Nostalgia...is a thing of the past. And so is nostalgia.

Had this movie come out 20 years ago...fantastic. I would've marveled at the countless references to the 1980-70s. But, too bad: there's been so many HEY, LOOK! HERE'S A REFERENCE TO THE PAST! movies and TV shows recently, that frankly, I'm sick of looking into the past. This movie is so outdated by this point, it actually makes sense why they released the failure of The Darkest Minds a few months later. YA movie series are past their prime long before 2018.

Basically, this OVERLONG movie is a cartoon with bad graphics when it comes to humans. Which is weird. In TODAY'S time, these bad human effects is about normal, but this movie's set in the near future where this really should've been dealt with. But, I digress. This movie sucks.

What you get is a horrible future of humans that never work and just play VR to escape not working. Some pretty boy is the obvious savior when an Easter Egg is presented to, I guess, save all mankind.

This movie has zero heart, characters that have zero chemistry, generic nostalgia in graphics and score and the one saving grace is what they didn't ruin in the trailers: the Stephen King reference.

I perked up then. It's about an hour into a bloated 2 hour, 20 minutes mess. One of the million pop culture references takes center stage for quite a bit of screen time and I loved it. But, then it went away and the bad writing and stereotypical playbook happened.

This story was so concerned with showing better movies and ideas of the past, it forgot to have one of its own. When the movie was out of "the matrix," I was depressed. When it was in "the past films nostalgia" I was checked out. Again, nostalgia is definitely nothing new these days.

Absolutely not recommended. One of Steven Spielberg's worst.

***

Final thoughts: AT LEAST, Tye Sheridan and Win Morisaki were cute. When we left The Matrix, those two were pleasant to look at. Everything else: ugly as sin.