The first one to find the keys and follow them to the end will win the rights to the trillion-dollar company. It’s been five years since the death of OASIS creator James Halliday (Mark Rylance), a fizzy-haired Steve Jobs-meets-Willy Wonka nerd deity who left behind a trio of Easter Eggs - hidden clues - in his game. Everest with Batman! Presumably the thin air would make him less grumpy. There, an individual can transform into a digital avatar - live-action or animated, human or extraterrestrial, Sonny or Cher - and do basically anything. “These days,” he narrates, “reality’s a bummer.” With bleakness all around, seemingly everyone is addicted to strapping on a headset and entering the virtual-reality landscape of the OASIS. In a dystopian 2045 where the world looks mostly like a trash heap, teenager Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) lives in “The Stacks” - not aisles of books but towering piles of mobile homes - in Columbus, Ohio, with his aunt.

For those who get their fix through pop nostalgia, “Ready Player One” is - for better or worse - an indulgent, dizzying overdose. It wants to race into it at full throttle. Yet Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One,” a rollicking virtual-world geekfest flooded by ’80s ephemera, doesn’t just want to wade back into the past. But in today’s reboot, remake-mad movies, it’s not exactly swimming against the tide.

Pressing rewind is, if anything, an understandable desire these days. “Why can’t we go backward for once?” wonders the protagonist of “Ready Player One” shortly before gunning his “Back to the Future” DeLorean in reverse.

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