Ready Player One is a tremendously entertaining movie. I finally saw it this Wednesday and toward the end I began to realize something: This is basically a modern version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Spoilers follow.
There are many differences between both films, of course. Ready Player One is violent. It has a nefarious villain who goes to great lengths to stop the Egg Hunters (or ‘Gunters’) from winning. There’s romance and high-tech shenanigans and enormous amounts of truly impressive CGI. It’s filled to the brim with pop-culture references and takes place in a dystopian future that’s truly chilling to behold.
Willy Wonka, on the other hand, is far less dramatic and action-packed. There are singing Oompa Loompas and a shrinking machine that turns a bratty kid into a tiny person so he can walk around inside a fake TV. There’s not really a bad guy so much as there are bad qualities and vices that sabotage nearly all of the characters. Nobody gets blown up, unless you count the blueberry girl. Being spoiled rotten, lying, indulging in gluttony—these are the real villains of Willy Wonka, not some wicked corporation.
Nevertheless, the movies are strikingly similar. They’re both based off of books, for one thing, and they’re both excellent adaptations whose screenplays were co-written by their respective authors. Roald Dahl helped write the script for the movie adaptation of Willy Wonka and Ernest Cline co-wrote the script for Ready Player One. This is actually not a very common thing to see with film adaptations of popular books.
The Story
Ready Player One is the story of a boy named Wade, who lives in poverty with his useless relatives who suddenly finds himself in the middle of a quest for an Easter Egg in a magical virtual reality world called the Oasis. Whoever finds the Easter Egg, which was hidden in the Oasis by its creator, the quirky mad scientist James Halliday, will not only win the game, they’ll take over control of the Oasis and all Halliday’s vast wealth.
Willy Wonka is the story of a boy named Charlie who lives in poverty with his useless relatives who suddenly finds himself in possession of a Golden Ticket. He and several others will get to tour Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Wonka is a quirky mad scientist who leads a group of children through his magical factory, slowly thinning the herd thanks to each child (and parent’s) vices.
In the end of Ready Player One only Wade Watts makes it to the Easter Egg, where the bearded, wizardly VR avatar of James Halliday offers him vast riches if he’ll just sign on the dotted line. He tests Wade, and Wade passes the test. Wade—or Parcival as he’s called in the game world—inherits the OASIS and decides to run it with his friends, stopping the wicked IOI corporation from gaining control. They create a better virtual world and everyone lives happily ever after.
In the end of Willy Wonka only Charlie makes it out of the factory without some calamity befalling him. We discover that each of the other children was going to break their promise to Wonka and sell the secret of the Everlasting Gobstopper to Wonka’s supposed rival, Mr. Slugworth. But Slugworth was just Wonka’s spy, testing each of the children to see whether they would be suitable to run his factory. Charlie passes the test and inherits Wonka’s magical factory. We don’t know if he runs it to the ground because the next thing we know they’re all taking off in the great glass elevator.
Each features a very odd, very quirky and very rich hermit who sets up a contest in order to find someone to take over his company before an evil competitor swoops in to take over. In Ready Player One that’s IOI and its CEO, Sorrento. In Willy Wonka it’s the mysterious Mr. Slugworth who isn’t actually Slugworth at all.
Willy Wonka and James Halliday even look similar to one another, though their quirks and mannerisms are quite different. Wonka is self-assured and even a bit menacing at times. He confuses everyone around him and delights in their discomfort. Halliday, meanwhile, is funny but awkward. He doesn’t feel at home in the real world or comfortable around real people. That’s why he created the OASIS in the first place. Wonka is more sociable, but even he’s locked himself away for years, preferring the company of the Oompa Loompas to that of his fellow humans. Both Gene Wilder as Wonka and Mark Rylance as Halliday do a wonderful job in their respective roles.
The OASIS, meanwhile, is a modern take on the Wonka’s chocolate factory. Even the lyrics of Wonka’s first song, Pure Imagination, could be used to describe Halliday’s virtual world just as accurately as they describe the chocolate factory:
Come with me
And you’ll be
In a world of
Pure imagination
Take a look
And you’ll see
Into your imaginationWe’ll begin
With a spin
Traveling in
The world of my creation
What we’ll see
Will defy
ExplanationIf you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Wanna change the world?
There’s nothing
To itThere is no
Life I know
To compare with
Pure imagination
Living there
You’ll be free
If you truly wish to be
This may as well be the song playing over Wade’s introduction to the OASIS. In that narration he very nearly quotes the song, telling audiences “This is the Oasis. It’s a place where the limits of reality are your own imagination. People come to the Oasis for all the things they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be.”
Both films present a magical fantasy world that their protagonists can lose themselves in. Wade and Charlie are both poor and friendless and find their calling inside the ‘world of pure imagination.’ Both are about escapism but an escapism that is ultimately unselfish and connected to others. Charlie brings his grandpa along and refuses Mr. Slugworth’s advances. Wade finds friends in the virtual world who end up helping him in the real one. Both are tested to see if they understand that winning is about more than just victory, more than just the prize at the end of the race, and both pass with flying colors.
This observation isn’t intended to rain on Ready Player One’s parade or question its originality. It’s a fantastic film that I enjoyed (mostly) from start to finish, with some of the best CGI I’ve ever seen and tons of really fun nods to many of my favorite games, movies and music. The entire segment with The Shining deserves a post of its own. It was hilarious and incredibly clever.
I simply find it interesting how incredibly alike the two stories turned out to be. There’s even a golden egg in Ready Player One, mirroring the golden eggs that Veruca Salt so badly wanted—and never got—in Willy Wonka.
I want the world, she sings. I want the whole world. I want to lock it all up in my pocket, it’s my bar of chocolate. Give it to me…now! Salt should go work at IOI.
In the end, both films ultimately leave us with the same message: It’s not all about winning. It’s not all about having it all, even when you do win. It’s about treating people with decency and compassion. The prize for being a decent human being is much more than a golden egg.
