What About Tron?

WARNING.  This post contains spoilers for Tron: Legacy, and probably for the original Tron as well.  If you haven’t seen the original Tron, well, then I’m afraid it just isn’t going to work out between us.  I’m sure you’ll find someone who loves the same things you do.

WTF.

The graphics in Tron: Legacy are nothing to shake a stick at.  They’re really quite good.  The first scene with the updated Space Paranoids truly captured my heart as a Tron fan.  The lightcycle battles were everything I wanted them to be and more.  The lightgliders and lightbuggy were totally cool (probably not their real names, but I don’t care).  However, while utilizing the latest and greatest in graphic technology, the plot was lacking.

The movie begins with some backstory to fill us in on Sam Flynn, Kevin Flynn’s son.  Jeff Bridges is an old fart now, so the choice to computer animate a 1989 Kevin Flynn talking to his seven-year-old Sam was an interesting choice.  There was a bit of a disconnect there, as even the best visual effects cannot make a computer-generated character look like real life, but I understood why they did it; it would have been even worse to have current Jeff Bridges acting like his 1989 self.  Unfortunately, the director is depending upon your knowledge of the original Tron—set in 1982, before I was born—to understand this.  The young woman who sat next to me at the theatre actually leaned over and asked “Why does he look fake?”  Since a computer animated Bridges-as-Clu stars as the main villain, I can see how this alienates audiences who may not have seen the original Tron—one character computer animated while all the others are live action.

Other than the graphics and decent opening, which included a visit to the now-defunct Flynn’s arcade, the rest of the movie failed to live up to my expectations.  Even Flynn’s arcade is nothing more than an Easter egg; new viewers were probably bored mindless.  There was some possible intrigue with the titular character, Tron, having been somehow corrupted, but other than a single moment of revelation followed by Tron’s “rebooting” from orange to white, we never get to see what became of him.  This causes problems on two levels.  First, those having watched Tron before are left sorely disappointed as they watch the entire movie as this cloaked character with the familiar Tron logo on his chest goes around doing horrible things only to not get to see the situation resolved.  Second, those who have not seen Tron before do not realize this is a character until the old Kevin Flynn names him as someone important.  Unfortunately, the audience is left confused as the movie never moves beyond that.

The page thing is bogus, and obviously a forced plot point.  Alan receives a page from a defunct phone number from his long lost friend, Kevin Flynn, on a pager he decided to apparently keep for twenty years.  When he finally receives a clue about his friend, he goes  to Sam Flynn and hands him the keys to Flynn’s arcade—which he also apparently kept for twenty years.  Then he leaves, completely uncaring as to what happens.  It makes the opening feel flat and forced.

We’re also very lucky that Sam Flynn is an obviously trained daredevil, parachuting from buildings and possessing inhuman skills with a motorcycle.  These are precisely the skills he will need in the Grid, and he just happens to be blessed with them.  He’s also a skilled computer hacker, but that part we can probably assume based on his lineage.  However, pulling up the list of previously issued commands and reentering the last one to try to understand what his dad was doing was the one logical thing that made sense.  Much better than “Oh, look, a laser, I’ll bet you that I somehow know this laser thing will take me to meet my dad!”  Given the way the rest of the opening was set, I was totally prepared for it, and was pleasantly surprised.

The whole “do nothing” idea was absolutely dreadful.  It was the biggest cop-out for why Kevin Flynn—the Administrator of the Grid who has Jedi-like powers over the environment—decided to not do a damn thing for twenty years.  Speaking of twenty years, according to the original Tron movie, long stretches of time in the digital world was no more than seconds in the real world.  Kevin Flynn spent twenty real-world years in the digital world, which should have been equivalent to thousands upon thousands of years.  If I may say so, Kevin seems to have aged REALLY well.

What really made me give up on the movie is when the audience is introduced to the lightcycle that Kevin Flynn himself has programmed.  It was said to be the “fastest thing on the Grid.”  When Sam stole it to head back to the Grid, I was looking forward to see what it could do.  Then Sam parked it.  And gave it to a random Program to distract the guards.  Then it was captured.  The end.  Wow.  How awesome was that.  It should not have even been mentioned at all: let people assume it was the original bike from the first movie.  Then we would not have felt so disappointed when Sam just gave it up.  We know what the old bike can do; it is just an Easter egg.  A lightcycle custom made by Kevin Flynn? That should have been something to see.

After all of this, I just have to say the story of Tron: Legacy is just not worth it.  If you watched the original Tron, this one is a treat to see how the Grid has changed.  But even you will be disappointed with how the story plays out, especially with Tron’s story.  If you did not watch the original Tron, then the special effects are all that is in this one, and maybe worth a Red Box rental later.

03 – What Qualifies As Art?

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