It’s a tricky proposition making a sequel to a film that came out 28 years ago. Other than among the most hardcore of geek circles, I can’t imagine that there is much lingering familiarity left over from the original TRON’s release in 1982. Personally, I’m not sure that I’ve ever even seen the whole thing, all the way through. TRON is a film that exists for me and probably a lot of other people who are around my age in half remembered glimpses. A few minutes watched on basic cable here and there. A VHS box cover caught by peripheral vision countless times while walking through a mom and pop video store. I’m pretty sure I played the video game a couple times as a kid. I have a vague awareness of what TRON was. Jeff Bridges was a computer programmer who found himself transported into a computer world where he did battle with a security program that was personified. There were other programs that you had to race on motorcycles and have Frisbee fights with as well. He was helped by a renegade program named TRON who was loyal to the users. It was kind of slow and lame and looked very much like something that was made in 1982. This update was marketed as being anything but a relic from the early 80s. The look is slick and very cutting edge. It’s all postmodern inky darkness juxtaposed with geometric patterns of neon lights wrapped in digital image. When I saw the way they updated the visuals of the computer world created in the original film I was excited. If they were able to modernize the storytelling as well, I thought that this could be a real winner. A rare revisiting and improving upon of past material that wasn’t a complete success rather than a cash-in that ruins the sanctity of an original work that was great. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
Once Sam is rescued from the game grid by a mysterious female named Quorra (Olivia Wilde) and taken to see his long lost father, the film goes from action romp to naval gazing yet vapid nonsense. You would be hard pressed to think of something else that has as much dialogue but says less than the second two acts of this film. Not since the Matrix sequels has this level of boring semi-philosophical techno babble appeared in a script. It didn’t take long before I was having negative flashbacks to my experience viewing those atrocities. The expositional dialogue is tedious to get through and none of it is nearly as intelligent under scrutiny than its wordy veneer makes it seem to be on the surface. And every bit of talking that isn’t trying to be technical world building stuff manages to instead be completely sappy. In a search for poignancy the screenwriters throw out a bunch of heady truths that aren’t earned through what we see and experience in the film, but instead are just related to us with no real effective filmmaking supporting and coloring the life lessons.
But even worse than the tediousness of the dialogue is the laziness of the plotting. When the film opens we are subjected to the pretty standard narrative device of a newscast that gets us up to speed on the things we need to know about the story we’re about to hear. Usually basic pains are taken by the screenwriter to make the narration sound like something a newscaster might actually say. Here, we get a newscaster breaking the news of software developer Kevin Flynn’s disappearance, but instead of presenting it in the way that a news channel actually might, he focuses his entire story on how this disappearance must affect Kevin’s young son Sam. He goes as far as to wonder what the young boy’s emotional state must be. He’s not talking about the impact Flynn’s absence will have on the Encom Corporation, he doesn’t interview the police about what they’re doing to find him; he talks about the emotions of a little boy who happens to be our main character. This is the screenwriter talking directly to the film audience, setting up the story in the most mindless and lazy way possible, and putting no effort toward crafting something that is believable or real.
This lazy approach to telling us what we need to know and getting the characters where they need to be plagues the film all the way through the rising action, to the climax, and into the resolution. The endgame of the film involves a race towards the portal back into our world between the evil program CLU and the Flynn’s and Quorra. CLU has amassed an army of programs that he intends on bringing into our reality, and the only way the Flynns can stop him is by getting back into our world first and deleting him from outside. Everyone is thrown together nonsensically so that they can have confrontations on the way to the goal. If we need to get the good guys and the bad guys together, entire massive complexes full of soldiers will just appear out of thin air right where the protagonists happen to be. If we need a character to appear in order to keep the plot moving, a door simply opens and they are behind it. No effort is ever given to tell us where they’ve been, what they’ve been doing, or how they managed to show up exactly where the story needs them to be at exactly the right moment. Systematically, every plot development that we endure is presented in an impossibly constructed way. Watching this film feels much less like hearing a completed story than it does looking over the bullet points of an outline for a script. This is not a polished, fully fleshed out product in any way.
