While Steven Spielberg is back in the awards race this year with The Post, his long-awaited return to blockbuster mode is merely months away. Indeed, Spielberg will have prepped, shot, and released The Post all while continuing post-production on Ready Player One, because the dude is inhuman. The Ernie Cline adaptation was a curious choice of material for the legendary filmmaker, as it sees him revisiting 1980s pop culture iconography in a big way while also commenting on the future of virtual reality.
A new trailer for Ready Player One is set to hit this Sunday morning, but ahead of that trailer a few new images have been released that illuminate some very fascinating aspects of the film—especially for those that have read the book.
For those unfamiliar, the film takes place in 2045, where the world is on the brink of chaos and collapse. Tye Sheridan stars as young boy named Wade Watts, who decides to join a worldwide contest to find a literal Easter egg hidden in the OASIS, an expansive virtual reality in which most people now spend their time. Whoever finds the Easter egg gains control of the OASIS in perpetuity, so Wade teams up with other “gunters” to find the egg before a nefarious corporation can find it and monetize the whole thing, locking out those less fortunate.
One of these new images reveals the avatars of Wade and Olivia Cooke’s lead character, Samantha, whose avatar Art3mis rides the motorcycle from the anime Akira and meets up with Wade in the OASIS. It appears her character is changing the most from the books, and it’ll be interesting to see how she’s handled in the film, which was scripted by Cline and Zak Penn (X2).
Sheridan tells EW, which debuted the images, that Spielberg told him to modify his performances as Wade and as his avatar Parzival, who was performed via motion-capture:
“[Parzival] is a bit more confident than Wade. It’s a nice little contrast between who he is in the OASIS and who he is in the real world. When we first meet Parzival, he wins the first race and his avatar becomes this celebrity within the OASIS. But [Wade] is an outcast and an underdog in the real world, and no one knows that he’s actually Parzival. It’s almost like a Clark Kent thing, where he’s someone super, but no one knows about it.”
We’ll get a closer look on Sunday with the trailer, but for now check out these new images below via EW. The avatar one features Parzival, Art3mis, and the OASIS librarian The Curator watching virtual-reality archival footage of OASIS creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance) and Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg). Ready Player One opens in theaters on March 30, 2018.
