Page to Screen: Gone Girl vs Ready Player One

I watched Gone Girl on DVD shortly after it came out, but it wasn't until last January that I got a chance to read the book when it was on sale.  And the verdict?  There's really no huge difference.  OK, we're done!

Since the movie was adapted by the writer of the novel, I guess it's not a huge surprise that there aren't any real plot points missing from the novel.  There are a few minor differences, things cut out of the movie probably for pacing.  But the story is still pretty much the same:  Nick Dunne's wife Amy disappears on their fifth anniversary and the trail of clues eventually leads cops to him while the public more and more believes he's guilty.  But (spoiler alert!) we find out that Amy staged the whole thing because she was pissed at Nick for having an affair and dragging her from New York to Missouri.

But after she's robbed, Amy goes to stay with a clingy old boyfriend Desi.  She murders him and blames him for her abduction when she goes back home.  Though by then Nick knows the truth, he can't say anything, because who would believe him?  Then she uses some of his frozen sperm to get herself pregnant and he decides to stay with her.

That's the overall story in both book and movie.  What you get in the book is a lot more internalization.  So you know more about what Nick and Amy are thinking about.  That provides a better understanding of their motives.  If you don't care about that, then watching the movie is good enough.  I certainly don't regret reading the book, though, as it does provide more insight into the situation and characters.  It's definitely worth it if you feel like it.

By contrast, Ready Player One was also adapted by its author and yet doesn't bear that much similarity to its source novel.  The core concept is the same:  in the near future there's a virtual reality world whose dead creator has buried an Easter egg that whoever finds it gets to run the place and a group of young people battle an evil corporation to get to it first.  But the challenges to get to that Easter egg were a lot different.

There are 3 keys to unlock the Easter egg.  In the book the first key is found using a Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook.  In the movie the key is found by running a death race backwards.  By going in reverse at the start the race, Wade or Parzival as he's known online, goes through a trap door under the race track and then can sneak past King Kong guarding the finish line.  I guess visually that did look a lot better.

The second key was found by playing an old video came called Zork or something like that in the book.  In the movie it was from entering a copy of The Shining and finding a woman the creator went out with.  I think there was a different movie they had to find clues in in the book.  Was it Back to the Future?  Or one of the John Hughes ones?  Something like that.

The third key was actually pretty similar in book or movie in that it's in some fortress and the evil corporation protects it with a magical shield.  In the book it's Parzival who infiltrates the evil corporation to bring down the shield from the inside.  In the movie it's his girlfriend Artemis who's captured by the evil corporation and imprisoned in their headquarters and forced to slave away for them in the virtual world.

Similarly the bad guys trigger a bomb to wipe out everyone, but Parzival doesn't die because he has an extra life token.  In the book he gets the token by completing a game of Pac-Man on a single quarter.  In the movie he gets it from the robotic curator of a museum for the creator of the virtual world who turns out to be the former co-owner of the company.  In the book the young people actually go to the co-owner's house and he helps them get back online and was generally more involved.

Another change was Wade's house in the "Stacks" was supposed to be in Oklahoma City in the book but in the movie they move it to Columbus, which is where the evil company is also located.  It doesn't make much sense in the movie how all these people show up in Columbus, including two young people from Japan.

It's not that the movie was bad; it just wasn't as good.  The book goes a lot more into this world.  And there are a lot more 70s/80s references than 90s/2000s/2010s ones.  As I said in an entry a few months ago, this was a mistake because the "gunters" were supposed to be so obsessed with the creator that they completely immersed themselves in everything he was into back in the early days of video games.  There was also a lot more in the book about Wade's home situation and his parents and also him going to online school and such.

I'd say to read the book if you really want the full experience or just watch the movie if you don't care.

BTW, of all the Easter eggs in the movie, the one I liked most was during the death race when they pass a movie theater with a marquee saying, "Arnold Schwarzenegger in Jack Slater."  That's a reference to Last Action Hero, an underrated movie written by Zak Penn, who also worked on Ready Player One's script.