Disney released a long-awaited sequel this year to a cult favorite film. This sequel featured a chilling villain who, when faced with the possible abandonment of its owner, rebels and rebuilds the world around it in its image.
I’m talking, of course, about Toy Story 3. But I’m also talking about Tron Legacy. Both Lotso and CLU use fear, intimidation, and the destruction of dissidents to build a world that only seems perfect on the outside, and both meet their ends when they face off against a hero who also deals with abandonment issues. While Toy Story 3 has a deep story, Tron Legacy relies more on special effects to blow the viewer away.
This isn’t a bad thing though. I’m a big fan of the original Tron and even I can admit that it’s all style and no substance, whereas some reviewers seem to have been watching it with rose-tinted glasses. I didn’t go in to Tron Legacy expecting a deep storyline, considering I can barely make sense of the one in the original. The same goes here. Sam Flynn, son of Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn, goes back to his dad’s old arcade and finds a secret computer (that looks eerily like the interface of Master Control Program) where Kevin built The Grid, a digital playground that he hoped would unlock the deepest secrets of humanity. Sam gets zapped in, we see some awesome action sequences (including a breathtaking sequence on the Game Grid that beats almost everything actionwise this year) , we get some exposition in which we find that Kevin uncovered a new lifeform that is somehow both digital and organic (I think), and some more action and then the movie ends. It borrows a lot of beats from the original while at the same time feeling fresh, and the one-two punch of bouncy acting by Olivia Wilde (in what hopefully is a breakout role, she needs more great work like this) and scene-chewing courtesy of Jeff Bridges doing double-duty as the aged zen master Kevin and weird CGI monstrosity that is CLU makes star Garrett Hedlund almost invisible and unnecessary.
Where the film stumbles is trying to flesh out a backstory for the twenty years between the first film and now. I get the feeling that writer Steve Lisberger was hoping to turn Tron into a Star Wars-esque trilogy and wrote two sequels and unfortunately Disney didn’t let him make the second sequel. The backstory offered here smacks of Empire Strikes Back whereas Tron Legacy itself is almost certainly Return Of The Jedi. This “two films crammed into one” factor becomes blatantly obvious when an entire race, the weird digital-and-organic-possibly-who-knows Isomorphs is brought up and killed off within minutes with almost no explanation on how they were Kevin Flynn’s “gift to the world”. Also I still don’t see how CLU is so sure that invading the real world is even possible for programs such as himself.
All in all, Tron Legacy is a cotton candy-like experience, a two hour long sugar rush that crashes near the end. While the cheesy sci-fi fan in me hopes that a second sequel is made (indeed, the groundwork is laid both in the film and in the video game TRON 2.0) I know deep down that this may not be the financial success I hope it is and Disney just won’t make another one, making Legacy a fitting, if flawed, send-off to a film that some seem to forget is groundbreaking for its GRAPHICS and not its story.
