Thread by @monikabielskyte

1/ Finally saw Ready Player One in Mumbai. It was even trashier than I expected. I mean, how could the world design be SO unimaginative?

2/ Nothing felt fresh, nothing breathed LIFE in it. Not even the damn headset design! Like, seriously?!? I mean how in hell anyone would think that in 30 years VR devices will still look like glorified ski goggles?!?!?

3/ On a more serious note, I feel that RPO, in polar opposite to #BlackPanther, just closes down our imagination rather than opens it up in terms of what we can be as human society & what is the reality we can create for future generations.

4/ This critique by @tnyfrontrow is very much on point: ‘The movie’s icons of nostalgia provide a grotesque carnival of the undead, a uniform spew of icons emptied of substance, history, connections.’

newyorker.com/culture/richar…

‘#ReadyPlayerOne depicts a retrofitted universe that filters out any artist or subject cooler, bolder, more aware than Spielberg and his films—&, chillingly, that monolith of VR & nostalgia that fuels it isn’t depicted as a terrifying aspect of the movie’s dystopian premise.’

6/ #ReadyPlayerOne is buil around ‘a pathetic, synthetic echo effect—a paradise of nerd trends that reinforces a narrow view of the late twentieth century centered not on what mattered but on what sold.’

Also this:

External Tweet loading...
If nothing shows, it may have been deleted
by @sidizenkane view original on Twitter

7/ The total absence of animals in #ReadyPlayerOne might seem a sidenote but I find it extremely depressing too. We should never forget that with fiction we create reality.

8/ From the day one when people excitedly started whispering how this movie with be a fantastic way to launch VR for the masses, I bit my lip at the thought. IMHO this is the worst way to introduce audiences into what VR can & cannot be.

9/ Nostalgia is the vomit, it’s the food we have already eaten, digested, & regurgitated..... just to have it thrust down our throats once again. It bobbles my mind how one would find that ‘delicious’ or ‘comforting’.

10/ Past belongs to the past, unless we are able to bring into the future in new & unexpected ways. Telling new stories or creating new worlds you need to be inspired by new realities. You need to live by new realities.

11/ So I’ll finish with this yet again: there is so much to explore in this world, & we should at least try & do that. Stories are Power & Nostalgia is Poison. Onwards!

12/ Oh! & thank you @warrenellis for sharing this with me: ‘Aside from the nostalgia epidemic itself, there was also an outbreak of fake nostalgia among soldiers, who would pretend to miss their friends and family to get out of fighting’

theatlantic.com/health/archive…

13/ continuing ‘advice on treatment from Hippolyte Petit is as relevant to someone clinging to the past today as it was to a soldier driven mad a hundreds of years ago: Create new loves for the person suffering from love sickness; find new joys to erase the domination of the old’