Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” is not a video-game-centered dystopian teen adventure but a horror film, a movie of spiritual zombies whose souls have been consumed by the makers of generations of official cultural product and regurgitated in the form of pop nostalgia. The movie, framed as a story of resistance to corporate tyranny, is actually a tale of tyranny perpetuated by a cheerfully totalitarian predator who indoctrinates his victims by amusing them to death—and the movie’s stifled horror is doubled by Spielberg’s obliviousness to it.

Set in 2045, “Ready Player One” follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), an orphaned teen-ager who lives with his aunt and her abusive boyfriend in a poor neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, known as the Stacks. Like everyone else, Wade uses OASIS, a virtual-reality program that serves as the fundamental form of entertainment and also as a form of business, because the virtual money that’s won or lost there is credited to or debited from the players’ actual bank accounts. Wade is one of the many, likely millions, who take part in a new game for earnest stakes: a competition to find three Easter eggs, or embedded tricks, in a virtual game.

That game-within-a-game is the posthumous legacy of the inventor and founder of OASIS, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), who left a video that was released after his death. In it, he stipulates that whoever solves the three puzzles will win an unmatched prize: possession and control of OASIS, and possession of his half-trillion-dollar fortune. Halliday was more than a creator of a dominant pop-culture phenomenon: he was also a pop-culture fanatic himself, whose fandom was centered on the late seventies through the early nineties, and he makes the solution to his puzzles pivot on pop iconography and trivia of that time (as well as on knowledge of one other area of arcana, namely, an obsession with Halliday’s own life story). And that’s where Wade—competing in the guise of his V.R. avatar, Parzival—reigns supreme: he’s a seventies-through-nineties pop-movie and video-game obsessive whose obsession also ranges to the persona of Halliday and the story of the creator’s life.

Wade’s real life is lonesome and scary; it’s only in OASIS that he has something like a social life. There, as Parzival, he has a virtual best friend and gaming sidekick named Aech (pronounced “H”), who is a hulking mechanical genius who can not only fix virtual vehicles with the twist of a wrench but also has a workshop in which he re-creates, large scale, the figures and gizmos of eighties and nineties movies. (Aech’s pièce de résistance is a massive reconstruction of the Iron Giant.) In the midst of a high-speed race through a virtual New York—in which the ultimate obstacle proves to be King Kong—Parzival meets and befriends another top-flight competitor named Artemis, and romance shyly blooms between them. Artemis, in real life, is a young woman named Samantha (played by Olivia Cooke); Aech turns out to also be the avatar for a woman, Helen (Lena Waithe). She, Samantha, and Wade team up with two other online warriors to attempt to win the game.

Their main rival for the supreme prize is the evil corporate overlord Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who runs Innovative Online Industries (I.O.I.) and wants to take over OASIS for power and wealth (including filling its virtual spaces with advertisements). And Sorrento has help: gamers who lose their virtual money are held in his real-life debtors’ prison (or “loyalty center”), where they’re forced to do V.R. work on his behalf in OASIS, and other pop-culture prodigies are working overtime in his back room to feed him the profitable trivia of which he’s ignorant.

Halliday, himself a child of the eighties and nineties, drags his childhood obsessions a half-century ahead and transforms them into the core of mid-twenty-first-century pop culture. The dozens, maybe hundreds, of pop references built into “Ready Player One” whiz by with genial winks or lumber through with a bigfoot dominance (as in an entire sequence that pivots on a reënactment of “The Shining,” which reduces it to a few goofball theme-park memes), creating a pathetic, synthetic echo effect—a paradise of nerd trends that reinforces a narrow view of the late twentieth century centered not on what mattered but on what sold. The seventies, eighties, and nineties of Halliday’s—of Spielberg’s—fantasy world is a time without Spike Lee or Jim Jarmusch or Lizzie Borden or John Cassavetes or the Coen brothers, let alone Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola; it’s an eighties without hip-hop, without punk, without Patti Smith. There’s no counterculture in Wade’s 2045 world, and there’s no counterculture or artistic alternatives in the imagined world of OASIS, either.

