Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy

Real fans often wish they could re-write the endings for their favorite franchises, especially since Disney has acquired so many big-name properties (to promptly ruin). However, Kim Dok-ja can’t blame the Mouse House. They would never touch IP like his favorite web-novel, because its readership had diminished to a single follower: Kim. That certainly gives him the right to complain. When he sends angry feedback, the mysterious author challenges him to write his own ending. However, he must do so IRL, when reality starts to parallel the opening of the web-novel in Kim Byung-woo’s Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy, based on Sing Shong’s Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint web-novel, which releases today on VOD in the UK.

In Kim’s longtime favorite web-novel Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse, an impish dokkaebi announces to the hero’s subway car, the Constellations are angry with humanity, so they decided to plunge Earth into planet-wide survival game to punish our wickedness. To survive the first challenge, everyone must take a life.

Knowing the secret behind each game, Kim devises a workaround killing ants in a boy’s ant farm. Of course, some of his commuters would rather earn their points the “honest way.” Nevertheless, many survivors quickly recognize Kim’s strategic advantage in the game, including his former work colleague, Yoo Sang-ah. Kim also tries to save several of his favorite characters, whom he believed died too soon in the web-novel, including righteous but guilt-ridden soldier Lee Hyun-sung, and Jung Hee-won, who was driven to punish predators who took advantage of the game’s chaos for their own sadistic pleasure.

The source web-novel ran for five multi-chapter volumes plus an extended epilogue that sounds like a separate volume in its own right, so not surprisingly, the first film never gets close to explaining why real-life is suddenly paralleling the apocalyptic events Kim Dok-ja already read about.

The concept is intriguing, but the quality of the CGI effects varies drastically. Yet, ironically, viewers unfamiliar with the source material might best enjoy the high campiness of the film’s cheesier indulgences. Kim Byung-woo takes big swings—that’s for sure.

Ahn Hyo-seop is awkwardly earnest and naïve in a strangely likeable way. Despite his character’s stiffness, Ahn develops a nice comradery with Chae Soo-bin and Shin Seung-ho as Yoo and Lee. With the addition of Nana (a.k.a. Im Jin-ah), whose steeliness and fierceness as Jung makes a welcome contrast to Ahn’s goody-two-shoe Kim, the quartet forms a solid nucleus you can’t help rooting for. Unfortunately, the film lacks a strong nemesis for Kim Dok-ja and his allies, who simply fight one CGI’ed ludicrously fake boss after another

Kim Byung-woo’s adaptation could have asked provocative questions regarding free will and predestination, given Kim Dok-ja pre-knowledge of the game. Instead, the film mainly delivers a parade of outlandishly silly visuals. Yet, that over-the-top-ness is what gives it such oddball charm. Recommended as a guilty pleasure, Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy releases today (12/15) on UK VOD platforms (and it is already available for digital rental in the U.S.).