As much of a dork as I am, I've never seen the original Tron, which posed a bit of an issue seeing Tron: Legacy, because, for a niche movie released 28 years ago, the sequel--built to be much more of blockbuster for a wider audience--does surprisingly little to really set things up for a new audience. I already knew the broad strokes of it, and there's a prologue which serves as a brief recap, but Legacy's plot is contingent upon exactly what the nature of "the grid" is and all the programs that dwell within it, and nothing contained within Legacy really spells this out well enough for me to determine whether it makes any sense. I suppose I could Wiki the first movie now, but again, the whole point is that this is a blockbuster holiday movie intended to make a bunch of money, not a straight to DVD release to placate the guy in the Tron suit that shows up on Jimmy Kimmell. The movie should stand on its own and I don't think it does. It's visually impressive and there's some fun sequences, but it's hard for the movie to really resonate with me much beyond that.
The movie starts out in 1989, with a CGI-assisted young Jeff Bridges playing Kevin Flynn, explaining what "The Grid" is to his son, Sam. Again, I'm assuming the specifics are explained much more thoroughly in the original, but I guess the gist of it is that it's a digital world that kind of mirrors are own existing within a computer. It's like the Matrix with more neon. Despite being digitized, humans within the world ("users") have to eat food and bleed when they get cut. Is this following Matrix rules too? Does "the mind make it real"? The movie never really says. Again, maybe this is something explained in the '82 version. Anyway, shortly after this scene takes place, Kevin mysteriously disappears, not telling anyone of his whereabouts.
After our opening prologue, we meet a grown up Sam Flynn, our protagonist. After Kevin vanished, Sam went to live with his grandparents, but they soon passed away, and Sam became the archetypal troubled, aimless youth, represented mostly by the fact that he drives a motorcycle really, really fast. Once every year, Sam makes a point to break into his father's old company, Encom, and cause some sort of shenanigans, as revenge for the company veering away from his father's altruistic vision. This was unquestionably the dumbest part of the movie for me, as the company's board of directors sits around a dark room with all black furniture (cause they're evil!) and talk about how their OS version 10 is exactly the same as OS version 9, but the dumb consumers will never know, mwahahahaha, only to be foiled by Sam ruining their tech demo by inserting a Youtube video his pug barking his mad hacking skills. The sequence ends with Sam eluding a pudgy security guard by performing a Batman-esque base jump off of the roof. The entire thing is just very silly.
The movie gets more interesting when the plot that everybody came to see starts in earnest, when Kevin's old business partner, comes to see Sam in his makeshift apartment in a warehouse down by the river (he's a very rebellious youth!) and tells him that he was mysteriously paged from his dad's old arcade.
At some point in time, Kevin created a computer program doppelganger of himself which he named Clu maintain The Grid and turn it into "the perfect system." Like Kevin in the 1989 scene, Clu looks exactly like a younger Jeff Bridges, and the realism they were able to achieve with this is undeniably impressive. Wouldn't you know it though, Clu ends up turning evil. Clu feels slighted after Kevin becomes fascinated with the spontaneous appearance of "Isos:" programs that seemingly came into being on their own; their code writing itself like genetic material. Clu considers the Isos, with their inherently unknowable nature, to be a contaminant in his perfect system and has them to be destroyed. This is another thing that doesn't fully make sense to me--either because I haven't seen the original movie or because it's not explained in either movie. The thing is, all of the programs that inhabit the world, even after Clu eradicates the Isos, seem to have their own distinct personalities anyway. Michael Sheen has a bit part as Zeus, who has a bit of a David Bowie thing going on and acts pretty much flamboyantly, stereotypically gay for the entirety of his time on screen. How did he come to be if he isn't an Iso? Did Kevin design a program to daintily prance around for some reason back in 1982? It's entirely possible that there are definitive answers to these questions, but they're not addressed in Legacy.
Sam has a run-in with Clu first, but eventually finds his real father, living a sort of exiled existence out of the reach of Clu's regime. Alongside him is Quorra, (played by the ridiculously attractive Olivia Wilde), a computer program for whom Kevin serves as a sort of mentor. The nature of Quorra isn't revealed until quite a while into the movie, although you can probably figure it out based on what I've already written. As the creator of the world, Kevin seems to have Keanau Reeves-esque power over the environment, but these seem to work intermittently as the plot demands. Kevin has pretty much adhered to a code of non-intervention, but Sam wants to get the hell out of The Grid as soon as possible and tries to escape, even though it would mean letting Clu escape into the real world as well, which he also apparently can and wants take over somehow and for some reason. And so the last act is a chase between Kevin, Sam, and Quorra and Clu's malevolent forces as to who can get to the gate between the flesh and blood world and the digital world first.
Tron: Legacy is pretty on the eyes for a while although, frankly, after two hours I was pretty much ready to be done with the whole neon blue and neon orange motif. It has some fun sequences, but the plot seems muddled and requires a surprisingly large amount of prior knowledge about a cult movie from 28 years ago. For a movie dealing entirely about a sentient beings living in a digital world, it doesn't really leave you with much to think about the way, say, Ghost in the Shell does, and while the action is fun at times, that in and of itself isn't enough for this movie to have much staying power. It's wasn't an unpleasant watch, but I can't really imagine wanting to watch it over and over again.
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