The second is the OASIS, a dazzling land bound only by the limits of one’s imagination that has somehow ossified around late 20th-century pop-culture artifacts as if they’re religious icons. The first is our real world, which has become far more polluted and overcrowded-both a typical and believable near-future prediction. Steven Spielberg’s new film is set in two different dystopias, but it’s only intermittently interested in acknowledging that. The American dream is a rotting corpse, and instead of hoping for a better life, people while away their days in the OASIS: a virtual-reality realm filled with cartoon avatars of logged-on gamers, where you can do whatever you want as long as you have enough coins (a currency, it seems, that’s largely earned by blowing up other gamers). The year is 2045, and the world is an overpopulated wasteland in Columbus, Ohio, the fastest-growing city on Earth, people live in shipping containers stacked on top of each other. Ready Player One is a beautifully, expensively realized vision of hell.
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