Disclaimer: Spoilers

Have you ever sat through a movie and felt like bashing your head through a brick wall would be a better thing to do than sit through literally one more second of the film? Yeah, that was me yesterday on the opening day of "Ready Player One." Now, I would be straight up lying to you if I said I wasn't really anticipating this movie to be awesome. This was one of the few films where, just before it came out, I had somehow found the willpower to actually sit down and read the damn book it was based on.

"Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline was one of those 400-page books that could only be summarized in one word by calling it downright "polarizing." Yeah, you're either going to love this book, or you're going to want to throw it into a volcano. I think part of that has to do with the book having such a narrow target audience. I'm talking people with an obsession with '80s nerd pop culture. I didn't live through the '80s or anything, but I really liked the book. I'd have to say that it's because I'm a post-modern nerd and understood at least 80% of the references anyways.

There were callbacks to obscure pop culture artifacts that I was sure everyone had forgotten or had never of. Of course, Ernest Cline would tease you with the prototypical "Star Wars" reference or the "Pac-Man" bit, but then he'd hit you with one hell of a deep-cut. Have you listened to Canadian progressive rock band Rush's "2112" album in its entirety? No? Get ready to be lost for an entire critical plot point in the book. Have you ever heard of the Japanese science fiction giant kaiju fighting alien called Ultraman? No? You get the point.

It's literally just coincidence that I knew what these references alluded to, but that's obviously not going to be the case for everyone. At the end of the day, that was all the story was really good for. It was 400 pages of Ernest Cline going "Oh hey, you know that one thing that no one's heard of that you like? Yeah! I like that thing too!"

Steven Spielberg's attempt to embody the book had it's wins. For example, Spielberg decided to include modern video game characters, which was awesome. There was much less alienation going on there. It didn't take much effort to wander with your eyes and pick up on characters like Master Chief from "Halo," Tracer from "Overwatch," Blanka from "Street Fighter," hell, even Hello Kitty was in there. But again, all that the little cameos did was take your attention away from the fact that the main characters were atrocious, the relationships between them were paper thin and that the movie progressed like a Michael Bay action scene stuck on loop.

There was so much change to the story's plot that all resemblance of flow and significance had just disintegrated into thin air. There was already pacing issues with the book, but now it was two-fold in the movie adaptation. Key events just seemed to overlap one another, and there wasn't much time for the audience to process the significance of a scene.

For example, in the book, after the characters would find a key or a gate, it would be weeks or even months at a time before someone else found the next key or gate. This gave the audience a sense of just how hard it was to move forward in the egg hunt. Instead, the characters in the movie made the whole quest seem like a walk through Candyland.

Not to mention the out-of-nowhere romance between Wade and Samantha that evolves after they spend about 15 minutes with one another. That last shot before the credits rolled where they're sitting in the one chair together and being all lovey-dovey was so cheesy I thought I was going to hurl.

One of my biggest regrets from the movie was that they rushed the main characters meeting in person so quickly. The book paced this part out very well, emphasizing that when it came to the Oasis, anonymity was golden. The single greatest thing about the Oasis was that you could be anything without being judged for who you are in the real world, and that made it so much more significant when the characters finally met in person in the last four chapters of the 40 chapter book after they navigated the egg hunt. Instead, in the movie, it's like you just blink and suddenly there's Samantha, who was super apprehensive in the first like 30 minutes of the movie about meeting in person, and then you blink again and there's everyone else. And not to mention like there's this rebellion too? What do they do again? Ah never mind.

I'm just going to call "Ready Player One" by what it truly is: a power fantasy. It's about a kid who's got no stakes in the "real" world but rises out of the shadows of the virtual reality world to become a rock star. His knowledge of obscure pop culture facts becomes a rich currency in this world he escapes to, and with a little help, he wins it all. Trillions of dollars, all while beating the bad guy and getting the girl in the end. Aside from the clearly toxic masculine themes of the film, it was just a poorly executed movie. I really hate being that guy, but I'm just going to say it: the book was better.