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Tron Legacy is just around the corner -- a mere 28 years after the original film. I'm planning to see the new movie at some point, so I decided to revisit the original film. And I found it to be a crazy mixed bag of contradictions.

Obviously, style is really the thing Tron had going for it. As a piece of storytelling, it borders on being completely incoherent. Oh, it's a simple enough story, and not hard to follow. It's that the movie bounces from one idea to the next with little or no connective tissue, and never stays with any given thing for more than a minute or two. It's a rapid fire narrative of sensory overload that you could argue is perfectly suited to the visual display. Recognizers! Light cycles! Pools of raw power! I/O towers! Love interests! Giant spinning heads! And it's all related with stilted, wooden dialogue. You might think it a conscious choice made to convey the personalities of the "programs," save for the fact that the real world characters are just as awkward.

In a 90 minute movie, it feels like 30 minutes of it is badly delivered exposition, and another 30 is a big advertisement for the real life Tron arcade games that cropped up everywhere in the wake of the films. This doesn't leave much room in the remaining third for proper "getting from A to B."

But oh, those visuals. It's easy to see what made jaws everywhere drop back in 1982. This film doesn't look like anything that came before, nor even was it really much imitated after. Even the handful of 80s movies to embrace computer generated visual effects -- say, for instance, The Last Starfighter -- didn't have the style or flair of this film. And the interesting thing watching the film is that while it can at times look hokey now, full of bad blue screen work and the modern computer equivalent of childrens' crayon drawings, it still somehow works within the context of the movie itself. Somehow, it looks old without looking dated; it's the real world moments of people in short-shorts and feathered hairdos that call more attention to just how old the movie is.

On the acting side, it's hard for anyone to shine saying these kinds of lines. Still Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner make likable heroes, while David Warner is a wonderfully oily villain (both in the real world and the computer realm).

I'd call Tron a C- overall. My hope is that in this modern age of movie making, where it is so much harder to deliver "something you've never seen before," that the sequel will pick up the storytelling slack for a more complete experience.