I just watched it, a lot of fun & your review nailed it...oh my gosh, the visuals, soooooo much fun! But the story...what I don't understand is why you would target 20 to 40 years with the content (Atari, Thundercats, BTTF, Iron Giant, etc.) & then target the movie to a 13-year-old audience. I mean, I know the demographics of movies are mostly that young teen males watch movies, and that's what sells tickets, but the whoooooooole point of the movie was the nostalgia factor, you know? It would have gone from an 80% to a 100% if they had put the same effort into the story as they did the CGI.
imo it really should have been a 2-part movie, if not a trilogy, and it should have had more meat than just being a cutesy story. They glossed over a lot of stuff, partially because it was targeted to the young teen crowd & partly just due to time. I didn't care for the PG-13 rating, because the stuff they threw in (particularly the swearing) was so noticeable that it was clear they simply put it in for the rating, not as part of the story.
Love the concept, loved the visual execution. Really fun, especially if you've played with VR before, because you can see it getting that good once they get retina-level VR screens & cheaper omni-treadmills & stuff. I'm curious if older people & non-technical people understood the concept as well as was intended...I'm a nerd who also happens to have a VR system at home, and loved the back & forth they did, but I wonder if non-techie people or people who didn't grow up in the video game generation really got the concept or not, like if they ended up getting as lost in it as say Inception.
I think my only complaint about the visuals was that they went a bit too fast through the crowd scenes...you'd barely catch a glimpse of recognizable characters, in fact we rewound it a couple times when we thought we saw a character, because the camera was zooming around so much...Spawn, Halo, Battletoads, etc, I would have LOVED to have seen those in more detail the the split-second they were on-screen! Especially since each of those CGI assets must have taken a monster amount of time to create & animation, and they were hardly even seen on-screen.
Anyway, visually awesome, pushes a lot of geek buttons, fun story but fairly generic & simple - but still really enjoyable overall! I knew going in it wasn't going to quite hold up to the book, so if you understand that the deeper storyline concepts are kind of toned down for the target age group, it will be a lot more fun.