Ready Player Two this November

The sequel to Ready Player One, adapted into a big budget feature film by director Steven Spielberg (Jurassic Park), will be published this November. Author Ernest Cline takes readers back to the Oasis, a virtual reality game, in Ready Player Two (affiliate link).

In the wake of Netflix's Stranger Things capturing the zeitgeist for eighties nostalgia. Spielberg's blockbuster adaptation left me cold. Mostly. A sense of wonder, a hallmark of the director's beloved classics from my formative years, was markedly absent and in its place was attention deficit disorder (ADD) and cynical commercialism.

Alan Silvestri's soundtrack playfully references his work on Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future trilogy and longtime Spielberg collaborator John Williams, but that zest was too short-lived to elevate the film above a series of mediocre vignettes despite charismatic leads Tye Sheridan (Wade Watts) and Olivia Cooke (Art3mis).

Personally, I preferred listening to the Ready Player One audiobook read by Wil Wheaton. Wheaton is best known to geeks (myself included) for his portrayal of Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Sheldon's (Jim Parsons) nemesis in The Big Bang Theory.