Using 3D the way “The Wizard of Oz” did color, the film hits its pulse-racing heights early as Sam tries to intuit the rules of this virtual world while being stripped down, suited up and thrust into a series of dazzling life-and-death games involving neon-lit discs and DayGlo Light Cycles, while leaving the story nowhere to go but home, Dorothy. Instead, under the sometime supervision of Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner, downgraded from the title character in Version 1.0 to cameo status here), the trust-fund orphan gets his kicks racing cops on his Ducati and pulling stunts that undermine the profit-hungry motives of dad’s old company, where suits (Jeffrey Nordling and an uncredited Cillian Murphy) now run the show.ĭrawn back to Flynn’s arcade, Sam discovers a secret lab, where a laser zaps him onto “the grid” - a fully CG arena where programs take human form and genuine humans hold hallowed status. The son of ultra-successful software engineer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), who disappeared into his own creation nearly 20 years earlier, Sam shares none of his father’s high-tech interests. ![]() And though the world is a friendlier place to gamers today than it was when Disney first beta-tested this franchise, the new film’s four writers play it safe by conceiving their protag as the ultimate anti-nerd, a young Bruce Wayne type embodied by the generically handsome Garrett Hedlund (“Troy”). ![]() That old-vs.-new paradox traces back to the original, which framed a wooden gladiator-style conflict against the backdrop of borderline-psychedelic, never-before-seen CGI.
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