Starring the actor (Ahn Hyo-seop) who voiced the lead boy-band bad guy in KPop Demon Hunters, and one of the singers (Kim Ji-soo, also known mononymically as Jisoo) from real-world girl-band Blackpink, this Korean sci-fi-fantasy feature feels very skewed towards the young on all counts. Superficially, it appears to be about a guy named Kim Dok-ja (Ahn) who finds that the web novel he’s been following for years is turning into reality. That means the whole world becomes gamified, as if everyone has been turned into players compelled to kill to survive, while plagued by CGI monsters and puckish digital dokkaebi (demons) which explain things when the rules change.
But under the surface, this film is really about being popular, coping with traumatic childhood experiences such as being forced to beat up your best friend, getting a pimple, and building up enough gumption to tell authority figures – older people, your boss, the author of the book you’ve been a fan of for ages – that they suck.
A goodly chunk of the action in the first hour takes place on a commuter train which will inevitably remind some viewers of the far superior zombie-themed feature Train to Busan. That comparison gets thinned down with a big dollop of Ready Player One meets Squid Game meets Super Mario Bros: as Dok-ja and his newfound friends struggle to survive, the excessively complex gaming narrative involves collecting coins and then spending them on upskilling. Dok-ja’s buddies include pretty co-worker Yoo Sang-ah (Chae Soo-bin), nerdy primary-school-aged boy Lee Gil-yeong (Kwon Eun-seong) who loses his beloved ant farm in the first melee, fictional soldier come to life Lee Hyung-sung (Shin Seung-ho) and cold-hearted Yoo Joong-hyuk (heart-throb Lee Min-ho) who is the protagonist of the original web novel.
You’d think with all that palaver about novels becoming reality and so on that this would have a bit more fun with metatextual jokes, but no, the film is profoundly single note. Similarly, all the monsters kind of look the same with different serpentine-dragony-demigorgonoid components mixed and matched as needed, all of them moving with the same kind of hypersmooth sinuous motion generated by off-the-shelf CGI engines.
• Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy is on digital platforms from 15 December.