And after a good hour of the amassing of forces and hemming and hawing about the fate of the world, the big finale we build up to is a complete letdown. After the first couple games that Sam has to endure there isn’t anymore satisfying action in this film whatsoever. We’re told that CLU has been trying to get Flynn’s identity disc for the past forever and if he does there’s gonna be some bad mojo. But once he gets it, he doesn’t even have it properly guarded, and Sam just walks up to it and takes it back. We see that CLU has built an army, but they are never used. The film is called TRON: Legacy, but the character of TRON barely shows up at all and is used in a ludicrously disappointing way. For our big climactic fight scene we get a lightplane dogfight that is exactly as big in scope and no more exciting than the one that appears halfway through A New Hope. The only thing the scene needed was Kevin yelling “don’t get cocky, kid” at Sam when he manned the gun turret. Add in a non-confrontation between the Flynn’s and CLU out on a catwalk that never even degenerates into fisticuffs and instead relies on the random addition of ill defined superpowers to wrap everything up in a cheap and simple way as the climax, and you’ve got one of the most pathetic third acts to a big budget supposed spectacle of a film that I’ve ever seen. But don’t worry; after the climax is over the script let’s us know that the world has been completely changed through more expository dialogue. How it has been changed or why you should care that it has changed is never explained. But take our word for it; this was a big deal what happened in this movie. The biggest. Tell your friends.
So the script is bad, the action is disappointing, is the film then saved by the acting? No, not really. Garrett Hedlund is completely unremarkable as the lead. If you gave James Franco a lobotomy I imagine that he would still manage a slightly more charismatic performance than what we get here. Maybe this isn’t completely Hedlund’s fault, as his character isn’t fleshed out anymore than impetuous thrill seeker who is good at riding motorcycles; but certainly he can be given no credit for elevating the material. It’s kind of fun to see Bridges reprise his old character, and they play off of his late career persona a little bit by making him some sort of cyber-guru, but he never really appears to be especially engaged by the material. This is more a case of him sleepwalking through another chilled-out hippy role while wearing the long hair and beard that he already needed to have for other, more important films than anything. I would even call it a bit of a cash grab. Olivia Wilde is striking and shows a bit of spunk as Quorra, but isn’t given enough screen time or development to make her character into anything substantial. She might be a star in the making, but this isn’t going to be the role that does it for her. Michael Sheen is fun in a brief role as a flamboyant and outlandish nightclub owner/guy with information, but he works because of the short time we spend with him. Anymore and the act would have become grating. And also, what he does with the character is too derivative of things that have been done before him by people like David Bowie and Chris Tucker to be truly interesting. Twice in the film we get a digitally rendered, young Jeff Bridges as a character; first in a flashback, and second as the villain CLU. Never once does the effect work. The face is shiny and plastic when still, all dead eyed and creepy. And when he has to open his mouth to speak or emote in any way the visual goes from fake looking to just plain awkward and distracting. Whoever made the call that their computer animation had gotten good enough to mimic real people made a huge blunder here and ended up sinking a huge portion of the film by not giving us a worthwhile villain.
When walking out of this go around with the TRON universe I found myself comparing the experience to two other films: The Fountain and Avatar. It reminded me of The Fountain in that at some point during both films I found myself tuning out of the story completely and just sitting back to look at the pretty pictures and listen to the pretty music. For The Fountain it was because the plot was too complex and convoluted to follow, and here it was because the story was so simple and lazy that I didn’t have to follow it at all. It reminded me of Avatar in that it was all art design, all digital effects wizardry, and no story. Avatar was a film that I didn’t like a lot of stuff about, but ended up giving four stars to based just on how amazed I was at the new ground that it broke. This film doesn’t quite achieve on that level. Avatar used 3D technology to create an entirely new way to block and construct shots. To compose the scenes that Cameron did in that film he had to completely reinvent the way that we think about what is happening on the screen. This film looked cool, had good design, and had an exceptional score; but it didn’t break any sort of new ground technically. The 3D adds nothing to this film. No thought was given as to how it could be utilized to add visual elements that you don’t get in regular movies. Like everything else that has used 3D since Avatar, it’s just thoughtlessly tacked on as a gimmick to overcharge at the box office. The problems with this film are so great that it should probably be given a failing rating of two stars, but I enjoyed the experience enough to bump it up to three. One below Avatar feels right. The story sucks, the dialogue is terrible, and the acting is nothing great; but the aesthetic of the film is undeniable cool. The disc-fights and the lightbike duel are legitimately exciting action sequences. And the Daft Punk score is so great that it might be worth the price of admission alone. Add those three things up and I wasn’t completely upset that I spent time watching this. Think of it as a really long music video; just don’t pay 3D prices.
