A worthwhile Armada adaptation needs to follow the same course by making the plot more distinctive and creative and finding more resonant elements in its simplistic characters.īut like Ready Player One, the Armada adaptation is presumably going to be aimed at a comparatively wide audience, and its fantasies of validation and recognition have to reach further than the comparatively narrow world of competitive video gamers. And it gets its strongest character work by significantly deepening the character of Halliday, the tragic games designer whose obsessions define protagonist Wade Watt’s world. The film version of Ready Player One takes some sharp left turns from the book, replacing its most unfilmable scenes - like the one where he reenacts the entirety of Monty Python and the Holy Grail - with surprising new material.
The book doesn’t bring enough of a fresh take to the “video games are actually training people to fight aliens” concept. But just acknowledging the plot similarities doesn’t excuse them. Armada openly mentions both works and presents itself as the “real” version of their fictional story. One of the most frustrating things about Armada is that it’s a lightly re-skinned take on the 1984 movie The Last Starfighter, and, to a lesser degree, Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel Ender’s Game. It’d also cut down on endless critical hand-wringing over whether the film is based in cultural awareness or empty nostalgia. Limiting the spazzy references to Zack and his closest buddies, for instance, would make him a distinctive character instead of just another cog in the reference machine. For Armada, Cline and Mazeau could easily pare them down a lot further. Ready Player One needs its cultural baggage to make its plot and setting work, but the film pares down the references to what’s necessary for the action, and pushes the rest of them to the backdrop, as set dressing instead of centerpieces. It’s self-indulgent and repetitive, and it makes widely diverse characters from around the world all feel like identically drawn Ernest Cline clones. Even Zack’s mom uses Lord of the Rings’ line “You shall not pass!” when scolding him.
But that doesn’t explain the way Cline turns every sympathetic character in Armada into a quote-slinging, trivia-arguing fan nerd. Protagonist Zack Lightman has a reason to care about ‘80s culture, since it connects him to his long-gone father, who left behind a conspiracy theory tied to old movies. Focus on the action, not the lists of references.Īrmada practically chokes on its pop culture references, and unlike Ready Player One, it doesn’t make them integral to the plot.
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