What a disappointment.

That's my thought on both the book and the movie. Perhaps its not the book's fault. There was so much hype surrounding it when it came out I thought it must be awesome. Instead I found the same simply story I'd read in a dozen other books, except this one drowning in a sea of 80s and 90s pop culture references. If it was a simply summer read without the hype I likely would have liked it for what it was.

I had similar disappointment when I finally read Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". I read that same type of story a dozen times in other much better books but everyone was saying it was a groundbreaking book.

I found the book kind of insufferable, so I never bothered with the movie. Every 'puzzle' was solved by the protagonist saying something like 'fortunately, I'd memorised the entire script of War Games' or something. I started to wonder how many lifetimes it'd take to actually learn and memorise all that stuff.

I actually liked it. The book was good too. I wasn’t completely disaffected. Agree to disagree.