TRON: Legacy (2010)

Kevin Flynn: "It's amazing how productive doing nothing can be."

By Joseph Kosinski
With Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde 

I watched TRON: Legacy (2012) after Tumor referenced it in his review of Oblivion (2013) a film also directed by Joseph Kosinski.  I watched the film on my net book in the dark roads (as I was on a road trip of sorts). It was a thrilling and compelling experience, for many reasons.

The story begins with a little boy, Sam Flynn, listening to his father, Kevin Flynn, tell him a story about some action figures in an arcade game called Tron. As the father speaks, he talks increasingly of a perfect world and perfect people in a place called the Grid. The little boy is entranced by the story, but the father for reasons which are unclear, hops on a futuristic motorcycle and cycles into the night. The next thing we know is that the father has been missing for decades and the boy is now owner of a software company the father helped found. He refuses to take any serious part in it except for an annual prank he plays on the board of members. When the old time friend of Kevin's confronts Sam and tells him he just received a page from his missing father, Sam goes in search for his father's old office and finds, beyond all expectations, a portal into the Grid--realizing that the stories his father told him as a child were in fact true. Within the Grid, Sam is quickly processed into a digital suit and finds himself in a sort of gladiator-style fight. He is soon discovered to be a "User" (human being) and only then does he find himself face-to-face with a man who looks eerily like his father, but not having aged a day since his disappearance.

First things first: the visuals in this film are stunning. It's the kind of film where you aren't sure if you mind very much if it's style over substance just as long as you are dazzled by the graphics. To some it may be a little overproduced, a little too slick, but nevertheless, it's a great play on the eyes. The story is of some merit as well, and fans of The Matrix will find themselves noticing a few similarities between the films. I think the theme of perfection in the digital realm is something of much fascination to the 20th-21st century, as in The Matrix human life was potentially a computer program and as such, all the images of everyday life in the matrix were extremely slick and modern (though not as much as that in the Grid in this film). There seems to be a clear value judgment being made here, however, that the perfection of the digital realm is somehow suspect. Despite this, I feel that this film varies slightly from that as it introduces the idea of "isos" -- a kind of being produced entirely from and within the Grid, a perfect hybrid of digital+material world.

Much of the movie was occupied with action scenes which were interesting to some level but I felt that the story line was intriguing enough that had there been more dialogue, the film could have moved to newer and more interesting heights. At many points I felt that I wasn't very sure what was going on and what the motivations for the characters were, and as such I felt that events were a little contrived and a little too convenient.

63/100