TRON: LEGACY: The Cyber-Future Is… Murky At Best

Of all the hol­i­day block­busters com­ing down the pike for the 2010 hol­i­day sea­son, Tron: Legacy eas­ily has the biggest geek-controversy atmos­phere sur­round­ing it.  Some are call­ing it a shame­ful dis­as­ter and a smaller cir­cle of fans are already stak­ing out a claim for its poten­tial “mis­un­der­stood clas­sic” sta­tus.  Films that inspire this curi­ous blend of reac­tions are usu­ally mis­fires and that is the case here — but what kind of a mis­fire is Tron: Legacy?

The story tries to pitch the film both as a direct sequel and its own franchise-starter.  This time, the focus is Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), the son of the hero of the first film, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges).  The senior Flynn is work­ing on a top-secret project when he sud­denly dis­ap­pears, leav­ing his son an orphan and his com­pany, Encom, to be taken over by soulless-corporate types.  Sam grows up surly and rebel­lious in his father’s absence but has a piece of his dad’s freedom-fighter instinct — as shown in a fun pro­logue where he swipes Encom’s new oper­at­ing sys­tem out from under their noses to dis­trib­ute it free on the internet.

However, Sam is forced to put aside the chip on his shoul­der when Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), Sam’s sur­ro­gate dad/buddy of his father/human alter-ego of Tron, approaches him with the news that Kevin sent him a text the other night from the old arcade he used to own.  Sam checks it out and a computer-assisted laser defrag­ments his body into bytes, hurl­ing him into the cyber-world.  After some fight­ing via data-disc throw­ing and light-cycles, he dis­cov­ers that his father is alive in the cyber-world but locked in a bat­tle of wills with the dictator-like Clu (also Bridges), a computer-program dop­pel­gänger that wants to take over the real world.  There’s also Quorra (Olivia Wilde), Kevin’s gor­geous cyber-assistant, who catches Sam’s eye.

As the above syn­op­sis indi­cates, Tron: Legacy has plenty of mate­r­ial to work with but the end results have more width than depth in terms of story.  Re-establishing the sto­ry­line and set­ting up the two worlds eats up about half of the film’s run­ning time.  Once the real con­flict begins around the mid­point, it’s rather sim­plis­ti­cally laid out.  The inner work­ings of the future world are both expan­sive and vague, as is the war of wills between Kevin and Clu.  The com­plex­ity of jug­gling the nar­ra­tive demands of a sequel, a fran­chise reboot and a story/concept recap for the unfa­mil­iar result in a film where the expo­si­tion tends to smother the char­ac­ters and their relationships.

Worst of all, Tron him­self is an after­thought despite being name-checked in the title.  His char­ac­ter is hastily worked into the final third, being made a major part of the finale’s action despite get­ting almost no face time and none of the char­ac­ter moments needed to lay out any sort of an arc for him.  The “have it both ways” approach taken to his char­ac­ter reflects the many prob­lems of the sto­ry­line, which attempts to be mul­ti­ple things for mul­ti­ple view­ers with­out ever really sat­is­fy­ing anyone.

That said, Tron: Legacy has some virtues.  The min­i­mal­ist visual design will please those who go for this approach, updat­ing a num­ber of con­cepts from the first film in appeal­ing way and the Daft Punk score blends orches­tral and elec­tron­ica ele­ments in a man­ner that is truly daz­zling.  Director Joe Kosinski han­dles the look bet­ter than the sto­ry­line, blend­ing CGI and impres­sive sets in a way that gives the film a con­sis­tent look (even if the phys­i­cal lay­out of the cyber-world itself isn’t so clear).  The action in the big disc-fight and light-cycle scenes deliv­ers the fun Tron fans are hop­ing for.  Mileage will vary for indi­vid­ual view­ers depen­dent upon their patience with the story itself but Your Humble Reviewer found the film to be engag­ing as an audio-visual expe­ri­ence: it’s not a game-changer but the scope of the spec­ta­cle can be pretty hypnotic.

Also, the act­ing in Tron: Legacy has more vari­ety than you usu­ally get in a block­buster.  Hedlund under­plays but this fits the nature of his char­ac­ter­i­za­tion (which is admit­tedly sketchy in places).  Bridges does well in his dual role, even if the Flynn side of things chan­nels a lit­tle too much Big Lebowski, and his abil­ity to play both roles seri­ously goes a long way towards keep­ing the audi­ence engaged.  Wilde is impres­sive as Quorra, pro­ject­ing a wide-eyed sense of won­der that harkens back to the orig­i­nal film in a charm­ing way.  That said, Boxleitner might be the most intrigu­ing of the group: despite min­i­mal screen time, he car­ries him­self with a grav­i­tas that will make fans of the orig­i­nal smile (and wish that this script gave him more to do).  The one real question-mark in terms of per­for­mance is a bizarrely camped-up turn by Michael Sheen as a creepy club-owner who seems to have wan­dered out of The Fifth Element.

Ultimately, Tron: Legacy is a mis­fire on con­cep­tual terms, too bur­dened by the weight of its mul­ti­ple aims to give the story room to breathe, and it often feels like the open­ing act of a big­ger minis­eries instead of its own self-contained film.  That said, it’s an inter­est­ing mis­fire that offers a lot to look at and lis­ten to.  Despite the many prob­lems laid out in this review, the film is not humil­i­at­ing in a fan-betraying Phantom Menace sort of a way nor is it overblown and visu­ally inco­her­ent à la Michael Bay.  It’s not going to be the beloved smash that Disney was hop­ing for but it’s a lot more viewer-friendly that other big-budget mis­fires and may estab­lish a cult of its own based on its audio-visual appeal… a set of cir­cum­stances that will allow it to fol­low in Tron’s foot­steps in an eerily apro­pos manner.