Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is imminent, And while the trailer gave us a pretty overwhelming look at the inside of the OASIS, we still have yet to see what the dystopian reality looks like outside of the virtual world. As it turns out, it looks much like ours, except with more neon lighting and slightly cooler outfits.
I’m probably not going to rock your world if I tell you that Hollywood enjoys catering to the nostalgia of audiences. Some of the most successful shows and movies from the last few years - including Stranger Things and Ghostbusters - have succeeded specifically because they were able to recreate things that we loved when we were children. What made Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One such a worldwide phenomenon wasn’t just the author’s grasp of eighties and nineties popular culture, but the way he wove that into the book’s original narrative. His character’s obsession with the past was both his greatest strength and his biggest weakness.
Costume upgrades are pretty standard when it comes to superhero movies, and for the next X-Men outing, Dark Phoenix, our good super kids are getting some new gadgets too. Most importantly, Cyclops will have a new visor that’ll make him look a whole lot more like his older James Marsden counterpart (and a little less sillier than his Apocalypse look did).
Ready Player One could best be described as absolutely maddening to adapt into a movie. First of all, in Ernest Cline’s book you have two separate worlds to deal with: the dystopian slum world America has devolved into, and then the virtual world inside the OASIS that people use to escape their reality. The OASIS is peppered with ’80s and ’90s pop culture references — they become integral to the plot — so it makes sense that Steven Spielberg, one of the people who essentially created the late 20th century pop culture landscape, would be a good choice to direct it.
Ready Player One, Ernest Cline’s virtual reality dystopia, is getting the film adaptation treatment from Steven Spielberg, and he’s currently shooting it in London. The book takes place in the near future of 2044, and tells of an energy crisis that has forced most people to turn to OASIS, a VR game complete with chunky goggles, as a form of escape from their harsh reality.
Ready Player One was always meant to be a movie. With a plot that centers on millenial nostalgia for early ’90s video games, movies, and television shows, and a thoroughly likable group of characters, Ready Player One has been on many science-fiction fans’ most anticipated movie list since the movie rights were optioned. And on Friday, screenwriter Zak Penn posted on Twitter that production on the Steven Spielberg-led film adaptation had finally begun.