RP1: Nostalgia meets VR

“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. “Really put the pedal to the metal.”

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

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.

“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. There, an individual can transform into a digital avatar live-action or animated, human or extraterrestrial, Sonny or Cher — and do basically anything.

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. The first one to find the keys and follow them to the end will win the rights to the trillion-dollar company. Wade, who goes by Parzival inside OASIS, is among the competitors still trying to crack the first challenge — a blistering melee through New York City streets where racers must evade, among other things, King Kong and the T-Rex from Jurassic Park.

At the film’s SXSW premiere, Spielberg introduced Ready Player One, based on Ernest Cline’s 2011 best-seller, as a “movie,” not a “film.” Spielberg, too, is here turning back the clock - just four months after releasing his well-timed ode to the freedom of the press, The Post - with a thrill-ride spectacle that harkens back to his pre-Schindler’s List days and the more popcorn-friendly flights of movie magic that Spielberg conjured before focusing on more “serious” tales. The funny, sometimes awkward irony of

Ready Player One is that Spielberg isn’t just making a movie like his old movies; he’s making a movie awash with his old movies. Sounding almost embarrassed, Spielberg - who initially thought a younger director ought to direct Cline and Zak Penn’s script - has said he stripped out many of his own references from the screenplay.

But the universe of Ready Player One remains a loving, fanboy homage to the escapist entertainments Spielberg did more than anyone to create. Ready Player One could conceivably be titled Spielberg: The

Remix. Watching it is a little like seeing him sit in with a Spielberg cover band - a band that’s, like, totally stoked to have the master in their midst.

When it’s not careening through ‘80s references from Tootsie Roll Pop commercials to Buckaroo Banzai, Ready Player One is an Internet parable.

There’s mention of prior “bandwidth riots” ahead of this battle over keeping OASIS an open playground to all. Ready Player One is both game and war, the stakes of which are occasionally lessened by the fact that it’s a land of make believe. Much of Ready

Player One also promotes a tiresome gamer culture where “real” fanboys outrank “haters,” geeks vie with suits, and tech wizards are slavishly worshipped.

As eye-popping as is the kaleidoscopic OASIS - a shinier, bigger-budget, less funny pop-culture soup than the one stirred in The

Lego Movie - Ready Player One is best when it keeps a foot in to the real world. Still, Spielberg shows that he’s just as capable as he ever was in making a rip-roaring spectacle. The momentum is headlong, the visual fireworks are brilliant and despite all the realityflipping, every scene is perfectly staged.

But if choosing between vintage Spielberg and meta Spielberg, I still — not to sound too fanboy-ish about it — prefer the genuine article. Jake Coyle, AP

Ready Player One

Director: Steven Spielberg Cast: Tye Sheridan, Lena Waithe, Simon Pegg, Ben Mendelsohn