With a visual style all its own, this action-adventure update of the 1982 original shows the advancement in CGI technique achieved in the age of theater and Blu-ray 3D. But this is only an adjunct to Tron's original visual design based on remarkable spatial line art, self illumination in the dark spaces and neon splendor of its vast setting--plus the photographic lighting balance that assists the effect. Anyone wondering about a justification for an update of an incoherent story of yesteryear need look no farther than Tron's smashing visual and action creativity.

While "Tron Legacy" achieves more in the coherence aspect than its predecessor, it really settles for the application of slick and sleeker game choreography in an ironic play of good intentions gone wrong. It's about becoming entrapped in an invention of your own making and discover that it's a place where a human organism is considered hostile.

The adventure begins one evening when Kevin Flynn makes some bedtime promises to his seven year-old son Sam (Owen Best) about his revolutionary computer work in his advanced technology lab at ENCOM, a computer game manufacturing company where he's CEO. Hardly your average dad, Kevin refers to a mysterious, abstract object called The Grid. What he doesn't reveal to Sam is that he's become addicted to transporting himself daily to his virtual world where he's cloned himself into an avatar named Clu. Wishing his son a good sleep, this technological genius proceeds to disappear. What no one knows is that the cyber-addict has become trapped in the Grid.

Sam has to grow into manhood without a father, but with the memory of one he feels isn't dead--just gone to another place not called heaven. It's a place he yearns to go to in order to rescue dad. Twenty years later, Sam (Garrett Hedlund), now 27 and a wayward presence at ENCOM under CEO Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), is a bachelor bikerider practicing his prodigious skills around town until he's lured to an unidentifiable signal emanating from the company's arcade. (The point being made: he's an accomplished bike rider, see?)

Sam turns the lights on in the company's musty old museum of game consoles and proceeds to investigate. As though it was an invitation for him alone, Sam's finding of the signal results in his being tansported--at last!--to The Grid, which turns out to be a digital world suggesting a circuit board with its connective runways between the chips that make up the essentials of a computer. At this point, the film turns from 2D to 3D (to excellent effect).

The landscape, part arena part massive structure, is bathed in an eerie, low-key light with circuit fragments illuminating the occupants with a dim neon-like ambience. These occupants are all "programs" taking the form of humans that are under the control of CLU 2, an advanced version of Flynn's groundbreaking hacking program. Something like a next generation operating system, say, with robotic enhancement and a nasty disposition.

Sam has finally entered the space where he will find his father. He encounters a number of strange program characters with different agendas and he quickly learns that he's an unwelcome type who isn't welcome here. He meets up with Clu who has the head of Kevin as he looked 20 years ago CGI- composited on a martial uniform--a virtual clone of Kevin as we last saw him years before. He is, in fact the program Kevin created to run the place with a far more benign capability than the treacherous one who has world domination in mind and will suffer no contradictions--not even from his creator.

Clu takes the podium to announce to the army of acolytes he has digitally spawned that there is an intruder in their midst--the worst of all possibilities... a USER! May the games begin. Quickly learning how to mount and operate those mean looking lightcycles, the scene takes on the aspect of an unending racetrack in which bikers compete in apparently wild displays of strategic ingenuity and hair-breadth near-misses. Trade racing cars for lightcycles and lightdiscs of enormous, damaging power and we're in the world, here, of Andy and Lana Wachowski's "Speed Racer." The similarity will hit you like a rush of deja vu.

This time, however, it's not so much about speed for its own sake, but for taking out his programmatic adversaries in order to perform the rescue mission. When he finally finds his dad, Kevin is living the comfortable life of a pasha in a white, antiseptic enclosure. There is no stable of beautiful native girls to serve his every need, but what he considers his master work lingers at his side. She is a program that is so highly advanced that she could become a user with the right opportunities--precisely what Kevin has planned in creating her.

The genius has foreseen the day when his son would come to bring him out and he has prepared a proper companion for him in the gorgeous form of Quorra (Olivia Wilde, "The Next Three Days"). If Sam's mission were not already full of peril, it has taken on a multiplier of peril with the addition of this alluring creature. Sam puts his biker background to good use through the digital gamesmanship with hazardous choreography that is the justifier for the movie for the proper fanship.

