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I also have time to ruminate over the film’s uneasy blend of hippie-ish idealism and state of the art technology. While I don’t begrudge Kevin Flynn’s philanthropic motives as ascribed by the plot, he seems to have morphed from the late 20-something computer hacker/slacker of the first film into a benevolent bearded sage who seems like he would have been at the forefront of sit-ins and protests in the 1960s. From a timeline perspective this makes no sense, but it does from a cultural standpoint simply by benefit of having Jeff Bridges reprise his role from the first film, looking and talking, meditating, and pounding his hands on virtual walkways like the unlikeliest blend of The Dude, Neo, and Gandalf. His presence is enough to grant Tron: Legacy some distinction even if he is given as little to do in the film, as he is able to do for the film.

Performances: As Sam and Quorra, Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde acquit themselves nicely by being pretty faces onto which we can project our thoughts and emotions on what it might be like to encounter your father in the unlikeliest of places or to never have seen a sunrise. Michael Sheen pops up in a small splashy role (about the only splash there is), and his presence in a film like this or the Underworld films or the Twilight films or that Pierce Brosnan-Julianne Moore comedy always throws me for a loop, as I always see him as Tony Blair or David Frost. I don’t want to deny anyone his or her range, but I think he suffers from Kenneth Branagh thespian overacting hamminess when left unchecked. On the opposite end, I was happy for Bruce Boxleitner to also reprise his role from Tron and deliver a quiet weariness to his three scenes.

Music: Daft Punk provides the score (and cameo as DJs at the establishment run by Sheen’s character) and it is no small praise to say that their music (performed with help from The London Orchestra to achieve its symphonic richness) carries the film and helps it rise above at several key moments. As one example, I am thinking of the bubbling, gently building track (aptly titled “The Son of Flynn”) that kicks off the great transition from Sam Flynn as a teen riding off on his bike in anger to the adult Sam tearing up city streets on his motorcycle. If at times some tracks settle into John Williams territory standard bombast, these are balanced by compositions of such sweep and fullness, it becomes impossible to imagine this Tron world should sound like anything else.

The Visuals: Tron Legacy is eye candy and glorious sugar for the peepers at that. The computer world feels like spending two hours under the backlight at your favorite club, and even on my home screen in 2D, the luminescent glow was potent and… oddly soothing. The film’s schema of fluorescent colors draped over black backgrounds should reasonably grow monotonous as the film nears the two-hour mark, but director Joseph Kosinki finds ways of pushing the film along, notably by shooting action sequences so that the flow of events can actually be followed.
The one visual trick that doesn’t work - creating a late '80s-era Jeff Bridges face for Kevin/Clu results in, surprise, a creepy fake Jeff Bridges - doesn’t hurt the film since Clu is the villain and not meant to seem relatable (note how the camera stays away as much as possible from showing Kevin’s full face in the early scene set in real world 1989). Almost lifelike, but still just not quite, it’s the true ghost in the machine, but not one that keeps Tron Legacy from being a gorgeously passable diversion.

Next time: an iconic '80s hero/villain returns to our troubled modern times, and finds out his portable phone is a tad big now.

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