Emily’s Weekday Wonderings – Ready Player One
On Sunday we had our first discussion of the Reel Life 2018 casual worship series. We started with Ready Player One , currently the sixth highest grossing film worldwide this year. We ate popcorn, watched a trailer and a short clip from the film, sang hymns, lit candles, and had time to think together about some of the themes.
Ready Player One has received a lot of attention for its nostalgia and celebration of pop culture – many of the references are to the ’80s but earlier and later decades are also referenced in many ways. The film itself is set in 2045 in a future where the world is generally not appealing. There is poverty, economic inequality, and the increasing control of large corporations, but in many ways the world does not look all that different than our own – a matter of degree more than a significant upheaval. In this dystopic future, the general approach for the people is one of escapism. They escape to “The Oasis”, a virtual reality universe, where everyone spends their time. As the main character Wade Watts says “People escape to the Oasis because of all the things they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be.” These themes of virtual reality and online identity are ones that arise for us in our society today.
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