, I feel old now) and his childhood was shaped by the stuff that was new and in re-runs at the time -- BSG, Star Wars, the Golden Age of '80s cartoons...
My personal favorite is Wade's Buckaroo Banzai skin.
But yeah, the book has a lot more in the way of D&D and text-based game references. Kira was Halliday's love interest's actual name, rather than her screen-name (which was something else, not mentioned in the movie). She gave him the nickname Anorak when he was younger, which he later used as the name for his Avatar... There's a lot of character detail that Cline omitted in the screenplay version. We could debate endlessly as to whether it would actually have worked in this medium versus prose, slowed the story down too much, whether there was enough story to carry multiple films, etc.
I personally feel it could have been half an hour longer if that half-hour were devoted to more in the way of setting-establishing, character-building, and clarity-enhancing. But it's a fairly straightforward story, and I don't think there's enough there to fill a whole trilogy. Maybe a six-to-eight-episode Netflix miniseries, but the universe-building and translating-exposition-to-visually-interesting-content would have really dragged down a first film that tried to do that without the payoff of an immediate sequel to keep the audience engaged.
--Jonah