At The Movies: Korean fantasy Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy misses the mark

Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy (NC16)

117 minutes, opens July 31
★★☆☆☆

The story: Kim Dok-ja (Ahn Hyo-seop) is an underachiever at everything. The office worker takes refuge in the web novel Three Ways To Survive The Apocalypse, but its dwindling popularity turns him into its only reader. When he posts a criticism of the final chapter, the author replies, challenging him to write his own ending. On Kim’s way home from work, the novel’s monster-filled dystopian setting comes to life. Kim meets the novel’s hero, Yu Jung-hyeok (Lee Min-ho). Helped by his knowledge of what is to come, Dok-ja and his allies have to fight their way to safety.

This is a movie with plenty of ideas, but little coheres into a story. It does not help that the screenplay portrays contradictory themes.

Dok-ja is jolted out of his mundane reality by a message instructing him to “write his own story” – a call for him to use his free will.

But instead of breaking out of a narrative written for him – in the manner of The Truman Show (1998) – Dok-ja exercises his new-found autonomy by fighting monsters with tricks he has picked up from the novel, but modified to suit the situation. In Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy, this counts as freedom of thought.

The world has been plunged into a dystopian science-fiction fantasy in which gods are spectators at sadistic human-versus-monster matches. This is Squid Game (2021 to 2025) on a planetary scale, but with the mechanics of live streaming laid over it.

As humans fight for coins and loot, cosmic deities bestow treasure or special weapons on their favourite players – the way fans might drop gifts on a live streamer.

Plenty of world-building is needed to fully explain the goings-on, with much of it delivered through unwieldy blocks of dialogue.

At one point, the story perks up when it subverts the Chosen One trope. It begins to say that classic sci-fi heroes like Jung-hyeok are narcissists, but the thread is not satisfyingly pursued.

This is a complicated landscape that blends the virtual, low-stakes language of video gaming with high-stakes survival action-horror.

The herald of doom who explains the rules of the brutal new world is a cute Dokkaebi, or Korean goblin, an adorable sprite whose design might have been plucked from a Pixar movie.

The sardonic comedy, which sees survivors ripped apart for want of game coins, is jarring when juxtaposed against the grim battles waged by Dok-ja and his allies.

The goofiness of one undermines the life-or-death stakes of the other. The use of arcade-style game graphics – neon colours, floating buttons – makes everything feel weightless, a feeling reinforced by the digitally crafted monsters, which never feel like they belong in the same world as Dok-ja and his allies.

Each fighter is blessed with a game-changing talent. The enigmatic warrior Jeong Hee-won is played by Nana from the K-pop girl group After School, while Blackpink’s Jisoo portrays sniper Lee Ji-hye.

They are each given neatly packaged backstories that explain their skills and motivations. But, like the movie itself, the teammates never quite come together in a believable way.

Hot take: Flashy visuals and game mechanics cannot save Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy from muddled storytelling and hollow character dynamics.