Hollywood just does not get movies anymore.

Rating: 4/10 (11 January 2019)

If you've read the book, you will hate this movie. If you have not read this book but have seen any other movie ever, you'll probably still think this movie is pretty poor.
It's a great story (in the book) but they mangled it so much only the general synopsis & character names are the same. It's soulless pop-culture references are thrown together with no logic or charm, clearly the screenplay had no geeks to give helpful advice like "Halo is poop for jocks so don't reference it, unless you are going to have the lead geek disparage it." I'm not hating on Halo but I'm questioning why they didn't reference Skyrim, Doom or something more geeky & less obvious.
The casting was quite bad, a typically Hollywood cast of good looking wood & painted plastic. Given this is a story about geeks it was very strange to see how pretty they all are. Obviously future geeks will spend more time in the gym than at their computer. Not a single memorable performance given in the entire thing, the Simon Pegg narration was about the best performance of the lot & I'd say that was one of Pegg's most forgettable moments.
Most of the added plot points don't make sense which combines with illogical story telling to render the ending haphazard & unsatisfactory, It felt rather bolted on in the typical Spielberg way. He's a good director but a terrible story teller & he really needs someone to explain that having money + directing talent does not make one a good creative writer.
I give this a 4 because the CGI was very good, the set scenes were well placed & they did get the world (real & virtual) very accurate to the descriptions in the book. That being said this shouldn't have been called Ready Player One & the character names should have been changed.