I’m really starting to think they hate us, the masters of our so-called entertainment. At the very least they surely hold us in disdain, see us as inconvenient obstacles to their god-granted profits. If only we weren’t so insistent upon such things as powerful story and resonant themes and embraceable characters. Oh, wait: We’re not. Not on the whole.

And so Tron: Legacy, the totally superfluous and eminently forgettable sequel to the groundbreaking 1982 flick Tron, will make a bloody fortune, not because it embodies any qualities deserving of such, but out of compelling nostalgia and, well, not much else.

In 1982, Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn was a computer game designer who got zapped into a virtual world of his own making. Thirty years later, he’s still therenever mind that he did actually escape in the original film – and while he has been stuck, he has shepherded this virtual world into something that bears no resemblance to much of anything we would recognize as a representation of cyberspace. That should be OK, since the server upon which Flynn’s electronic purgatory is running has been cut off from the outside world and so has evolved independently… but it still has no meaning for us, and neither the army of screenwriters nor first-time director Joseph Kosinski seem to think it’s important that there be one. It’s just so freakin’ cool to look at!

Except it isn’t. The spandex-and-neon aesthetic of the 1982 film has been upgraded to ooze even more smoothly into your visual cortex, but it still looks cheap and cheesy and like a relic of that era immediately post-Star Wars when everyone was desperate to manufacture that next sci-fi blockbuster. But as then, everyone here seems to have forgotten that Star Wars wasn’t, you know, STAR WARS because of FX but because we fell in love with Luke, Han, and Leia. It’s tough to love – or even to grudgingly like – Garrett Hedlund’s Sam Flynn, Kevin’s now grownup son who follows Dad into VR-land: He’s a smug, deeply unappealing, empty shell of a contrived would-be hero.

We’re supposed to care what happens in the cyberspace here, but it’s hard to understand the threat. Apparently, Clu, an avatar for Kevin Flynn (a disturbingly CGI-age-regressed Bridges), might somehow be able to lead an army of indistinctly dangerous VR soldiers into our “real” world and do some damage, but what threat this poses is unclear. More than a decade after The Matrix utterly transformed popular metaphors for the virtual world – and for how the physical world might interact with the digital one – Tron: Legacy wants to be content to exist in an uninteresting alternate to that, one that, Kevin Flynn promised, would transform everything – “science, medicine, religion” – yet cannot even begin to make us appreciate how this might come about. Kevin rhapsodizes about “biodigital jazz, man,” so where the hell is it? I’d like to see a movie about biodigital jazz. It would require a helluva lot more imagination and intellectual adventurousness than Tron: Legacy can muster.

TRON: LEGACY (1½)• Directed by Joseph Kosinski • Starring Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, Bruce Boxleitner • 127 min • Rated PG • At Century Cinemas Del Monte, Maya Cinemas, Northridge Cinemas, Lighthouse Cinemas.