How often have you picked a book, a series, or a film – given your time and energy to the world it creates, only to be royally pissed by the way it ends? Take “Game of Thrones” fans, for example: dedicating 8 carefully administered years to a fictional world, only to be slapped in the face with that obnoxious ending. It’s not just a massive heartbreak, but also a lingering feeling of being cheated out of something one deserved.
The lonesome and introverted young protagonist in Byung-woo Kim’s “Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy” replicates that feeling when one of his favorite web-novels, “Ways to Survive the Apocalypse,” ends on a sorry note. Kim Dok-ja (Ahn Hyo-seop), who has followed the novel from his high-school days – a fictional world and a constant companion he had by his side when things got bad in the real world – has just ended his contract-based job, and the novel’s end has coincided with it.
The ending has left him so disappointed that, while taking the subway home that day, he decides to write to the author about it. I mean, the web novel’s audience shrank so much through the year that by the time it ended, only Kim Dok-Ja was the one reading it. What he did not anticipate was an answer. A thoughtful, absurd reasoning by the author blows his mind – he is offered to change the ending, but before he could do anything about it, a sudden shift in the train he is taking home traverses and blurs the lines between fiction and reality.
The world suddenly turns into the one that he has closely followed, with citizens thrust into a post-apocalyptic wasteland that is riddled with scenarios that they have to finish in order to proceed and survive. Everything gets extremely chaotic pretty soon, and Kim Dok-Ja becomes like a guiding light because he already knows this world inside out. He is joined by a makeshift crew that he meets as he navigates the incredibly weird scenarios in the game-like world: a work colleague, Sang-ah (Chae Soo-bin); a grief-stricken soldier; Hyeon-seong (Shin Seung-ho), a member of the original crew from the web novel; and Gil-yeong (Kwon Eun-seong), a young boy who has the ability to communicate with insects.
Based on the South Korean web-novel “Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint” by Sing Shong, Byung-woo Kim’s vision feels uninspired. The success of global hits like “Train to Busan” and “Squid Game” among a host of other web-toon-inspired IPs has left very little room for something new to be established without it feeling like a recycled version of the same story. However, it’s especially disheartening here because the self-indulgence of the fiction-within-fiction scenario of the narrative could have allowed the film to soar high with a wild, imaginative turn that’s so out there that any form of criticism would hit itself in the foot.
However, the film fails to conjure a single shred of pathos that makes you invested beyond the predictability of how everything pans out. Much like the protagonist who is obsessed with Jung-hyeok (Lee Min-ho) – the hero of the story-within-the-story who he belives would save the human race from complete extinction, Byung-woo Kim’s film is too dependent on his inspirations like “Dune, ” “Scott Pilgrim Vs the World,” and “Star Wars,” to carve an identity of it’s own. The CGI work is patchy and sloppy, with the monsters of the underground failing to elicit the form of terror that the film is aiming for. It also doesn’t help that none of these characters make a lasting impression despite a stacked cast of familiar stars from Korea.
That said, the first two acts of “Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy” are intriguing. Before the film turns into VFX-heavy slop, there are some interesting turns that it takes. At some point, a new order is formed within one of the challenges that the group has to endure. A politician devises the humans within the subway system to beg for points to survive through the day. The scene is enough to establish how the film is vehemently interested in looking at the human condition when survival becomes pertinent. It uncovers something deeper about people, and even though it’s enough for a blockbuster movie to not get to the bottom of it, I wish the film leaned more towards this aspect instead of barraging us with uninteresting set pieces that fail to give us a ‘satisfying ending’ anyway.
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