Tron Legacy
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Starring Jeff Bridges, Garret Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, Bruce Boxleitner, Michael Sheen, and Beau Garrett.
Backstory
Tron is one of those films I grew up with…it’s part of the background noise of my childhood. I first saw it at a school assembly in Grade 2. I have no idea how many times I pretended a Frisbee was one of those light discs. Rumors of a sequel have been going around the Internet for years. But two years ago, when Disney showed off some test footage to show that they had finally gotten serious about revisiting the Tron universe, my hearts was one of the many that started beating faster. How would a return to this universe look in this new age? Would it become as legendary as the original?
Plot
Kevin Flynn, the hero of the first film, rose to become one of the most visionary computer programmers of the 1980s…until his mysterious disappearance, which made his son Sam an orphan. 20 years later, Sam is now a shiftless young man, occasionally cyber-terrorizing his father’s old company to make sure it stays true to his father’s ideals. But one day, a mysterious page leads to his father’s old video arcade, and his father’s secret computer lab. Soon, Sam is sucked into this computer and thrown into a nightmarish digital world. It seems that, following the events of the first film, Flynn wanted to try to program the world’s greatest computer system from the inside, and created a computer duplicate of himself named Clu in order to achieve this. But, when their views of “the perfect system” began to clash, Clu overthrew Flynn and became a brutal dictator. And Flynn has been in hiding for the past 20 years. But now that Sam has arrived, the game has changed, and Flynn and Sam must escape before Clu unleashes his endgame.
What I Liked
Is it wrong that whenever they made an allusion or a reference to the original film I wanted to stand up and cheer? This film was made with the fans in mind and they’re sure to get the shout-outs. A lot of the new additions to the universe are just spectacular. As expected, the special effects are amazing. Olivia Wilde as Quorra, the elder Flynn’s apprentice, is incredibly adorable. The fight sequences are fantastic. This film just looks good. I really liked that they finally fully explored some of the concepts introduced in the original. However….
What I Didn’t Like
Some of the new concepts they introduced, I think, aren’t fully explored. Jeff Bridges, while great as always, sometimes seems to be playing the Dude from The Big Lebowski rather than Flynn. The plot is fairly standard. And while I was thrilled to find that the character of Tron is indeed in the film, I don’t like the story arc he was given.
Final Assessment
At the end, I’m having the same problem I had with G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. I can’t figure out if it truly is a good movie, or if my nostalgia for the source material is making me blind to the flaws. I did enjoy the hell out of it, though.