Wednesdays trivia Slick sequel ‘TRON: Legacy’ gets some wires crossed

“All your questions will be answered soon,” he is told. But for those in the audience, it’s best to just sit back, drink in its virtual dazzle and not ask questions.

Garrett Hedlund is shown in a scene from the the Disney film Tron Tweet Digg In the Troniverse ? which is to say, the land in which the 1982 film “Tron” is hailed as a prescient classic rather than that legendarily bad Jeff Bridges movie where he wore a glow-in-the-dark wrestler’s helmet ? fans know that the direst of fates is to be “subject to immediate deresolution”. The elder Flynn vanished on the verge of a big discovery two decades before. Meanwhile, Sam has come to believe his dad is “either dead or chilling in Costa Rica or both.” There’s plenty more similarly unimaginative, even obfuscating, dialogue. Sam probes his father’s disappearance and is sucked into the same computerized world as the one his father invented. Director Joseph Kosinski, making his feature film debut, opens with a prologue set in 1989, in which Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, the non-villainous youthful model) tells a bedtime story about his “Tron” adventures to his young son Sam. Though fierce-looking transportation devices materialize out of thin air, the path they race off on is predictable. The supposition is that he’s trapped within the Grid, the digital frontier which he continued to visit after the events of the first movie, pursuing a dream for mankind involving freedom, shared wisdom and technology ? kind of like Linus Torvalds, but with James Cameron’s ego. (See photos of James Cameron’s special effects.) A beeping page sent from Kevin’s long-disconnected number entices Sam to the arcade his father used to run. A portal opens and Sam steps in, anticipating seeing his father. And Kevin is indeed there, dressing in flowing white outfits accessorized with prayer beads and spending a lot of time on a meditation pillow, but before Sam can find him he ? like his father before him ? is forced to join a group of sacrificial programs playing gladiator-like games involving glowing Frisbees. Sam, a “user” in Tronspeak, yells “I am not a program” a bunch. It does not quite have the emotional heft of the Elephant Man telling us “I am not an animal.” I chalk this up to the fact that he and his opponents are dressed in skintight outfits that look uncannily like my set of Master Mechanics screwdrivers, which are also black and fetchingly trimmed with bright yellow. The film’s logic is too muddled to be engaging.