THE FILM INDULGES IN NERDERY WITHOUT A SPARK.

of War or the motorbike from Akira you are not free to think about much of anything else.

You might think you’re immune to the impulse but it’s in the nature of the film to entice you to share in its niche expertise. During the finale a character hurls an explosive Madball as a weapon and I sat totally nonplussed, trawling my brain for the relevant memory because I was certain I recognized the thing but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Until I remembered that I don’t care about this and would rather be at home reading a book.

It’s not that I consider Cline’s culture-plundering low-blow geekdom beneath me, exactly. I am fond of The Shining and Goldeneye and The Terminator too. It’s the totality of the nerd world that disturbs. The matrix of references deemed acceptable by the movie is so narrow – 1980s and ’90s American pop culture mainly, plus certain Japanese imports of the era, with a tendency toward comic books and teen films and video games, the kind of stuff a 35-year-old today might have obsessed over at 16 – that it feels as if the whole wide world of other culture, all the world’s art and literature and cinema of any depth or seriousness, has been extinguished, snuffed out by the extravagance and volume of the geek stuff Cline favours. This is monoculture. And given how intensely we are already besieged on a daily basis by superheroes and first-person shooters and ’80s-aping adventures like Stranger Things, the undertaking feels not only stifling but redundant. Why do we need a paean to all things nerdy when at the highest levels of our culture the nerds have already won?

Spielberg himself doesn’t seem as invested in the specific crop of references he’s cultivating as Cline manifestly was in the book. The source material luxuriated in seeking out the lore of a mind obviously steeped in the stuff; the film has the slightly strained quality by comparison of an outsider enthusiastic about the concept but working hard to seem authentic and keep up. You don’t feel the vicarious thrill of the director’s joy when, for instance, a Gundam Wing materializes in the skies to battle the villain’s summoned Mechagodzilla – Spielberg plainly hopes we will be excited to see two unlikely cultural objects briefly collide but the affection for these objects in particular is not inherently his own.

The effect the movie aspires toward is nostalgia. But it isn’t a nostalgia that Spielberg shares. At least Cline, talentless hack though he may be, was expressing an earnest obsession. The film commits the sin of indulging his hackneyed nerdery without any of his personal spark.