Ready Player One Trailer Explained: 10 Things We Learned
Spielberg's ad aptation of Ernest Cline's novel looks bold, bright and surprisingly timely.
The upcoming release of Ready Player One, in cinemas March 2018, will likely mean different things to different people. Some have been eagerly anticipating the movie adaptation of Ernest Cline's best-selling 2011 novel, while others are excited to see legendary director Steven Spielberg return to PG-13 blockbuster adventure terrain for the first time since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
However, plenty more may be looking at Ready Player One without the first clue as to what it is or why they should care, as demonstrated by the somewhat stilted reaction to the first teaser trailer from San Diego Comic Con in July. The fact that this initial teaser declared the film a 'Holy Grail of Pop Culture' didn't go down too well with the many who were completely unfamiliar with the source material, or the portion of readers left unimpressed by Cline's novel.
But with just over three months until its release, there's still time for Ready Player One to win over the doubters - and a good first step toward that came in the first official theatrical trailer for the movie, which arrived online this past weekend.
Starring X-Men: Apocalypse's Tye Sheridan as young hero Wade Watts AKA Parzival, Ready Player One is an epic treasure hunt/battle for survival in a virtual reality dreamworld called the OASIS - and from what we've seen so far, it promises to be quite a spectacle.
10. What The OASIS Avatars Look Like
The initial teaser gave us a clear look at Sheridan's Wade and his bleak existence in the 'stacks': trailer parks in which the trailers are parked on top of one another, as well as side-by-side. However, we hadn't yet seen Parzival, the personalised avatar Wade uses in the OASIS.
The theatrical trailer gives us a clear look at Parzival, and as may have been expected considering he only exists within a virtual reality, he and all the other OASIS avatars are 100% digital creations. Indeed, it would appear that all the footage from within the OASIS has been realised via the same mo-cap CGI technology Spielberg used on 2011's The Adventures of Tintin, and in a lesser capacity on 2016's The BFG.
A common complaint of this technology (long-championed by Robert Zemeckis, who used it on The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol) is that it has a cold, lifeless quality which inadvertently renders its characters a bit creepy. However, it was of course the only logical means of bringing the world of Ready Player One to life; as a virtual world, it shouldn't seem completely real.
However, readers of the novel may be taken aback by how much of the trailer appears to take place in the bleak real world of 2044. It's clear that, in adapting the novel, Cline and co-screenwriter Zak Penn have made some significant changes.