Tron: Legacy Review

Tron: Legacy

When it comes to mega-event movies, Tron: Legacy is a bizarre specimen. It is a sequel that comes nearly thirty years after the original Tron; a film that did mediocre business back in 1982 and many viewed as an oddball misfire by the then struggling Disney Studios. Decidedly ahead of its time, Tron was the first film to utilize computer graphics as a special effects medium and is an important work that has influenced much of what we see at the Cineplex today. It is also a slow paced, unbalanced film that many found boring and plodding. Over the years Tron has developed a devoted cult following and the neon blue and red fingerprints can be seen all over the pop culture landscape. But does a small mob of rabid fanboys and girls clamoring for more time on The Grid constitute the production of a 200 million dollar movie? Probably not. To wait three decades to give the masses another dose of something that the majority of them weren’t interested in the first place is an example of studios sapping their back catalog for any little idea they can revisit. A sequel to a flop is a bizarre thing indeed.

Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) has been missing for years. He has left behind a young son, Sam (Garrett Hedlund), a genius rebel who can ride the hell out of motorcycle and spends his off days BASE jumping from skyscrapers. These just so happen to be excellent skills to have when visiting the mainframe. While exploring his father’s old arcade palace, Sam is sucked into a new and improved version of the Grid and is immediately thrown into a large arena to participate in some fast and violent games. Two opponents throw glow-in-the-dark discs at each other, to the digital death! After a slight trickle of blood is spilt, Sam is quickly identified as a User, a human from the outside world, and not a Program and taken to the leader of the Grid. He is shocked to find that the ruler of this digital world is his father, looking the same as he had when he disappeared twenty years earlier. Turns out that this isn’t Kevin Flynn, however, but a Program named Clu who was created by Flynn to help him develop this world.
Clu is a digital copy of Flynn but with more sinister plans and when the time was right, Clu took over and Flynn was exiled off the Grid. It was a Clu coup. Sam must find his father and help him escape this prison that he has created for himself. But time is short and they only have a few hours before the portal will close again forever.

The main attraction here is obviously the special effects and they are hit and miss. The Grid is beautiful and detailed while the action sequences involving “The Games” are exhilarating. The new light cycle race and disc game are the sole reason to revisit Tron and these are the best-rendered and choreographed moments of the film. For some reason, the 3D effect does very little to enhance this world and most of the movie is flat. First-time director, Joseph Kosinski, tries to impart some Wizard of Oz on the film and presents first few minutes in 2D. This is during the moments that take place in “The Real World” and when Sam enters the Grid, the movie is supposed to become alive in full 3 dimensions. This doesn’t work and the artificial landscape has barely any depth to it at all. It does look like Jeff Bridges is standing a few feet behind Hedlund in some scenes though. You could almost reach out and touch it.

Another major failure when it comes to the “special” effects is the main villain, Clu. To make the character appear to be Jeff Bridges decades younger, Clu’s entire head is cobbled in a computer and it looks it. The work is a few steps behind The Curious Case of Benjamin Button from a few years back. In Button, you saw a person in those early moments that featured Brad Pitt as a tiny old man. In this film, there isn’t one second that Clu comes off as a real being. The eyes are dead and the mouth isn’t well synced to the words. Clu is a walking prop. It is a massive mistake that is hard to ignore, never allowing you to invest in the fantasy.

If nothing else, the first Tron film was a true original. Opinions aside, it can’t be argued that the film was visionary and broke new ground. The saddest aspect of this retread is that it copies instead of defines. Besides sharing some Wizard of Oz structure, here are elements lifted from the book of Wachowski (The Matrix’s slo-mo action, the light cycle scene screams Speed Racer) stirred up with a little Star Wars (in that robe, Flynn sure does look like a Jedi) and a dash of Christianity (the savior is the Son of the Maker) for good measure. It is all so old and tired. This is a prime example of an unnecessary sequel. Maybe the third one will be better. I hope they keep pace and we won’t find out until 2038.