TRON: Legacy

Twenty-eight years after Steven Lisberger’s Tron, Disney has run out of ideas and, having exhausted their share of straight-to-video sequels plundering every successful original story they made, they’ve now come to recycling this movie. Not only that, but director Joseph Kosinski has been commissioned to also rehash The Black Hole. It’s not to say that the original Tron was a flawless masterpiece that needed no tinkering.

The filmmakers manually programmed each still frame of “computer animation”* and shot on location at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Not bad for a $17 million budget, small even by 1982 standards. But the story and characters were no more clunky than the sequel’s, so why go to the trouble?

In the original film, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), was a former ENCOM employee and gifted programmer whose games, including the successful Space Paranoids, were plundered by company CEO Ed Dillinger (David Warner). Flynn made a breakthrough discovery and digitally transferred himself into the corporate mainframe to confront the Master Control Program, Dillinger’s creation which protected the proof of his intellectual property theft. That’s particularly interesting, considering Disney’s penchant for plagiarizing other sources for story concepts, turning around and taking extraordinary measures to protect these uncredited derivative works from theft.

Suffice it to say, security was incredibly tight at the screening for Tron: Legacy. Though, I suspect that had more to do with Disney’s paranoia that this $200 million albatross may not have the staying power it needs to turn a decent profit. Generally, the more paranoid a studio is that its gamble may fail, the tighter the screening security. It’s partly about piracy, but it’s really about negative buzz destroying opening weekend momentum. I digress.

It probably went something like this: Disney Executive VP Brigham Taylor, also responsible for the dreck that was a live action (read: superfluous) adaptation of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice… sorry, DISNEY’S THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE, A BRIGHAM TAYLOR PRODUCTION IN CONJUNCTION WITH MICKEY MOUSE, DID WE FORGET TO MENTION IT’S A DISNEY PROPERTY- er, FILM? Sorry. Where was I? Oh yes, Brigham Taylor, after being the seven billionth person to discover Tron Guy on YouTube, probably made some phone calls insisting that this thing’s got legs. Who better, then, to write a convoluted sequel with lousy character development and a resolution that I forgot two minutes after leaving the theater, than Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, both co-executive producers of Disney-ABC’s Lost?

Someone paid Academy Award® winner Jeff Bridges enough money to return, sans bulge-concealing dance belt, as a Buddha-slash-The Dude reincarnation of his former engineer self. Flynn’s digital doppelgänger, Clu, is a CG re-creation of Mr. Bridges—de-aged, but about as lifelike as the actor who plays Kevin’s abandoned, real-world son, Sam. Garrett Hedlund may be the world’s first live-action, artificial actor.

The film begins with the customary set-up, giving us a little bit of backstory on Sam’s character, because he didn’t exist in the original; in other words, there was no reason, beyond money, for this sequel to exist. Sam grows up to be a thrill-seeker. That’s a relief! Can you imagine how the next two hours would play out had he been a poet laureate?

Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) now holds a rather useless seat on the board. In about as trite a scene as you can imagine, the board’s power struggle is reflected in a clash between the CEO and Sam, who happens to remain ENCOM’s largest shareholder after his father’s vindication and subsequent disappearance left him the farm. It’s a typical petulant-prince-rejecting-the-mantle-of-responsibility story in which Sam is lured by Bradley to answer a mysterious pager call from Flynn’s arcade which leads him to his father who is trapped in the digital world.

The action sequences are, admittedly, fun to look at—as is Olivia Wilde, Beau Garrett and the scenery-chewing Michael Sheen, who as Zuse beautifully emulates David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust alter ego. The problem is that, outside the movie’s action- and graphics-driven sequences, the film’s story and characters fall flat.

Why, for example, does Clu harbor resentment toward his creator, Flynn? The story argues that Clu, more or less became obsessed with perfection and rebelled against his human user, rather than learning from Flynn’s own personal growth; isn’t the point that Clu is an adaptive program? This is as inexplicable a turn for Clu as it is for the mysterious character named Rinzler (whose secret I won’t reveal) to suddenly switch sides at such a time as is opportune for the plot in need of a last-minute deus ex machina.

Since he hasn’t spent any time whatsoever in twenty years with Sam, Clu has very little reason to act bitterly toward Flynn. But imagine if Flynn remained something of an absentee father to both worlds. His 2001-inspired hideout is a perfect setting to establish his deity-like neutrality, which could have served as the basis for his ambivalence toward both sons or, better yet, the genesis of his corruption by the very system he created. Now wouldn’t that be fascinating—Flynn turning on Clu? As the idealist protagonist of the original, Flynn has further to fall than the self-contained Clu.

The film’s downward spiral into stupidity is aided by the overdriven sound mix. The otherwise pulsating music by Daft Punk, sadly, contains no traces of Wendy Carlos’ original score, not even a hint of Vangelis—Blade Runner, anyone? As I indicated in a recent video editorial on the Loudness Wars, the sound mix is so horribly pushed to the limits of digital audio’s dynamic range that it lacks punch. Bombastic hits thrum at us every other second. Had the inventive Frenchmen been more subtle, certain emotional cues might actually stick out at the appropriate, pivotal scenes in the film.

Here, nothing stands out, but it’s perhaps useful if the point of the entire film is, like much of the over-hyped 2001: A Space Odyssey, to bake passively while pretty colors pass by on the large screen in front of you. Of that exercise in Stanley Kubrick’s self-indulgence, Pauline Kael once wrote, “2001 is a celebration of cop-out. It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise, something better is coming, and it’s all out of your hands anyway. There’s an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab. Drop up.”

Indeed, the conclusion is so infuriatingly pointless (as was the Lost finale) precisely because, in two hours and seven minutes of film, Sam learns a lesson about responsibility that, by Steve Wozniak’s standards, probably wasn’t the right one anyway. The only question we are left with is: Why is Cillian Murphy, cast as a hipster Dillinger 2.0, on the ENCOM board and what the hell happens to him, anyway? No wonder the film is loaded with neon lights. Disney paid $200 million for this piece of shit. So pop some E, sit back, shut up and enjoy the colors and sounds.

* The still images had to be photographed and then put together in a reel. This wasn’t computer animation by today’s standards nor did it employ textures or raytracing. Though along with the Genesis sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan by Industrial Light and Magic’s Craig Huxley, Tron was an important precursor to modern CG.

Tron: Legacy • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 • Running Time: 127 minutes • MPAA Rating: PG for sequences of sci-fi action violence and brief mild language. • Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Dolby and the double-D symbol are registered trademarks of Dolby Laboratories.