Tron legacy movie review

If you were born around 1970 and grew up sporting a Casio digital watch, totally rocking Ms. Pac-Man and all but sleeping with your Commodore 64, you remember “Tron.”
That was the 1982 Disney film that had games guru Jeff Bridges “digitized” and trapped inside a computer — where he explored cyber-reality and had dangerous neon Frisbee fights.
Although all that was pretty cool if you were an 11-year-old geek, the movie was not a hit with the masses. But this is now 2010, and the geeks have inherited the earth.
So here comes an enormous, expensive, belated sequel, “TRON: Legacy,” to warm your memory chips. (Although, good luck finding the original — it’s oddly unavailable on DVD, suggesting the studio doesn’t want you drawing any unflattering comparisons).
And, admitted, the new “TRON” looks great. Tricked out in IMAX and 3D, it’s a trippy fun-ride. Diagrams turn into objects and objects disintegrate into glittering shards; the depth illusion isn’t used merely to make things come at you, but to have characters slip in and out of different levels. It’s yet another step forward for 3D and computer-generated effects.
 Directed by Joseph Kosinski. With Garrett Hedlund, Jeff Bridges, Olivia Wilde. Now playing in New Jersey.

For human-generated effects … er, not so much.
The story has Sam, the grown son of the first film’s Kevin Flynn, entering his dad’s bizarro computer world. There, he finds his missing father in two versions — his own aged self and Clu, an evil, eternally youthful, completely computerized version.
But Garrett Hedlund, who plays Sam, may be the least exciting young actor in a sci-fi epic since Hayden Christensen in “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones.” And the digitally created Clu — played by a digitally enhanced Jeff Bridges — looks like a Macy’s mannequin. Bridges is a lot more fun as the older version, partly because he looks like himself. Also because the character has been conceived as a sort of burned-out mystic, padding around in yoga pants and telling someone off with an angry “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man!”
Yes, it’s the byte Lebowski.
But Hedlund is still a pretty-boy bore (the only unintentionally amusing thing about his character is that the script — from the perpetually trademark-obsessed Disney empire — presents his copyrights-be-damned hacking as heroic). The only interesting thing about his love interest, Olivia Wilde, is her asymmetrical haircut.
Meanwhile, unlike “Inception,” which made you work for your fun, the muddled script just makes you work. Kevin’s occasional unearthly powers, an oddly campy “program” who runs a nightclub, a genocidal war against a race of living algorithms — this is a story fueled not so much by ideas, as by ideas for ideas.
Perhaps all this is enough to rekindle some fond memories in nostalgic nerds. And it is genuinely exciting to see where this brave new world of CGI and 3D is leading. But on the whole, this isn’t really much of a legacy — or even as much fun as a round of Space Invaders.