Tron: Legacy: Old Jeff Bridges Battles Young Jeff Bridges in Disney’s Reboot

Jeff Bridges is God and, as image-captured from the original 1982 Tron, he’s also the devil in Disney’s mega-million-dollar reboot, Tron: Legacy. The notion of a tragically split persona might have been scripted to give the new movie emotional gravitas, but why bother with writing when Legacy is so intermittently stupendiferous in its 3-D sound-and-light show? In the original Tron, Bridges’ game-inventor Kevin Flynn hacked his employer’s computer to defend his intellectual-property rights, then somehow found himself “in the grid” and obliged to save the world from an operating system run amok. In the reboot, Flynn’s game self, an entity “programmed for perfection,” has become the resident cyber-tyrant, with the middle-aged, flesh-and-blood Flynn his unwilling prisoner. Years pass, and young Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), abandoned as a child, gets lasered into the computer (don’t ask) and finds himself transported to the disco dives of neon-limned Tronland. However ridiculous, the idea of a programmer vanishing into his creation is still an apposite allegory, and the setting is more than appropriate, as just about everything worthwhile here is computer-generated. When not delighting the eye, Legacy baffles the brain with mumbo-jumbo, including the promise of “a digital frontier to reshape the human condition.” Cast as a self-described “bio-digital jazzman,” Bridges gets the least felicitous lines. “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man,” he cautions Sam. Given the movie’s graphic pizzazz, the best hippie wisdom Bridges might offer the viewer is: Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.