Tron: Legacy

Anything I say about Tron: Legacy needs to be preceded by a lengthy and loud round of applause for the marketing team at Walt Disney Pictures. To a very small group of people, making a sequel to Tron sounds like a great idea. What with the proliferation of the Internet in so many various ways, especially the concept that people reinvent themselves so completely online, following up on the Steven Lisberger film from 1982 that touched on these thoughts seems obvious. And, hey, Jeff Bridges just won an Oscar. He's back in a big way. However, the idea of making a sequel to a barely remembered Disney live-action film from the early 1980s is, on its face, insane. While Bridges is certainly doing well in this stage of his career, he's not a guaranteed box-office draw, and the most memorable thing about Tron to some people is that it's the reason for a great Treehouse of Horror gag ("Has anyone here seen Tron?" "No." "No." "No." "No." "Yes. Oh, I mean, no.").

Making a sequel to a movie from so long ago, a movie that so few people in the target demographic have even heard of, is borderline idiotic. That I wanted to see this movie--and I did--without having seen a single second of footage of the film in my lifetime is cause for celebration for Disney marketing, I'm sure. Mind you, if you watch Tron: Legacy with no prior knowledge of its predecessor, you won't be baffled. The plot is about as convoluted as most science-fiction or action-adventure stories, but the basics of the story are easy enough to pick up. In some ways, that is the biggest problem with Tron: Legacy. At best, it is a mishmash of every popular genre film of the past 40 years. Flashes of Star Wars (though with some fight scenes where the people involved look like they're holding actual lightsabers, it can be more than flashes), Batman Begins, throw in some Joseph Campbell, and you have something close to what Tron: Legacy looks like at its finest, which isn't that great. At its worst, Tron: Legacy is something truly dangerous for any tentpole blockbuster: dull.

So much about the movie could have worked, even if it dredged up familiar ideas. We open in 1989, with Sam Flynn, a tween, being told about the Grid, a virtual world created by Sam's father, Kevin (Bridges). Sam wants to go to the Grid, just like his dad, but before he can, Kevin disappears. Sam grows up into a loner who lives in a studio apartment that looks like a mini-warehouse and plays pranks on the company Kevin was the head of before he vanished, ENCOM. He's able to do so because he's also very rich; ENCOM is wildly successful and Sam is the chief shareholder, despite not wanting to have anything to do with the company. One night, Kevin's friend and ENCOM board member Alan (Bruce Boxleitner, reprising his role from the original film) informs Sam that he was paged at Kevin's old arcade, which has been out of commission for decades. Sam investigates, and by tapping out a few keystrokes, he's sucked into the world of the Grid. Once there, he's riding on lightcycles, fighting for his life with his identity disc, and discovering that the Grid is run by a physical version of Kevin's younger self, called Clu, while the real Kevin lives on the outskirts of the Grid with a pretty young woman who falls for Sam.

I haven't even gotten to the crux of the film, and I'm already nodding off a bit. Nothing about Tron: Legacy works as well as it should. There's a stunning lack of humor in the film, not just because the film takes itself very seriously, but also because what accounts for humor is just a lot of weak one-liners. How do we fix this? Well, Michael Sheen shows up for about 10 minutes and acts like a mix of Ziggy Stardust and Jack Sparrow, and there you are. Sheen is, at least, having plenty of fun, which is more than I could say for the lead of the film, Garrett Hedlund. I'd heard that Hedlund, who plays the adult Sam, was a complete charisma vacuum here, and I didn't end up seeing him as that bad of a performer. However, he just felt very disengaged. Of course, that's as much his fault as it is the director's and the writers' (Joseph Kosinski and Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz, respectively). While the majority of the visual effects are, if not unparalleled, really cool to look at, the story is uninteresting at its best moments.

Buckets of money were thrown at this film's look, and for the most part, it pays off. Kosinski makes his debut here, and knows how to provide interesting imagery. His work doesn't have enough of a distinctive mark to keep me excited for his next project, but there are far worse directors in the business. Kitsis and Horowitz, straight off of writing on Lost, create a similar combination of familiar tropes and idioms, but forgot to include compelling characters. The reason why Lost worked wasn't always the story, it was the characters stuck in that story. Sam Flynn, Kevin Flynn, Clu, Quorra (the love interest, essentially, not the "warrior" Olivia Wilde wants to dub her), and others should have been drawn better, given more heft and dimension. There's more excitement to be had in listening to the Daft Punk score for the film; not being too familiar with the band, I can't say where it stands with their other work, but it's the most flawless element of the movie.

The most glaring element of Tron: Legacy that does not work is Jeff Bridges. Now, in his current, elder state, Bridges is OK. For one reason or another, he's given to randomly talking like he's an old hippie, which is meant to be character-building. It doesn't work, and Bridges almost seems to struggle with the "radical" dialogue. The real misstep comes with Clu, also played by Bridges. While I give him credit for attempting such versatility, the fault lays with the people behind the supposedly groundbreaking effect of having a young and old Bridges in the same film, even interacting in one scene. Clu looks creepy. He looks creepier than anything Robert Zemeckis ever concocted for his motion-capture films, not just because of the so-called "uncanny valley" effect, but because Clu's lips look like dead slugs, not like human lips. Every other "program" in the Grid is played by an actual person. Clu is not a person. He's a creepy projection of what Bridges might have looked like in the 1980s.

There are other problems in the film (why hire Cillian Murphy to play the villain of the sequel for the original, and just have him say a few lines at the beginning?), but Tron: Legacy fails because it wants to be a 21st-century franchise for all the kids who didn't grow up with the original Star Wars films, but isn't able to provide enough action, intrigue, or lovable characters to make me demand a repeat journey. Also, even though it seems obvious that Disney wanted Tron to be a new franchise, I genuinely have no idea what they'd have done. Spoiler alert: the bad guys die at the end of this one. The Grid is safe again. The guy gets the girl. Where else do you go from here? Final note: the 3-D in the film should have been great. But the film takes place in such physically dark places that the technology is almost useless. I don't want to say I literally could not see some scenes in the film, but...it came real close. Considering that this movie was shot in 3-D, I was surprised and disappointed that the technology was a waste of time and money. I have no idea if Walt Disney Pictures was thrilled with the box-office performance of the film (my guess: they were just OK with it), but they should give their marketing team a big, fat bonus for pulling the wool over everyone's eyes.