I should be just about the target age (if on the young end of it) for "Ready Player One" and the book(s) and the movie utterly and completely disgusted me, and in fact gave me a weird bleak sense of dread when they first became known.

Same. The Iron Giant thing was especially offensive to me. The whole point of the original Iron Giant movie was that the giant didn't want to be a weapon. But in Ready Player One he's treated as just a weapon the protagonists can exploit. Disgusting.

The nostalgia of Ready Player One never hit me because I haven't stopped hearing about 80s movies since the day I was born. Was the idea to scramble a bunch of stuff that most people haven't thought about in decades? How do they avoid that? I turn on any TV in the last 20 years and it's a barrage of the same 80s and 90s movies, or references to them. There's a whole scene in Ready Player One where they mess around in The Shining hotel, and that's one of my favorite movies, but it felt so empty. I've already seen endless riffs and gags on The Shining. Like Freakazoid or the Animaniacs already made the references, we don't need to make more in 2018.

the worst part about all this rehashing? All of this feels so late. I would have exploded in excitement at 9 years old if you told me there was gonna be a movie about a guy with a virtual reality DeLorean who fights a mecha godzilla. I would have shit myself if I had known there would be 5 Marvel movies every year. And yet here we are and it's the worst possible version of what I thought I wanted as a kid.