It’s been years in the making, but it’s finally here. Witness the awesomeness of the first full length trailer for Steven Spielberg’s new cyberpunk thriller, Ready Player One.

Ready Player OneIt all starts with a kid named Wade Watts. His father named him that because he thought it sounded like a superhero’s secret identity. But with his parents gone, and society unraveling around him, he takes solace in the Oasis, a massive virtual universe. Wade unexpectedly becomes a hero in this synthetic world, in which people go to escape from the harsh realities of their real lives.

Based on a novel by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One is set in the near future. It’s the year 2045, and the real world is an ugly place.

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them.

For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.

Ready Player One is chock full of 20th Century pop culture references, from so many different franchises that it’s astonishing that they were able to put together so many recognizable memes in one film. It’s like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or  to a lesser degree, Wreck It Ralph, in this respect.  (Watch for Overwatch’s Tracer, King Kong It also reminds one of the promise of virtual online universes like Second Life, in which this very station got its original start.

The film is directed by Stevel Spielberg, will feature a theatrical score by Alex Silvestri, and stars Tye Sheridan as Wade Watts / Parzival, and releases March 30, 2018.

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SCIFI Radio Staff

SCIFI Radio Staff

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