DVD review: “Tron: Legacy” (Blu-ray+DVD combo pack)
From Friday’s Weekend Look section of The Oklahoman.
“Tron: Legacy” (Blu-ray+DVD combo pack)
Eye-popping visual effects and an ear-candy electronic score from Daft Punk turn the sequel “Tron: Legacy” into a dazzling trek into a fantastical digital frontier.
The movie’s stunning look establishes it as a worthy successor to the trailblazing 1982 cult favorite “Tron.” “Legacy” opens with computer pioneer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) telling his young son Sam stories about “The Grid,” the digital world he has created. Kevin goes into his office one night and never returns.
Sam (Garrett Hedlund) grows into an underachieving adrenaline junkie, a programming whiz who is the majority shareholder but declines to take over his father’s company, Encom.
When family friend Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) reveals that he has received a strange page from Kevin, Sam enters his father’s old office inside the abandoned Flynn’s Arcade. The younger Flynn finds a mysterious program running, and with a few keystrokes, he is pulled into “The Grid,” where he must survive advanced versions of “Tron’s” identity disk battles and light cycle races.
Sam learns his father is alive and trapped inside “The Grid,” the prisoner of his tyrannical computer doppelganger Clu, a program Kevin created to build the ideal digital world. With the help of Kevin’s innocent but brave protege Quorra (Olivia Wilde), the Flynns must escape back into the real world without letting Clu get off “The Grid,” too.
The film’s cutting-edge technology outshines the timeworn storyline, although the computer-generated efforts to take Bridges, 61, back in time three decades have a glaringly fake look. Only Michael Sheen’s flamboyant turn as night club denizen Castor fully matches the bright brilliance of the jaw-dropping special effects
Bonus features: Making-of featurettes, trailer for the Disney XD animated series “Tron: Uprising,” Daft Punk music video, Disney Second Screen (which allows viewers to simultaneously view interactive content on a computer or iPad at the same time they watch the movie) and “The Next Day: Flynn Lives,” an epilogue capped with Easter eggs that hint at what might happen in a possible third “Tron” film.
— BAM
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