Own it today! (Click on item link) Tron: Legacy / Tron: The Original Classic (Five-Disc Combo: Blu-ray 3D / Blu-ray / DVD / Digital Copy) 2-MOVIE COLLECTION: Disc 1 - Tron Legacy Blu-ray Feature Film 3D Enhanced Disney High Def Picture and Sound Disc 2 - TRON Legacy Blu-ray 2D Feature Film + Bonuses:  The Next Day - What happens immediately following the end of the movie? What is Flynn Lives and who is responsible for their efforts?  TRON: Disney Second Screen [BD Exclusive - Interactive bonus piece] - Using your iPad or computer, watch the movie with exclusive interactive elements available on your 2nd screen  Launching the Legacy - Beyond the amazing visuals is a rich story filled with an entire world's history and mythology. Discover how the writers and filmmakers created this complex fiction  Disc Roars - Watch director Joseph Kosinski use the raucous crowd at Comic-Con to record actual ADR for the disc game stadium crowd  Music video - "Derezzed" written, produced, and performed by Daft Punk Disc 3 - TRON Legacy DVD Feature Film + Bonus  First Look at TRON: Uprising, the Disney XD animated series  Visualizing TRON - How did the filmmakers bring to life the gorgeous world inside the GRID?  Installing the cast - Hear from all the stars of TRON: Legacy and their experience in making the movie Disc 4 - TRON Legacy _ Digital copy of feature film Disc 5 - TRON The original classic Blu-ray feature film + Bonus The DVD Single Edition The Soundtrack: a sonic masterpiece by Daft Punk THE TRACKS: 1. Overture 2. The Grid 3. The Son of Flynn 4. Recognizer 5. Armory 6. Arena 7. Rinzler 8. The Game Has Changed 9. Outlands 10. Adagio for TRON 11. Nocturne 12. End of Line 13. Derezzed 14. Fall 15. Solar Sailer 16. Rectifier 17. Disc Wars 18. C.L.U. 19. Arrival 20. Flynn Lives

Steven Lisberger, the writer-director of the 1982 "Tron," which also starred Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner, acts here in the capacity of producer and appears as a character in a minor role.

Tron Legacy's score is a probing, shifting sonic tapestry by the French dance duo Daft Punk. With their incandescent fusion of acid house, disco, heavy metal and funk they explore every register for mood modalities and percussive power. Call it a tune up for the heartbeat as you marvel at the stunning light races and the light-disc combat.

Billboard has already reported it to be the first score soundtrack to debut in the Top 10 in five years ("Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" in 2005) and it's selling better than the "Inception" score at this time in its sales cycle. Look for it to be an Oscar contender for 2010.

The rather challenging cinematography is beautifully handled by Chilean Claudio Miranda in a first full-fledged assignment as Director of Photography.

Other characters are played by Michael Sheen as Castor/Zuse; Daft Punk as the Masked DJs, Steven Lisberger as Shaddix; James Frain as Jarvis and Beau Garrett as Gem.

Bridges is very much himself, not himself and non-self as (1) the concerned father of 20 years ago in which he, indeed, looks twenty years younger; (2) as he looks today as the aged Kevin in cyber-space; and (3) as his digitized clone of twenty years ago. All of which semblances he masters seamlessly and to sympathetic satisfaction, as always.

Hedlund, with his cool determination and relaxed intensity has the charisma to carry his role. He evokes a behind-the-wheel Steve McQueen. Wilde's calm, understated beauty contains all the attributes to inspire a love affair with the camera as well as with her counterpart and all the males in the audience. She's a keeper.

In terms of falling in love, director Joseph Kosinski and his writing team led by screenwriters Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, ("Felicity," "Lost" TV) game-players all, fell about 30 minutes too much in love with the concept's many opportunities for unique action design. Unfortunately, this also leads to repetition in a story line that doesn't sustain itself very well. Less would have been more and would have enhanced the ingenuity to greater advantage. Computer and arcade game players and action junkies like myself will appreciate the effects, the time travel and the masterful visuals. We will leave the theater with a positive glow.

                                      ~~  Jules Brenner