Ernest Cline novel’s Ready Player One is a fantasy of the future obsessed with the fantasies of the past, many of which were directed or produced by director Steven Spielberg. Now Ready Player One is being turned into a movie by ... director Steven Spielberg. The snake is eating its own tail. (And then the tail lights up and John Williams’ music swells and the kid in the red hoodie cries.)

The new trailer for Ready Player One begins with clips from Spielberg’s greatest ’70s and ’80s hits before segueing into footage from the new film, along with interviews with the director himself, calling Cline a “visionary” and claiming that he believes the future of the film and book are not far off from what awaits us all in the year 2045. We’ll see about that, but in the meantime the movie is due in theaters in just a couple months. Here’s the official synopsis:

From filmmaker Steven Spielberg comes the science fiction action adventure Ready Player One, based on Ernest Cline’s bestseller of the same name, which has become a worldwide phenomenon. The film is set in 2045, with the world on the brink of chaos and collapse. But the people have found salvation in the OASIS, an expansive virtual reality universe created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance). When Halliday dies, he leaves his immense fortune to the first person to find a digital Easter egg he has hidden somewhere in the OASIS, sparking a contest that grips the entire world. When an unlikely young hero named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) decides to join the contest, he is hurled into a breakneck, reality-bending treasure hunt through a fantastical universe of mystery, discovery and danger.

To me, Spielberg making a movie based on a book rooted in Spielberg nostalgia is by far the most interesting part of this. That and those shots that go from objective angle to POV with one swooping camera move into the VR goggles. If Spielberg can marry his incredible eye with a genuinely original look at this new technology (with a little nostalgia in it) then Ready Player One may live up to the movies that inspired it. The film opens in theaters on March 30, 2018.

 

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