Rarely are films so completely unique that they invent new genres upon their release. Even rare still: that the only other entry in the genre — call it cyber-adventure — is the original film's sequel 28 years later.The first TRON was a watershed moment for computer imaging in films, so much so that the organization that runs the Academy Awards, scratching its head at the film’s pyrotechnic wonder, barred it from the special effects category. They simply didn’t know what to do with it.
No one really knew what to do with it, which is probably why you’ve never seen anything even slightly similar to TRON in the last three decades. In an industry where everything is derivative of something, TRON was genuine.So is its sequel.
TRON: Legacy, the hotly anticipated computer adventure, is everything the Web geeks and techno nerds have been saying about it through the last few weeks of pre-release hype. It is as uniquely stunning as the original, but with some much-needed visual upgrades and with all the hyper-kinetic additions films have embraced since 1982: dazzlingly rendered computer effects, lightning-fast editing, a technocentric soundtrack (by Daft Punk) that soothes the film’s digital ego and some fresh, young stars who fill this realm of circuitry. Even the 3-D, which I loathe in principle, worked rather well in this neon-tinted wonder of computer imagery.
The film begins several years after the original TRON, with game designer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) being permanently uploaded into the digital world of the first film, leaving his son with a crumbling software empire and without a father. Years pass and Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is more into mischief than following the footsteps of his forgotten father. The mischief leads him back to his father’s hidden office and into the rabbit hole of the digital universe.It’s here on the Grid that Sam is forced to compete in a series of gladiator-like games involving Frisbees, ricocheting walls, gravity-manipulating arenas and the famous Lightcycles, which leave trails of neon ribbon behind them. It’s also here that he finds the original Kevin Flynn, now much older, and a computer clone called CLU, who serves as the villain — maybe he was created with ctrl-C and ctrl-V commands.
The story is fairly straightforward, though it leaves plot holes big enough for terabytes of information to flow from in big streaming arcs. There’s a whole business with CLU trying to take a digital army from the Grid into the real world, and some more business about a race of intelligent algorithms that are somehow the answer to the world’s problems. None of this really make sense, but neither did most of the first TRON; we’re just expected to watch and enjoy, not figure all this out.
Bridges is a lot fun, and occasionally he channels his inner Dudeness — “It’s like bio-digital jazz, man.” Between this and his turn as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, Bridges has a lock on the holiday movie season. Hedlund performs well in a role that must have required a lot of standing in front of green screens and grimacing at tennis balls on sticks. The two men are completed by Olivia Wilde, who plays one of the lost algorithms. She’s so perfectly beautiful that the geeks of the world might replace their gold-bikini’d Princess Leia toys with ones of Wilde.The film is a dazzler. Much of it is shot in blacks and grays, but with this nifty neon trim attached to everything from clothing and Lightcycles to the Grid’s fantastic vistas and the computer architecture. And when characters, called programs, are killed — often by deadly Frisbees — their individual little bytes break apart as if corrupted by a deadly computer virus. It’s a neat effect.
There is no shortage of things to look at in TRON: Legacy: There are numerous Lightcycle scenes, laser battles, chase sequences and one-on-one fights to see who can crumble the other’s pixels first. I had a blast in this movie. I think you will too, whether you’re visiting the TRON universe for the second time or the first. Go have fun with this movie.
