Aside from the fact that one cost hundreds of millions of dollars more to make than the other, the experience of watching Joseph Kosinski's Tron: Legacy is not unlike eating cheap take out. Both are things you have a nostalgic attachment to. Both provide a sensory thrill. Both encourage you to shovel in a little more than you really should. And once the initial thrill is over both tend to leave you feeling a little bit lacking. You just end up hungry again too soon after the fact.

You've seen and enjoyed the various Tron trailers and promos?  Digging on the Daft Punk soundtrack, the light cycles zipping across the screen and the sight of Olivia Wilde in a glowing, form fitting suit? Go for those things and you'll leave happy because they're exactly as advertised: eye and ear candy of the highest order.

Look for much more than that, though, and things get a bit rocky.

Here's the story. The original Tron was built around Jeff Bridges' Kevin Flynn character, a game designer who ended up trapped within a sentient game of his own devising. Well, he stayed trapped in there and has been gone for a good long time now, long enough for the son he left behind to grow up fatherless and more than a little bit bitter about his disappearing dad. And then, one day, Flynn somehow gets a message to the outside world and his son Sam comes looking for Dad, only to get sucked into the digital world himself. There Sam discovers that Kevin is being held captive by an evil, digital copy of his much younger self and it is up to Sam to stop the evil twin, save Kevin, save the world in the process and, if he's lucky, score a bit of action with the hot computer program (Olivia Wilde) Dad created to help him out.

Got that? It's all an excuse to have people zipping around in cool digital environments in glowing suits, really, and if they'd stuck to that fact and a more manageable running time instead of trying to stretch it out into something more serious and much longer then they probably would have come out better.

Tron: Legacy is stretched too thin, basically. It's a design geek's wet dream, absolutely gorgeous on screen and taking excellent advantage of the 3D effects, and all of the technical elements are jaw dropping. But the human bits are generally just okay. Hedlund doesn't make a particularly compelling hero and his story is one we've seen plenty of times before, usually executed with a bit more pop than this and the simple story just lags over the 2+ hour running time. Cut it down to and hour and a half or and hour forty five and I wager it'd crackle along nicely but as it is you just have a bit too much time to get caught in the stuff that doesn't work. It's almost as though the creators got so caught up in the tiny details of the design work that they failed to notice that there were some problems on the larger story level.

Eye candy? Hell, yes. Tron: Legacy is that of the highest order. But it also feels like a bit of a missed opportunity, like something that could have been the starting point of something much, much more significant if they'd just nailed down the human element a bit tighter.