Van Halen Jumpstarts Steven Spielberg’s New ‘Ready Player One’ Trailer
Van Halen's "Jump" spikes the adrenaline in the new trailer for Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. Watch the clip, which also features Depeche Mode's "World in My Eyes," above.
The film is based on the 2011 science fiction novel by Ernest Cline. Set in a dystopian 2045, the population has largely retreated into a virtual reality known as the Oasis. Our orphaned narrator Wade Watts sets the stage, saying "people come to the Oasis for all the things that they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be." We soon learn that the creator of Oasis has died, leaving behind an Easter egg in the game. Whomever reaches it first gains control of the Oasis, and as a result, the world's new economy.
The race for the egg is on, and so is "Jump." The chart-topping lead single from Van Halen's 1984, it has often been used as a theme song in the world of sports and remains their best-charting Top 100 single. That big success belies the long road taken by this track, which grew from a number of smaller creative moments.
"'Jump' is a song that we wrote for several different reasons, primarily because it is leap year and secondly, because I was watching television one night and it was the 5 o'clock news, and there was a fellow standing on top of the Arco Towers in Los Angeles and he was about to check out early, he was going to do the 33-story drop — and there was a whole crowd of people in the parking lot downstairs yelling 'Don't jump, don't jump' and I thought to myself, 'Jump,'" David Lee Roth said at the time. "So, I wrote it down and ultimately it made in onto the record, although in a much more positive vein. It's easy to translate it the way you hear it on the record as a 'go for it' attitude, positive sort of affair — an I-jog-therefore-I-am approach."
Eddie Van Halen's synth line, meanwhile, dates all the way back to 1981. It languished in the vaults for years, he's said, after being rejected by his bandmates.
This action-packed new clip from Ready Player One comes five months after the previous trailer, which featured Rush's "Tom Sawyer," from 1981's Moving Pictures. Speilberg's film will hit theaters on March 30, 2018.