Dewal Moods in Spielberg's Ready Player One
Ready Player One directed by Steven Allan Spielberg takes place in Columbus, Ohio in the year 2045. Nowadays, rather than fixing problems, people decided to just try and outlive them. There were corn syrup droughts, bandwidth riots, and now an energy crisis. Today the sky is always grey and cloudy, and reality is just a drag. This being said, living is not like it once was. The vast majority of the population lives in shanty suburbs referred to as the stacks. The stacks sit on the edge of most major cities, they are composed of thousands of trailers, mobile homes, and storage containers stacked on top of each other in rows, some as tall as 22 units high. They are held together by any sort of mental support they can find. On top of each stack are solar panels that provide power to all of the homes below. Due to the height of the stacks, little to no sun can make it to the ground making them an awfully gloomy dull place where a lot of crime is committed. Additionally, the surrounding city has a very similar atmosphere. Everything seems to be closed down and abandoned, with graffiti and trash everywhere you turn. The different materials that can be seen throughout the real world are rusty, dirty, old, and unkempt metals. Which created an ultimate gloomy mood.
In a time like this everyone is looking for a way to escape reality. James Donovan Halliday, a character in Ready Player One, made this possible. He designed a video game. The name of the game is “OASIS”, which, by definition, is an oasis. The OASIS is a virtual reality world where you can go somewhere without going anywhere at all. You can become best friends with someone that lives on the other side of the world. Technology has taken over the world in every aspect possible. The only reason anyone leaves the OASIS is to eat, sleep, and use the restroom. Life has become so dull and gloomy outside of the game, that people want to spend every living moment in the game. Unlike the real world, in the OASIS you can be anything and do anything you want. Everything is new, flashy, and luminous, with bright warm neon lights everywhere. The materials that can be viewed throughout are shiny, futuristic, and technologically advanced. Which creates a bright and cheerful mood.
The use of technology within this film is so advanced and futuristic just like the ideologies of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk takes both the aesthetics of dystopian life and technological utopia, which is seen in both aspects of the movie, and brings them together. The different uses of materials and colors have an enormous impact on this. The cyberpunk ideology takes these two different moods created by the imagery and materials of the movie and combines them into one new aesthetic. This is done by taking the old run-down cities (similar to this one) and bringing new technologically advanced gadgets, like the hyperloop, into them. By taking the once old and turning it into something new and inviting again by adding color, technology, and lights this cyberpunk reality is able to immerse.
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