I was a mere five years old when the first Tron came out and while I don’t recall seeing it in theaters, I do recall seeing it on either VHS or cable a few years later, where my young friends and I would marvel at this weird video-game environment that people were actually in. That being said, I don’t think I saw it too many more times after those first few viewings, but still, when I was in Hall H at Comic-Con 2008, as one of the lucky few to first see that surprise sizzle reel of Tron: Legacy, I was incredibly excited. I finally got to see the final product, the sum total of two and a half years worth of hype and buzz and, like most movies of our content-saturated age, it somewhat failed to live up to the hype.
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Now, I can’t completely trash the movie, because it truly is a visual masterpiece and Daft Punk’s electrifying score will be a big Oscar snub when it’s overlooked next month. As much as I go to see movies for sensory stimulation/overload, which Tron: Legacy delivers by the truckload, I’m drawn to a movie by its story, which was lacking more than I thought it would be.
We start off way back in 1989, with Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) telling a tale to his young son Sam, a tale of a warrior named Tron set in a magical world Kevin can’t fully describe to his son, pledging he will show him “the grid” one day soon. Unfortunately, Kevin Flynn never returns home after that night, a mystery that has plagued young Sam his entire life. When we catch up with the “adult” Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), we see him playing an elaborate prank on his father’s company, Encom, as they prepare to launch their latest software design… which Sam steals and releases it on the Internet for free. (FYI, look for a nice cameo from Cillian Murphy, sporting a very weird haircut, in these early scenes). When Sam returns home to his modified garage/house, he finds Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), former Encom head and father figure to Sam in lieu of Kevin’s disappearance. He tells Sam that he received a page from the Flynn Arcade, a number that has been disconnected for 25 years, which leads Sam to head back to that long lost arcade and snoop around, which leads Sam to be transported to “the grid,” inside the computerized world his father first dazzled him with as a child through his stories. From there, the visuals are stepped up to astounding levels… and the story gets even more convoluted.
The main throughline here isn’t all that complicated. Sam stumbles into this world, finds dear old dad, who was essentially trapped here against his will, and is determined to bring him back to reality. What’s annoying is they make great pains to describe the rules of this world to us, even though, when it’s all said and done, it either doesn’t make much sense or it doesn’t matter since they broke their own rules anyway.
Screenwriters Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, both longtime underlings of J.J. Abrams on both Lost and Felicity, do a great job in keeping us both interested and puzzled throughout the entire 127-minute runtime. For all the explaining they do about how things work in this cyberworld, they seem to sidestep how Kevin Flynn was trapped here, away from his family for over 25 years and the explanation we’re given on why Kevin couldn’t return, is flimsy, at best. Kevin tells us tales about how he, Tron and Clu, who Kevin created in his own image (an image that never ages), set out to create the ultimate system, although Clu got greedy and struck down Tron, as Flynn retreated to the outskirts of this world so that Clu could not get a hold of his “disc,” which holds the key to not only the dominance of this world, but the key to bring these characters out of the grid and into real life. Oh yeah, the disc. Since practically everyone/everything on the grid is a program, they have an identity disc on their back, which contains all of their knowledge/data they have obtained throughout their “life.” It’s also used as a weapon in the human air hockey/disc wars game they have. Basically, Clu wants Kevin’s disc for grid dominance, but Kevin isn’t having it, hiding in the outskirts of this world with Quorra (Olivia Wilde), an “isopod” who… ah crap. I have to explain that too. See, isopods were these original anomalies in the system, who were actually somewhat sentient beings, that had their own will and wouldn’t conform to the structure of the system that Clu had created. Kevin embraced the isopods but Clu hated them, since they were “imperfect” and had them all destroyed… except for, of course, Quorra, who now lives with Kevin as he tries to educate her on humanity… while living in a computer world. So, essentially, Kevin stayed in this world to avoid Clu, so Clu wouldn’t take his disc and use it to get into the outside real world… even if that means living in a prison he helped create. Confused yet? Me too… and I saw the damn thing.
Still, all of this jabbering aside, director Joseph Kosinski has indeed created a visual marvel that is nearly unprecedented by today’s standards, which, by today’s standards, is saying a lot. OK, I did hate the “disc game” thing, but not because it wasn’t visually arresting, because it was, very much so. I hated it because it was literally a human version of air hockey, with one dude/program/whatever throwing the disc at the opponent or off the walls, trying to slice the disc through said program/dude/whatever. When I saw these crazy discs flying around in promos and trailers, I assumed there would be more to it than what actually happens, but that’s not really the case. The lightcycle sequence is so absolutely f*&%ing stunning and just that one sequence is worth the price of admission alone. It’s literally the only scene in the entire movie that follows the age-old movie maxim of “show don’t tell.” They set up the rules of this grid-racing scene by SHOWING you what happens, instead of the talky-talk we get throughout most of the movie. This scene is truly the crowning achievement of Tron: Legacy (although I was impressed with the Benjamin Button techniques they used to de-age Bridges as Clu), and I only wish they could use the tactics they did here throughout the whole movie. I’ll be honest, though, I don’t have the foggiest idea how they could cut down on the verbal explanations, as the movie exists now, but maybe they could’ve started by not making it so unnecessarily complicated in the first place.
As negative as this review does sound, I actually did end up liking Tron: Legacy. The acting is sound, with fine performances from Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, although I DESPERATELY wanted a bigger role for the glorious Michael Sheen as Castor, for his irreplaceable irreverence, and Beau Garrett as Gem, for her demure gorgeousness. Director Joseph Kosinski more than proved his greatness as far as visuals go, with a highly-kinetic style, when needed, and a subtely subdued style, when needed. Daft Punk’s score is simply transcendent, in perfect harmony with Kosinski’s eye-popping visuals, and, yes, Daft Punk SHOULD be nominated for an Oscar… not only because of their brilliance, but because I wonder if they’d actually, literally, show their faces (they go to great lengths to never show their faces for photos/videos) at the Oscars if they were nominated… Anyway, when you get past the overwhelming semantics of this visual world, Tron: Legacy is really just a story about a young man who wants his dad back, with Kevin Flynn proving to be a prodigal dad, or sorts, which seems to get lost in everything that surrounds the story.
As I think back to that first time I set my eyes on the Comic-Con 2008 sizzle reel, I honestly wonder what I would’ve thought about Tron: Legacy if there hadn’t been two and a half years of hype surrounding it. Right now, there are over 17 minutes of trailers and clips from the movie right here on MovieWeb as well as over an hour of behind-the-scenes featurettes. That’s not even counting the music videos and the incredible amount of photo galleries we have for the movie. Up until I saw the actual movie, I practically had a five-star review just waiting to be typed up, because everything I had seen from the movie was very impressive, and because that amount of material was so substantially large, I figured there was no way I wouldn’t think this would be utterly amazing. As the Rolling Stones once said, though, you can’t always get what you want, and that’s about the best way I can sum up Tron: Legacy. As negative as this review does sound, I actually did end up liking Tron: Legacy… but I was expecting to like it a whole lot more.
