TRON: Legacy (2010)

To some extent, TRON: LEGACY doesn’t make much more sense than the original film, but benefits from a very dazzling, fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the visuals of this follow-up to the landmark (if odd) 1982 film are what you would hope they would be. Combined with another engaging performance from Jeff Bridges, who reprises his role as Matt Flynn/Clu, and the pulsing scoring courtesy of Daft Punk, TRON: LEGACY is a better film than “Tron.” But it’s still a film with problems, and it’s a good film at best, but nowhere near a great one.

A prologue features Matt talking to his young son about his adventures with Encom and The Grid. Never mind that the math doesn’t quite work; the first film was 1982 and the prologue here is set in 1989, but Matt did not have a kid in the first film and suddenly has a boy who looks to be about 11. And it’s also better to not pay attention to the “de-aging” process used to make Bridges look like his 20-years-younger self. When Bridges spends the majority of the opening with his back to the camera, you have to wonder how much faith director Joseph Kosinski and his crew had in the technology. And indeed, once we get a clear look at Flynn, he appears more as a cast-away from Zemeckis’ “Beowulf” than the first “Tron.”

But back to the “story”: what little of it there is and what I can comprehend enough to share with you. Flynn goes missing from 1989 to the present day, and his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) is a rule-breaking, thrill-seeking punk who shows little interest in his majority shareholdings of Encom, short of his delight in single-handedly sabotaging the unrolling of its latest product in a scene that inexplicably puts Sam and a fat security guard at the end of a beam that randomly and conveniently juts out from the roof of the Encom skyscraper, allowing Kosinski to film a scene that rips off “The Dark Knight.”

Word of a mysterious message makes its way to Sam, and this takes him to the arcade where his father once worked. There, Sam discovers Matt’s secret office and is sucked into The Grid himself. He is quickly earmarked for competing in “the games” and fitted with a cool, skin-tight black suit with neon light piping and an “identity disc.” Sam is forced to battle his way through a series of challenges (in some of the film’s best visual moments) before discovering that the guy pulling the strings is his missing father. Okay, not his actual father, but Clu, the avatar of Flynn who is now corrupt and cloying.

Sam then meets Quorra (Olivia Wilde), who takes him to his actual father, the non-digitized and 2010 Jeff Bridges with shaggy white hair and beard in a possibly-accidental reprisal of his role as The Dude from “The Big Lebowski.” Sam wants his father to come back home with him, and there’s a portal that allows them to do so that only stays open for a few hours. But The Dude – I mean Flynn – has taken to pacifism as a way of staying off the Grid and out of the sights of Clu, and warns of the dangers that will arise from their race to the portal gateway.

And here ends what I understood of the film and, frankly, what made sense of it, as Sam travels to a nightclub that could best be explained as Tron’s version of the Star Wars Cantina except that the music is a lot cooler. There, they meet Castor/Zuse, played by Michael Sheen as a clown-like David Bowie in a white pantsuit. Sheen is amusing but disturbing, and the script is so cloudy by this point that I still can’t figure out exactly what Zuse meant to the story, other than to surmise that he’s something like The Grid’s version of Oz.

By the time TRON: LEGACY comes to a conclusion, the plot has been shot full of some substantial holes, and the apparent need to leave the door open for a third Tron film seems more important than making sense of the current one.

If I sound really down on TRON:LEGACY, it’s mostly because I hoped that some screenwriter could fix the story up. The first one was somehow, miraculously, simple and confusing at the same time, and I’m sad to report that this sequel feels almost the same (save for its much more clear first half). I didn’t think the film was a complete failure. In fact, the light cycle scene was fantastic, and most of the visual effects were the sharp update I was looking for. And even though Bridges was mainly channeling his work in a role he performed since the original that is most likely the part for which he is best known, he was still engaging. Even better was the chance to see him playing both Flynn and Clu with their age and demeanor contrasts. None of the other performances were bad, but the script left all with little to work with.

I’d tell you that TRON: LEGACY is best seen and not heard were it not for the Daft Punk score, which fans of the group have been criticizing as “not Daft Punk enough,” but I thought felt perfect for what I was watching on screen. Indeed the music was a stronger element than the use of 3-D, an effect that had virtually no break-out moments of spectacle. In the end, TRON: LEGACY lives up to its title; it continues the legacy set by the first film of style over substance and visuals over script.

2.5 out of 4