Watching “Tron: Legacy” is like witnessing a thermonuclear explosion from inside the mushroom cloud—white hot, dazzlingly intense, and indescribably overpowering. Pure, unblemished spectacle, “Tron: Legacy” is cinematic escapism at its most thrilling and satisfying—pop art unlike any you’ve ever seen before.

27-year-old Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is the headstrong but ultimately directionless billionaire son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), the Encom CEO who vanished mysteriously when Sam was just a young boy. When his father’s friend and colleague, Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner, relegated to cameo status) informs Sam that he received a page from his father’s long-abandoned arcade, Sam decides to investigate, stumbling across a secret lab. When he tries to hack the system, Sam is zapped into a futuristic cyberworld where he is forced to engage in gladiatorial combat by the dictator Clu, who looks exactly like his father. Rescued by the beautiful Quorra (Olivia Wilde) and the real Kevin Flynn who has been trapped on The Grid since Sam was a boy, a reunited father and son undertake a life-and-death journey through a treacherous world toward an exceedingly improbably escape.

The first “Tron,” which hit screens in 1982, was a film only a mother could love. Too ahead of its time for its own good (think “The Matrix” for the Atari generation), the film’s groundbreaking, psychedelic effects (it was among the very first films to utilize computer generated imagery) look preposterously antiquated now, but, if filtered through younger eyes, still have the power to astonish. This follow-on (which includes lots of winking homages) expands on the original’s themes and mythology, employing a poignant metaphysical dimension the first film attempted but lacked. If “Tron” set the stage for a utopic world of binary perfection, “Tron: Legacy” examines the unintended consequences of such a vision. That much of the explanation for those consequences is incomprehensible, with entire plot points indecipherable, is certainly unfortunate, if ultimately irrelevant. At some point you stop trying to figure it all out and just brace yourself for the ride you know is coming. While we’d certainly prefer our story to match our visuals, a metaphysical, futuristic fable is not what we came to see.

We came to see a geography constructed of glossy contours, geometric shapes and translucent textures. We came to see vehicles that race on ribbons of light and end their lives in splashes of orange magma. We came to see muscular bodies poured into sexy, jet-black, self-illuminating foam-latex bodysuits. It is a world of unbounded dimensions, choreographed so that we are never at a loss for geography or spatial depth. With the unfortunate exception of a less-than-successful performance-capture experiment to breathe life into a younger, digital version of Jeff Bridges, the effects are better than anything on screen this year. As if arriving from an alternate sonic universe, the cutting-edge score, supplied by the French electronic dance duo Daft Punk, is a flawless compliment to the visuals, music that throbs in your gut and vibrates in your bones.

Bridges is a powerful Obi Wan presence. While he still retains his childlike wonder and SoCal affectations, Flynn has been humbled by time and isolation, adopting a supremely Zen-like posture. The Dude abides on The Grid. His reunion with his son is genuinely touching, the lynchpin moment in a young man’s life that shifts him from inaction to action, from purposeless to destiny. In many ways, theirs is not the only father/son relationship in the film, as Flynn’s relationship with Clu is suffused with plenty of its own “sins of the father” dynamics. But it is Wilde who is perhaps the most affecting, a character of innocence, enthusiasm and infectious curiosity who uses her eyes to recite pages of untranscribed text. It’s a dimensionality that, to be honest, isn’t even called for by the straightforward script, but which she nonetheless injects.

Commercials director Joseph Kosinski (making his feature debut) has created a world at once intimately recognizable yet breathtakingly new, a universe every bit as immersive as “Avatar” and one of the very few films to make the most of both the IMAX and 3D technologies (the first 20 or so minutes of the film are in 2D, shifting to 3D only when Sam finds himself in the digital realm, a nice nod to “The Wizard of Oz”). It’s as if we’re seeing this incandescently imaginative, gloriously self-indulgent, fetishistic world for the very first time, and it is dumbfoundingly spectacular.

GRADE: A

Directed by Joseph Kosinski

Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, Bruce Boxleitner, Michael Sheen

Rated PG for sequences of sci-fi action violence and brief mild language.

Running time: 125 minutes

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