Prepare your quarters, cheat codes, a 2-liter bottle of Shasta and your all-Rush mix tape. The first proper trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One has arrived. The preview comes after folks have had ample time to digest the nostalgia-laced teaser that came before it.
Like the teaser, the Ready Player One trailer blurs the lines between pop culture creature comforts and escapism with our hero’s IRL status being less fun than all the VAN FREAKING HALEN blasting throughout the preview would suggest. Based on the Ernest Cline novel of the same name, the events showcased in this peek reveal tons of thrills (show up whenever you like, King Kong) and a lot of destitute folks not having a good time in their non-IRL surroundings.
Here’s the Warner Bros. breakdown of what to expect from Ready Player One.
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.
Early chatter about the previous teaser morphed into a debate about how the film’s familiar pop culture elements will be deployed and that back-n-forth isn’t likely to disappear after this trailer. (Even if it does reign things in comparatively versus the teaser.)
Ready Player One is set to arrive in theaters on March 30, 2018.
