Tron Legacy Teaser Teases Us in New York

Icy, frozen streets could not keep me or Matt Patches from getting to the Lincoln Square IMAX theater in Manhattan this morning. I had won a “PitCell” ticket on Tron Legacy’s viral website FlynnLives and even though the rumor was it was “just a trailer” and hardly a replay of Avatar Day, we were stoked.

Yes, it was just a trailer. A teaser trailer. But *what* a teaser trailer.

Spoilers warning!

* We open on some very The Dark Knight imagery of a helicopter on top of the Encom building. The footage of Garrett Hedlund as Sam (fils-de Jeff Bridges) Flynn. He’s on a motorcycle, zooming around. Next he’s talking to Alan One himself, Bruce Boxleitner, looking a lot like one of the great That Guys, Bruce Davison.

* Alan One tells Flynn the Younger he’s tried to find his father, but, dammit, he’s gone! Next Flynn the Younger goes to the boarded up Flynn’s Arcade. In a feat of metatextuality, the actual TRON coin-op game is there. He puts in a quarter, but it doesn’t take. It falls on the floor. If I were a smarter man, I’d read all sorts of Freudian symbolism in this. While putzing around on the floor, he moves the game, finds a hole in the wall (much like the San Diego Comic-Con fake arcade) and enters a spooky lab-OR-atory.

* He sits at the desk, plays around with a cool looking computer and – guess what? Right behind him is the laser that the MCP used to zap Jeff Bridges in the original.

* Blackout.

* Then we see a GIANT EFFING AWESOME Recognizer facing down a human. It has a red, menacing trim. Then a blast of quick imagery flew by. I’m pretty sure I saw Sam Flynn behind the wheel of a Recognizer and I saw Jeff Bridges leading a band of “programs.” Also: a quick shot of Olivia Wilde that proved this film had intense, private rewatch value. We did not see the MCP. But, there was also one shot of a lightcycle heading toward a cityscape that looked phenomenal.

* After the “coming this December” (note – the title treatment for Tron Legacy was a little different than from what we’ve seen so far) there was a really short tag – it was of one lightcycle smashing into another and everyone around me went “coooooool.”

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