Is this thing ‘Tron’?

In theaters Friday: Jumping the Broom, Last Night [limited], Passion Play [limited], Something Borrowed, Thor

New on DVD/Blu-ray: The Dilemma, The Green Hornet

If any film deserves a second run in theaters, Tron Legacy is one. The merits of the computerized adventure’s story can be debated, but there is no question that its effects are a towering achievement in so much as they truly pull the viewer into a whole new world. So it is a shame that all we are left with in the near future are the recent Blu-ray and DVD releases of the film, because unlike so many modern movies, Avatar included, the world of Tron is an immense and mysterious landscape that actually demands to be seen in 3D. And this strange Odyssean tale is all the better for it.

Watching at home, a crashing light cycle or a prism of futuristic structures in glittering collapse still hold the power to melt eyeballs, though. When Sam Flynn logs in and zooms through a portal into the digital realm of his father’s making, I was hooked. Disney made the Kool-Aid, and I just drank it, I thought. Moviegoers in 1939 must have felt something similar as they watched a drab Dorothy stepped out of her sepia-toned farmhouse and into the super saturated rainbow colors of Oz.

On-the-rise actor Garrett Hedlund, who’ll soon be Sal Paradise in On the Road, plays Sam and enters Tron in search of his long-lost father Kevin after being told of a text message he believes was sent by his father from the great digital beyond. But the text is actually a trap set by Kevin’s all-digital doppelganger CLU. Created in Kevin’s image as a kind of Chief Operating Officer to look after the digital world while Kevin moves back and forth to his real family and company, CLU eventually turns on Kevin as an imperfect parasite in an effort to fulfill his programming and create the perfect system.

Jeff Bridges’ Kevin has changed, too. No longer the dashing action gamer he was in 1982’s original Tron, he more resembles Bridges’ “The Dude” chilled out on Valium. Once a dominant creator of worlds, the master computer programmer has passed into the life of a reclusive sage. He has found his Zen in retreat to a neo-classical home carved out of a granite cliff where he lives with an apprentice, Olivia Wilde’s slinky and curious sprite Quorra. “Life has a way of moving you past wants and hopes,” Kevin muses, before saying, “It’s amazing how productive doing nothing can be.”

This does not sit well with his headstrong son, Sam who takes charge and together with Quorra, attempts to save his father from CLU, whose draconian wrath is threatening to break out of the digital mainframe and into reality to destroy the world as we know it and replace humanity with more efficient programs and circuitry. With their goals set, the trio trips through a fantastic world of darkness and eerie lights, all alone in a sea of programs that would turn on them and strike the instant they are discovered. The chases double-crosses are a thrill-ride and without spilling any details, the climax leaves plenty of room for another sequel.

With memorable quotes like, “You’re messing with my Zen thing,” and “Bio-digital jazz, man!” the older, wiser Kevin is right down the Bridges wheelhouse. Olivia Wilde looks the part and her unpredictably childlike quirkiness is refreshing, but her story is underdeveloped, and she is often too passive, as if midway through production director Tk backed off from making her too bizarre. Pity that, because she and Hedlund have a real chemistry whose surface receives barely a scrape. Certainly, Hedlund is a leading man to look out for. He has a rascal’s charisma but can also play things straight or comical. He’s in the Matt Damon mould, and with the right roles he has a bright future ahead.