The movie’s fondly remembered eighties and nineties replicates its exclusions and its rejections; it’s the version that left Kathleen Collins’s “Losing Ground” unreleased, that left Wendell B. Harris, Jr., and Julie Dash and Rachel Amodeo without a second feature, that smothered Elaine May under snarky reviews. The movie’s icons of nostalgia provide a grotesque carnival of the undead, a uniform spew of icons emptied of substance, history, connections. There’s a dance contest based on “Saturday Night Fever” with the flashing disco-floor lights but without any story—without the movie’s ethnic gang wars, conflict over abortion, or dramas of sexual assault. In short, “Ready Player One” depicts a retrofitted universe that filters out any artist or subject cooler, bolder, more aware than Spielberg and his films—and, chillingly, that monolith of virtual reality and the nostalgia that fuels it isn’t depicted as a tyrannical or terrifying aspect of the movie’s dystopian premise. Halliday, as if desperate to recapture the fetish objects of his youth, creates a world of young mental clones whose minds are emptied of their current concerns and filled with his own obsessions.

Instead, to those who consume nothing but multiplex movies, commercial video games, and mass-market music to fuel their imagination, “Ready Player One” offers a heartening encouragement: fear not, for these things offer you all the tools you need to be Master of the Universe. But what lies just underneath that reassurance is a deadly, deadening complacency—to stick with the most immediately accessible products on offer, not to look further than what’s delivered by advertising or algorithm, and to look no further for heroes than the purveyors and recyclers of their self-consuming, vastly profitable trivia contest. Spielberg’s very career pivots on the notion of popular art as a source of virtue. In “Ready Player One,” Parzival insults the villainous Sorrento with the ultimate Spielbergian credo: “A fanboy knows a hater.” The movie turns Spielberg, in the persona of Halliday, into the ultimate cool dad, converting Wade’s heroism into a conjoined set of virtues centered on filial piety (piety toward a substitute father) and pop devotion. Yet that coolness is an unintended mask for an underlying horror: “Ready Player One” is a story of generations of kindly and avuncular creators, venerators of their own childhoods and the childhoods of children to come, perpetuating their own senescent, obsolete, and decaying reign by consuming the brains of the young. A fanboy doesn’t know a cult because he’s in it.

The movie’s one great exception, its one far-reaching inspiration, is another twist on paternity—here, Spielberg’s stifled rivalry with his own big daddy, not the one whom he’s artistically devoted to but the one whom he chooses, in the film, to wrangle with: Orson Welles, the colossus of Hollywood independence and the victim of its backlash, the founder whose founding work Spielberg both needs and fears because he depends upon but cannot match its reckless originality. Throughout “Ready Player One,” Spielberg wrestles Welles on the turf of “Citizen Kane”; in the process, he unleashes the only passionate inspiration of “Ready Player One,” and, true to Spielberg’s own zomboidal imagination, it’s a necrological inspiration.

Throughout the film, Parzival looks to Halliday’s life story for clues to solve the puzzles that he left behind; he does his research in visits to the pristine vaults of the so-called Halliday Journals, an archive that preserves the moments of Halliday’s life as theatre-like holograms in virtual dioramas behind glass walls, maintained by an archivist whom Parzival, in his quest for crucial nuggets of knowledge, directs to fast-forward, freeze-frame, or rewind. It’s akin to the library scene in “Citizen Kane,” where the banker Thatcher’s memoirs come to life, and, in revising it for “Ready Player One,” it’s the one moment where Spielberg’s impulses get the better of him, where his ideas burst beyond his constrained imaginings of Halliday’s nostalgic yearnings and try to probe something that mystifies, terrifies, and eludes him: the secrets of a creator greater, more mysterious, more troubled than himself. (There’s even a hint of Welles’s “Mr. Arkadin” embedded in the notion: a guilt-ridden grandee who seeks to have himself investigated.) As it turns out, Spielberg can only go so far with this idea, and he leaves his own boldest imaginings at the starting gate. His vision of Halliday’s crises and conflicts proves trivial, sterile, uncreative—as is proved when, at the movie’s dénouement, Wade unleashes, with a cringe-worthy gooeyness, the word “Rosebud.”