Last night, Disney set up screenings across the country of snippets from the new Tron film Tron: Legacy in IMAX 3D.

Their point was obviously to rile up support for the film (being released December 17, 2010) and work longtime fans who came into a frenzy.

Put simply, based on this 20 or so minutes, my opinion is that this is going to be the film to beat for the holiday movie season.  Sure, Harry Potter is coming out and will automatically do great, but this movie looks fantastic.  (So does Harry Potter, but that’s besides the point.)

For longtime fans of the Tron mythology like myself, this batch of footage was spine-tingling.  The first scene shown was one between Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner from the original film) coming to visit Sam Flynn, the despondent, thrill-seeking son of the hero from the first film.  It seems as though Sam’s father (Kevin Flynn, Jeff Bridges in both films) disappeared some time ago, but a mystery has begun and Alan seems to think  that Sam needs to investigate, starting at Flynn’s Arcade.  My only problem with this scene was that Boxleitner was a little stiff (on the cheesy side, even) but it established the story of a father and son quite capably and powerfully.

Reluctantly, Sam then seeks out Flynn’s Arcade.

This is the Flynn’s Arcade we all saw in the first film.  Every detail seems perfect.  This is where the Nostalgia Factor his highest for me.  The sets here were dusty and covered with plastic, but it has been so lovingly and perfectly recreated from the original film that I swooned.  In fact, there are shots of Sam in the upstairs office of the Arcade that mirrored shots of Jeff Bridges in the original film and it gave me the chills.  The detail is perfect and it’s obvious that this has been made by people who love the original film as much as the fans like us do.

Sam is then led downstairs, to a hidden office of his father’s and though he doesn’t recognize what he’s getting himself into, we do.  The same laser that digitized Kevin Flynn in the original film is stationed directly behind the seat Sam takes and we know what to expect from here.

Then we see Sam fall into the grid.

He’s picked up quickly by a Recognizer and abducted.  This gave us our first real look at the world of Tron in 3D.  The Recognizer and all of its captives flew over the city in breathtaking vistas, offering us a look inside the computer world as such we’ve never seen before.  This was full of awe for the character, doubly so for the audience.

There was a moment here, as they were assigning Sam to “The Games” (something so frightful the program before Sam commits suicide when he’s assigned to them), that I really missed the look of the old film.  That grainy old school black and white with neon color…  Don’t get me wrong.  Once you’re acclimated to this world, it’s leaps and bounds better than the original, but for a moment it did seem jarring because we’ve grown up knowing what this world looks and feels like and this is a much more sleek X-Box 360 version of the world, as compared to the original’s 8bit roots.

Sam is then suited up and given his programming disc and sent to play in a life or death series of games.  First we’re treated to a battle with the programming discs and then we get a taste of the light cycles.  This is where the 3D really shines.  They’ve added so many dimensions of space to the games that it might be hard to get your bearings but it’s visually stunning.  The effects are incredible and this was the moment where I knew I had to see this on IMAX 3D when it came out (which I suspect was the point of this entire Tron Night exercise.)

At this point, Olivia Wilde’s character, Quorra, busts Sam out of the games in order to bring him to his father, who seems to have been trapped in this world for the last 25 years.  She is absolutely stunning.  I was mesmerized by her.  I really, really couldn’t take my eyes off of her.  And she’s good, too.  (Why do I get the feeling she’s going to turn out to be a bad program?)

But it was the reunification of father in son that provided an unexpectedly emotional moment that was almost overpowering to the point of tears.  They build up so capably in the snippets of film they showed prior to this (built solidly on the foundation of the original film) that their reunion is so heartfelt and perfect that I don’t know how well to describe it.  There’s also that overwhelming wash of emotion that comes of seeing Jeff Bridges once again inhabit this world.  And there’s something not right about it, too.  He seems despondent.  And, in a big tip-off for what might be future problems or the hint of a well laid trap, he seems oblivious to the message that got out of the grid and into the real world that brought Sam there in the first place.  It raised a lot of questions for me and I’m going to die in the next two months waiting for answers.

After this heartfelt and somber scene, we were treated to a montage of images, beginning with a shot of Michael Sheen and Daft Punk leading into a pulse-pounding trailer for the rest of the film, including a look at the new aerial battles of the world of Tron.  We’re also introduced to Clu 2.0, which is a digital version of young Jeff Bridges.  I’m a little wary of him, but the movie looks so good I don’t care if digital Jeff Bridges is in it.

You can see some of the shots I talked about in this Daft Punk video trailer for the film below that Disney released yesterday called “Derezzed”:

I was also a little worried about Daft Punk, to be honest. I don’t know much about them and don’t specifically care for their music, but the use of music in the snippets of footage they showed us were perfect, for lack of a better word. Not just their music but the use of classic 80s anthems, too.

Long story short, I hope this movie blows my mind. And I will definitely be signing up to see it in IMAX 3D as soon as possible.

And be sure to look out for the new episode of The Geek Show Podcast on Monday. We recorded three episodes from the theatre and I was a guest panelist. In the first episode (coming out Monday) we all offer our initial thoughts of the footage. (As if you weren’t already pumped up about this film enough.)