A better reality awaits in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One

(image courtesy Laughing Squid)

 

SNAPSHOT
Based on “Ready Player One,” the first novel by Fanboys screenwriter Ernie Cline. In the near future, outcast teenager Wade Watts escapes from his bleak surroundings by logging in to the OASIS, a globally networked virtual utopia where users can lead idyllic alternate lives. When the eccentric billionaire who created the OASIS dies, he offers up his vast fortune as the prize in an elaborate treasure hunt. Along with gamers from around the world, Wade joins the adventure, and quickly finds himself pitted against powerful corporate foes and other ruthless competitors who will do anything, in the oasis or the real world, to reach the treasure first. (synopsis via Coming Soon)

Gotta say the future doesn’t look all that attractive.

I’m usually a glass half-full kinda guy but as current world affairs spiral seemingly out of control, climate change threatens to take our planet away from us and inequity and intolerance, you can’t help feeling that the more dystopian visions of the future are pretty much right on the mark.

Such as the one that Ernest Cline presents us with in his 2011 novel Ready Player One where Earth is a shadow of its former self, humanity is too and pretty much the only thing left to us of any value is to escape into what is essentially a fantasy land.

OASIS may look beguiling but it’s unnerving that we might reach this point, cut adrift from the real world and trapped in a flawed confection of our own making.

Thing is no matter how idyllic something may look, humanity has a way of dragging it through the mud, and as Ready Player One winningly demonstrates, that may make for great drama but not much of a life.

Ready Player One opens in opens in Australia on 29 March 2018, and in USA and UK on 30 March.

 

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