Everything is as it should be… this sequel pays due respect to the past, but also brings a whole new technological precision to the action that is a real pleasure to watch. And though it could have sunk the whole enterprise if it had not been executed so efficiently, the strange gamble of having Jeff Bridges compete with himself, the aging Zen Buddhist versus the perfectionist program, actually infuses the film with a lovely touch of strangeness.
Nonetheless, the film as a whole fails to deliver the most salient value of the first Tron. When we first saw Tron it gave us a visual paradigm that no one had ever seen before, and it offered an evocative structure to the world of computers that we were only just starting to engage with and understand. The sequel, because it must follow the general aesthetics of that which came before or risk angering the faithful, therefore has no such imaginative leap to share with us. It is a continuation, an updated version of a beloved program, a slicker and sleeker model of something that was a revolution of vision when it first appeared. So, we are pleased… but we are not impressed.
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