Ready Player One Review

So I just watched Ready Player One. The movie equivalent of any t-shirt from Think Geek.
Ready Player One is the latest movie from the director of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Ready Player One is set in a dystopian future where people use a virtual reality video game to escape their shitty lives. When the creator of the video game dies, he decides to go full Willy Wonka and leave the company to whoever finds the secret egg hidden deep in the game. The movie follows Wade Watts the poor dreamer who uses his knowledge of the game's creator and 80s pop culture to find the egg before the evil corporation that wants to find it and make the game shitty. 
I think I hated this movie. I went in expecting it to be decent. The premise isn't bad and typically Spielberg brings a certain charm, even if the script is lacking. Unfortunately no amount of occasional Spielberg schmaltz can save this movie from its boring characters, tedious predictable plot, and ham fisted nostalgia boner.
First the characters. I hated all the characters (except maybe TJ Miller.) Wade Watts is so generic I can't think of any redeeming or original characteristics. His best friend Aech is defined entirely by the "twist" of his real identity which is telegraphed so heavily that the real twist would have been if Aech was exactly who Wade thought he was. I tried my best to summon any sympathy for Art3mis (the main love interest) but I failed. Sho and Daito have so little personality that I had to look up their names. The most interesting character in the movie was Simon Pegg and he had 5 minutes of screentime.
Then there's the plot. At this point it's basically Spielberg by numbers. I was never surprised by anything any character did in this movie. The protagonist does generic hero stuff. The villain is a classic Spielberg corporate asshole. Each scene leads to the next. Alternate action and schmaltz. Rinse and repeat.
Of course the only reason this movie is even part of the conversation is its endless parade of references. Every scene features some pop culture reference from the 80s or 90s. For the most part these have the subtlety of a brick to the groin. I have no problem with using established characters or things, but you have to do something new with them. This movie didn't. It just put popular things on screen and hopes that the nostalgia of seeing something you know will be enough. Also arbitrarily combining two random pop culture references doesn't count as doing something new. Using the Iron Giant to make a Terminator reference isn't clever, it's just lazy writing. Unfortunately for a movie that features so many pop culture icons, this movie fails to understand what makes them so iconic in the first place. The Iron Giant was a box office bomb that only gained popularity years later through positive word of mouth because it's a beautiful, well written movie with a real heart. Not because The Iron Giant would look cool punching other giant robots.
My favorite scene in the movie is when the gang finds the second key. That scene takes place entirely within a popular movie. However they elevate the reference by playing with audiences expectations of the reference. There's actually a couple funny moments where the character in the movie doesn't know what's going to happen, but the audience does. Of course later that scene devolves into nonsense, but for a moment the movie was tolerable.
Overall Ready Player One is a bland and forgettable piece of garbage. It's an empty corporate shell designed in a lab to use nostalgia to cover the fact that there's nothing original. I give Ready Player One 12 out 71 Easter Eggs.