SXSW Film Review: ‘Ready Player One’

In “Ready Player One,” Steven Spielberg’s dizzyingly propulsive virtual-reality fanboy geek-out, Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a teenager living in a dystopian trailer park in the year 2045, spends most of his time strapping on a headset and immersing himself in the Oasis, a techie surrealist theme park of the senses.

Once inside, you never know what you’re going to see or imagine next — though it’s hard to go for more than 30 seconds without encountering some succulent tidbit of pop nostalgia, most of it from the 1980s.Early on, there’s a shoot-the-works car chase in which Wade — or, rather, his avatar, Parzival, who resembles a frosted-blond, plane-cheeked Keanu Reeves in a jean vest — climbs into the wing-doored DeLorean Dmc-12 from “Back to the Future” and races through a cityscape at petal-to-the-metal speed to the tune of Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” even as he

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