Adaptation Month - Ready: Player One

Ready: Player One is a book written by Ernest Cline, released in 2011, the film adaptation was released in 2018 co-written by Ernest Cline and Zak Penn, who has co-written for Marvel and DC films both good and bad (and in the case of Elektra, terrible)

In the director’s chair is Steven Spielberg, who is no stranger to adaptations and is of course one of the master visionaries of our time.

But how does this fare as an adaptation? Let’s start with a brief rundown on my thoughts.

Ready: Player One the book is a fun read, but there are problems. It’s reliance on 80's pop culture and just the wealth of references to it scattered throughout the book can be a bit much. In addition, the nature of the story requires a f*ckton of exposition. Then we have Wade himself who has problematic moments, including a couple of comments that could be considered transphobic.

Ready: Player One the film is a visual treat as you’d expect with Spielberg and they did well to modernise some of the ideas presented in the book. Wade is less of a problematic character but unfortunately he’s not left with very much character, and neither is anyone else. It does have a similar problem with exposition, its first 20 minutes or so is full of it and there’s a number of major bits of plot convenience but it’s not unenjoyable.

Jurassic Parkathon - Jurassic Park

Welcome to the Jurassic Parkathon

Jurassic Park is an icon in popular culture. Based on a book by Michael Chrichton and brought to life by the directing talents of Steven Spielberg, the movie created the zeitgeist for dinosaur related media that still exists to this day.

Jurassic Park was released in 1993, being one of the few films from that era to break a $1bn haul at the box office. It had a great run at the awards, winning 3 Oscars and in 2018 was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. But does it still hold up?

Cruise Month - Mini Review: Minority Report

So, we’ve looked at one Cruise/Spielberg collaboration, so let’s took a look at another with Minority Report

Based (and I know this will shock you) loosely on a book of the same name written by Phillip K Dick, this was originally conceived to be a sequel of the sort to another adaptation of his works, total recall, and I mean the original one with Shwarznegger, not the reboot. They looked at the story again in 1997 with Novelist John Cohen chosen to help screenwrite it. However for whatever reasons the original director, Jan de Bont dropped out of directing, instead serving as a producer to the series (neither Cruise nor Spielberg are credited as producers on this one) Cruise passed the script onto Spielberg who agreed to direct after several rewrites. He’d been hoping to work with Cuise for some time.

The movie had a $102m budget, and grossed $358.4m, a moderate success for 2002, but it gained massive critical acclaim for its ideas and themes. So, we’re 13 years on now, does the movie still hold up under modern grounds? Let’s take a look.