I'm going full curmudgeon on this one - GET OFF MY LAWN!

Rating: 3/10 (7 April 2018)

I heard recently that the time that defines your youth is when you were 14 years old. I was born on the exact same day as Sean Astin (yeah, the hobbit guy who gave ST2 ultimate 80s cred) - so me and Sean were 14 in 1985, we are the quintessential 80s teens.
So I nearly cried when I read Ready Player One - it captured so much of the cultural (albeit the good stuff - there was a lot of crap) identity of the 1980's. I nearly cried again after seeing the film - because it managed to completely ignore all of that.
To give this film it's due, the screenplay is a reasonable adaptation. I'm not going to pretend it should have faithfully represented the book - but they got the story. Let's face it, the story isn't that complicated - it's Willy Wonka in space - but there is a lot to compress into an hour and a half.
However, the book is a litany of 80s icons - WarGames, MTV, Star Wars, Atari, Computer Geeks, Pac Man, A-ha, Dungeons & Dragons, Video Arcades, Anime... and of course Kevin Smith. Good luck finding any of that in the film.
The genuinely 80s WarGames scene is replaced with a scene from the Shining - give it credit, well done - but Halliday would have been 8 when that R-rated film came out. How the hell was that his favourite film? WarGames on the other hand inspired a generation of computer geeks (like Halliday).
What bothers me most is reading other reviews that are amazed about how well the "zeitgeist" was captured. And what most bothers about that, is that those reviewers were in nappies in 1989.
It is disappointing that they didn't get an iconic 80s director like Spielberg to direct this - now there's a man who knew the 80s.
My suggestion, if you're still living in the past, like me - read the book "Ready Player One" and love it. Then maybe watch the totally unrelated film of the same name and relish the idea of a battle with 15 Master Chiefs.