Ready Player One: Blast from the past
Actors Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke and Lena Waithe discuss the message of Steven Spielberg’s scifi adaptation ‘Ready Player One’
In Steven Spielberg’s latest sci-fi adventure, Ready Player One ,we take a trip down a nostalgia lane like no other.
An adaptation of Ernest Cline’s 2011 bestselling book of the same name, the film is at once a call to the future and an ode to times gone by — a little like one of Spielberg’s earlier productions,
Back to the Future. But it doesn’t just end at a simplistic thematic similarity. In a thrilling moment right in the centre of all the action in Ready Player One , we get a grand viewing of the legendary DeLorean, hotly pursued by a T-Rex and King Kong, and we expect nerds all over the world to break into applause when the movie hits theatres today.
Set in Ohio, Ready Player One takes place in the not so distant and dystopic future of the year 2045, where a large part of the population live in precariously stacked tenements in trailer parks. To escape the crippling poverty and squalor, most people spend their lives behind VR glasses as avatars in the virtual world of the Oasis — an escapist virtual reality game created by geek genius and 1980s-obsessed James Halliday (played by Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance), who kicks the bucket unexpectedly. But in his death, he bequeaths control of his creation and all of his considerable wealth to the person who can find an Easter egg hidden deep in the game.
Despite boasting big names like Rylance, Simon Pegg and Ben Mendelsohn,
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Tye Sheridan on never having played Atari 2600: “Although I was very familiar with ’80s arcade games, I had never actually played a video game on a console from that era. I had seen tonnes of videos of people playing, played the game online and read up on the games, and done as much research as I possibly could... So, when it was time to shoot the scene where I was playing the Atari 2600, I had to pull Steven aside and say, ‘Hey, I’ve never actually played Atari before. Can you make sure I’m holding the controller right?’”
the weight of the film is carried by its three relatively young lead actors: the up and coming Tye Sheridan (Mud,
X-Men: Apocalypse), the British import
Olivia Cooke (Me, Earl and the Dying Girl), and, most importantly, Lena Waithe, who makes her big screen debut with this movie.
You remember Waithe from Master of
None, for which she also won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series — the first black woman to win the coveted prize.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Spielberg succinctly explained Waithe’s aura, “She was accessible at a glance. Her honesty was glaring. And she couldn’t hit a wrong note, because she found a way to be herself on-camera. I suddenly felt like I had hit the jackpot. The magic hadn’t