Ernest Cline’s delightfully nerdy Ready Player One is on track to be adapted for the big screen by none other than Steven Spielberg, the man behind plenty of the pop culture touchstones of the 80s that suffuse the novel.
For his part, Steven Spielberg says it feels very trippy to be taking inspiration from a source material that he partially inspired, “but I’m not making this movie to remind people of my ‘80s movies. I may leave most of them out!”
Steven Spielberg’s ‘Ready Player One’ Casting Female Lead
Instead, Spielberg says the novel’s predictions about entertainment and escapism in the not-too-distant future are what’s most compelling to him. He calls the movie “a crystal ball into exactly what is going to be happening not in 30 or 40 years but in between 5 and 10 years from now, where a virtual world becomes almost like a drug of choice and where we are spending more time in a nonorganic space than we are breathing and eating and interacting in real life.”
Talking about his teenage kids and their friends, “They socialize for about a half hour, and it gets very quiet,” he says. “I walk into the kitchen and eight or nine girls are sitting around and they’re all looking at their phones, Snapchatting and texting and Twittering and reading. It’s all become so introverted.
“This movie is going to show why it’s interesting not living in the real world but what we’re missing by not,” Spielberg adds. “It’s a cautionary tale but it’s also a big rockin’ adventure movie, too.”
The merits of the obsession with social media among millennials are debatable, although I’m confident Spielberg will have something insightful and not reflexively critical to say. Are you excited to see Spielberg’s movie adaptation of Ready Player One? Let us know in the comments.
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Source: USAToday