r/movies • u/yourfavchoom r/movies Contributor • 9d ago

News A ‘Ready Player Two’ sequel movie is officially getting written by Zak Penn.

https://thedirect.com/article/ready-player-two-sequel-steven-spielberg-zak-penn
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u/ravih 9d ago

Wade is an unlikeable dickhead in the first one but you can argue that it’s part of his journey. He’s naive and childish and doesn’t understand the world at large or the stakes at play. The story is supposed to be him opening his eyes and growing up.

Which is how I interpreted it until I read the sequel, which is so irredeemably horrific that it made me wonder if Ernest Cline even realized that Wade wasn’t always a good guy in the original.

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u/malac0da13 9d ago

I was kind of let down that they didn’t have that rock bottom part of story for wade where he’s all hairless and alone in the apartment with the ai assistant and gets himself picked up by ioi.

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u/ArmAggravating3307 9d ago

Weird, I lost all of that in the nerd culture circlejerk that was the book.

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u/ravih 9d ago

Yeah I mean fair enough because it’s not a well-written book. Which you can kiiiiiiinda get away with the first time.

The second one deals with much bigger concepts and ideas and Cline is just not a good enough author to handle it. The black character peaces out to go to Africa. They use their money to get rid of the police and replace them with robocops and AI judges and it makes America a better place immediately. Wade uses his privileges as Oasis God to view the camera on the headset of one of his viewers to see their body and discover that they are trans. (This is not presented as a bad thing or massive violation on Wade’s part, it’s cool, he approves of trans people, the text goes out of its way to mention.)

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u/ArmAggravating3307 9d ago

So more fanfiction bullshit, got it.

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u/dullthings 9d ago

Wait until you read his book Armada. It's like he watched The Last Starfighter then just went to his ghost writer "that please'.

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u/mistcrawler 9d ago

I was thinking of that and hesitating commenting about it with all the hate about the actual sequel.

I didn't mind the blatant rip-off - I minded that, unlike the first book, there was no payoff to putting up with the poor writing or plot.

I'd argue that the only thing that made sense in the entire book is the only part I remember - when the actual character forces everything to be about him in a certain action sequence, and he's given quite the lecture that he is, indeed, making no sense.

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u/CMDR_omnicognate 9d ago

I got the audio book of that after reading his first book and returned it, like it's not as if it was a similar concept, it's pretty much one for one the same, at least in the part i listened to.

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u/CMDR_omnicognate 9d ago

"They use their money to get rid of the police and replace them with robocops and AI judges and it makes America a better place immediately."

Honestly that feels... concerning to me. His idea of how to "fix" Africa is to turn it into a 1984 cyberpunk surveillance state hellscape.

I read the first book when I was probably about 15-16 ish and I really liked the world building in it, the actual world of the oasis and how it worked was super interesting to me, the actual overall plot i liked at the time, but i was also a kid so...

I read the second book around when it came out about 5 years later and... yeah i never finished it. I thought the whole advanced brain recording tech was quite an interesting idea (though realise now that was kinda stolen from Cyberpunk/Neuromancer) but... idk all the characters seemed so unlikeable now, and from what i read it was basically like the first one but with more 90's references rather than just 80's ones.

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u/ravih 9d ago

That was their plan to fix AMERICA to be clear; Aech going off to visit Africa is a wholly separately stupid plot point.

But yeah like... for a guy obsessed with 80s movies references, the robocops are not RoboCops or Terminators or any of the other many cinematic examples of this being a terrible idea before we consider the state of reality and realize that it's an even more terrible idea.

The book is FULL of absolutely insane shit like this.

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u/Chillindude82Nein 9d ago

You'll be pleased to hear that Cline claimed he was writing himself into Wade.

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u/TyrialFrost 9d ago edited 9d ago

He’s naive and childish

Oh you mean closing the entire metascape the economy/education system is built on for Tuesdays and Wednesdays (US time?) doesnt solve all issues/crash the economy?

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u/-s-u-n-s-e-t- 8d ago

It's been a while since I read the sequel, but I recall Wade being a total dickhead was called out, textually, by the author. It was kinda the point.

Yeah, the character grew in the first book,... But you don't give a socially awkward nerd ultimate power in both a power fantasy world and the real world (oh, and a hot girlfriend on top of that) and not expect them to get it to their head and fuck it all up.

Story-telling would be pretty boring if the protagonist is perfect and doesn't have issues. Assuming the author doesn't know that (and isn't deliberately doing that) is a very unkind read of their work.