Ready Player One, a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline that includes a litany of 1980s pop-culture references like Back to the Future and Indiana Jones, will be directed by none other than Steven Spielberg.
Considering that the dystopian novel is about a teenager named Wade Watts who only feels comfortable while in a virtual utopia called OASIS, the film adaptation sounds like something out of Spielberg's brain anyway.
Given that Spielberg will be sort of directing a film about his films in some strange meta universe, he describes the experience as being "very trippy," according to a piece in USA Today. He doesn't believe this film isn't about a future 30 or 40 years from now but one "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."
Spielberg is equally interested but concerned about a world where teenagers "socialize for about a half-hour" but then start "looking at their phones, Snapchatting and texting and Twittering and reading." In general, the movie will be akin to a "cautionary tale" that's about the fascinations of "living in the real world but what we're missing by not."
