Ryan McNeil
In trying to express my thoughts on TRON LEGACY, I had to consider the legacy of TRON. What Disney gave the world with TRON was an offering that featured cutting edge effects, wrapped around an uninteresting plot filled with enough mumbo-jumbo to keep the whole thing rolling.
So with that in mind, should there be any surprise over what we’ve been handed to continue that legacy?
Twenty years ago, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) disappeared. He left behind control of his company ENCOM, and his son Sam, and left no explanation of his absence. One day, his friend Alan (Bruce Boxleitner) gets a message originating from Flynn’s Arcade. Alan relays the message to a now grown-up Sam, and suggests that he follow the message to its source.
When Sam gets to the arcade, he finds a hidden lab. As he tries to hack his father’s system and learn what he can, he is drawn into The Grid – a world that exists inside some sort of super-computer, and the setting of his father’s adventures twenty-eight years ago.
Life in The Grid is pretty bleak it would seem, with a clone of Flynn named CLU running the show. Moments after Sam’s arrival, he is kicked into a gauntlet of games and nearly killed by CLU himself. However, right before the deathstroke, Sam is rescued by Quorra (Olivia Wilde), an entity with huge potential referred to as an ISO (don’t ask). She ferries Sam “Off-Grid” and reunites her with Flynn, who still has ultimate power over The Grid but has been living as a recluse.
Together, Sam, Flynn, and Quorra are poised to overthrow CLU and restore order to The Grid.
I think.
TRON LEGACY, like its predecessor, seems somewhat interested in pointing out to us that as we evolve technologically, we run the risk of becoming subservient to our own innovation. When I think about how out of sorts I feel on days where I forget my cell phone, that course of narrative becomes rather apt. Underneath all of that traces of a warning: forsaking human contact in the name of digital connection can leave one regretful later on. Flynn has taken The Grid to great places, but one has to think that he’d go back and give it up if it meant he could have been a better father to Sam. These are noble themes.
Unfortunately, TRON LEGACY doesn’t want to let these themes run through the film like the neon lines that illuminate so many shots. Instead, the film buries them under pseudo-stakes, incomprehensible mythology, and tyrannical rhetoric until they blend into the background. In the end, the plot is no more unique or faceted than one of the CGI-created faceless extras in the film…of which there are legions.
What makes all of this especially unfortunate, is that for a spectacle like this to work, the plot didn’t have to be exceptional…it just needed to be “good enough”. People willing to pay for a film like this aren’t looking for nuance – they’re just looking to have fun. With rope like that, the promise of stunning visual effects, you’d think that constructing a passable story would be an open-court-layup. The film would come with enough lightcycles and disc battles to keep us all distracted. It was literally going to amuse us with pretty flashing lights.
The story didn’t have to be evocative, memorable, or even original. They could have stolen any story structure they wanted and overlaid it on to this amazing world. Unfortunately, the story they decided to steal from was the original TRON. Bad idea.
TRON LEGACY uses 3-D and IMAX technology in a rather amusing manner. Essentially, these elements don’t come into play until Sam arrives in The Grid. Makes you think of Dorothy Gale opening that door to Oz and hearing a Daft Punk score blaring back at her. These elements are used to great effect to play on the imposing and vast nature of this world, becoming a fitting canvas for visuals like gathered mass armies and an impossibly massive coliseum. In many ways it felt like the filmmakers were watching all of the faux 3-D we’ve been offered this year and decided to say “Sit down kid, lemme show you how it’s done.”
Unfortunately, that’s just not enough anymore. The effects on display aren’t exactly groundbreaking, and once you get past those effects there’s not much left. When nobody in the movie seems to be having any fun, it makes it tough for us in the audience to have any fun. Thus the legacy of this film is assured. Like it’s predecessor, it will awe a particular audience for a little while with effects, before fading into a quaint relic when it reaches an unimpressive “end of line”.