Through the magic of cinema, dream impresario Steven Spielberg has saved Private Ryan, chronicled the invasion of Earth by Martians, raided the Temple of Doom and explored the impact of artificial intelligence on our lives.
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His latest film, Ready Player One, delves deeper into the impact of popular culture on our senses and the manner of our adoption of virtual living through our immersion in technology.
You only have to wander down the streets of Canberra to see the all-pervasive way we engage technology.
The latest revelations about social media giants such as Facebook and stories about people’s total addiction to online gaming in countries across the globe are the backbone of Spielberg’s latest cinematic outing.
On the surface, Ready Player One is an upfront and straightforward story about a society, its citizens and how they have become reliant on a virtual world, The Oasis.
The Oasis provides a respite from the dreariness of everyday living. Ordinary denizens of Columbus, Ohio, like Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), live in The Stacks, a suburb comprised of caravans literally stacked on top of one another in an impoverished version of high-rise living.
Everyone living in The Stacks resorts to living a virtual life in The Oasis. They can be anyone and try anything.
Even though the residents of The Stacks find shelter from their impoverished lives in The Oasis, The Oasis enslaves them. They are dependent on and the victims of technology. The Oasis supplants their actual lives.
When Halliday, the creator of The Oasis, dies, everyone has the opportunity to escape their miserable lives because Halliday has created a hidden Easter egg that gives the person who finds it total control of The Oasis.
People’s reliance on The Oasis is reflected in our own reliance on invented entertainment in the form of the very film we are watching, Ready Player One, and the multitude of films, music, apps and games we rely on as diversions within our own lives.
Ready Player One is loaded with cultural references. You’ll be challenged to keep up with them.
The next time you log in to Facebook, SnapChat, What’s App, Instagram and the multitude of other apps on which we have become reliant, consider whether Spielberg’s proposition in Ready Player One is all that far-fetched.
In the dream world of the film The Terminator, humans battle Skynet, a network of machines from the future intent on erasing humanity. We don’t need to worry about machines from the future. We only have to look at our dependence on social media to see that Skynet and Big Brother are already here.
In Ready Player One, Spielberg is prescient about how we’ve embraced technology and our subjugation by the digital world.