We recommend movies to watch after you see Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernest Cline’s nostalgic novel.
This is not a guide to all the movies referenced in Ready Player One. There are plenty of videos attempting to highlight every one of the movie’s “Easter egg” homages and direct allusions featured in the pop culture smorgasbord based on Ernest Cline’s sci-fi novel. There’s more to the makeup of this movie than just its sampling and remixing of nostalgia-baiting icons of past films and video games.
This week’s curation of Movies to Watch After mix the most direct and substantial cinematic building blocks of Steven Spielberg’s latest with other relevant recommendations. Not included are the usual selections involving virtual reality, considering we recently detailed the history of VR in movies, plus I recently highlighted such works (including the essential World on a Wire) in lists of movies to watch after Ghost in the Shell and Mute.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Based on the book “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” by Roald Dahl, this movie would seem a victim of being ripped off if its clear influence wasn’t so acknowledged by everyone involved with Ready Player One. Spielberg went so far as to offer Gene Wilder, who played the titular a role, a similar part in his new movie — fortunately the late actor declined, since that would have been too on the nose.
But then so was having a version of the song “Pure Imagine” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in the trailer for Ready Player One. And so was Cline’s comparison of his story to Dahl’s when introducing the Ready Player One trailer last fall: “If Willy Wonka was a video game designer instead of a candy maker and he held his golden ticket contest inside the worlds greatest video game — that’s the essence of what the story is.”
Way to wear your influence on your sleeve, guys. Yes, both movies involve an eccentric business icon who decides to give away his company through a competition that captivates the whole world. Ready Player One hero Wade Watts even, like Willy Wonka hero Charlie Bucket, happens to live in the same city where the contest is sort of centralized (that’s not the case in the book, though). And his final test of selflessness before winning is very similar.
Besides Wonka, the character of James Halliday in Ready Player One is based on iconic businessman Howard Hughes (Cline says he’s about 15%) and video game designer Richard Garriott (the other 85%), according to Cline. Of course, you can see Hughes’s life portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. For Garriott’s story, check out the documentary Man on a Mission: Richard Garriott’s Road to the Stars, focused on his experience as a space tourist.
The Shining (1980)
One of the most significant movies of reference in Ready Player One, this Stephen King adaptation is actually meticulously recreated in Spielberg’s movie and employed as the setting of one of its virtual reality puzzles. After realizing a clue refers to King’s dislike of this film version of his 1977 novel, the heroes enter The Shining itself and navigate its Overlook Hotel setting, complete with encounters with the Grady twins, the bathing woman from room 237, the elevator blood deluge and the hedge maze.
It’s a very funny and freaky sequence, but it surely helps if you — unlike poor Aech — are familiar with Stanley Kubrick’s movie before seeing Ready Player One, but catching up with the horror classic afterwards is necessary if you’ve never seen it. Never mind if King would discourage doing so. While not part of the book, which has a task set in the world of WarGames instead, The Shining was substituted since its a Warner Bros. property. Also, Spielberg surely loved remaking bits of one of his favorite films (which he admits in the below video to not liking the first time he saw it). He had previously gotten to make a film that Kubrick had meant to direct himself, as well: A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Also, he repurposed the Overlook set for one of his own for Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Steve Jobs (2015)
Halliday is compared to Steve Jobs in Ready Player One, but he’s also somewhat inspired by the real-life tech legend and Apple co-founder. More than singularly based on Jobs, though, the relationship between Halliday and Ogden Morrow is very much akin to that of Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the other founder of Apple and Jobs’s former best friend. Basically, both pairs of partners had a falling out. Morrow is more aligned with Wozniak than Halliday is with Jobs, actually, with the character’s back story and career modeled more on the lesser known man.
You can see some of the relationship between Jobs and Wozniak depicted in this Oscar-nominated biopic from director Danny Boyle. It’s not just about the title figure’s true life story, though, and that also fits with Ready Player One more. While the point of Halliday’s contest in the end seemed to be an expression of the late OASIS mastermind’s regrets in life and love, including for his old friend, while Steve Jobs is a three-part film about Jobs’s role as a father-creator of both Apple computers and, more so, his daughter Lisa, and custody issues with each (more on that here). For a more truth-focused portrait, there are multiple documentaries to watch, including Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine and Steve James: The Lost Interview.
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