It seems like aeons ago, when Disney last tried to break into the sci-fi market because, you know, the kids liked that stuff at the time, decades after their last great animated works and with acres of middling juvenile comedies in between. Disney’s own tradition of adventure moviemaking had turned up the odd outlying gem like Island at the Top of the World (1974), which today looks like an abortive first draft for the impulses of the neo-pulp movement Spielberg, Lucas, and Milius would make blockbusters out of, as well as the Steampunk sub-genre. Disney’s own efforts in the field were subsequently fumbling and uncertain of their audience taste, resulting in the disastrous The Black Hole (1979), and then Steve Lisberger’s Tron (1982), a zesty if rather basic adventure yarn recast in a digital world where the logic and experience of the early computer games took on gladiatorial dimensions and metaphysical heft. Tron was, as with the era’s many, nakedly ambitious geek-boy dollar-siphons, clearly designed to be the next Star Wars, but it was instead only ever merely Tron, at least until another quarter-century’s residuals came in and proved that it had tapped into something with potential, just a little early. In any event, Tron Legacy is the sequel, co-produced by Lisberger but directed by former video game designer Joseph Kosinksi, making his cinematic debut. That fact, of the technocrats being entirely in charge, seems initially threatening, but funnily enough, Tron Legacy has a patina of soul that can’t be easily faked.
Taking some obvious cues from J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek (2009), with son losing father in opening scene and growing into a pop cultural placard of disaffected masculinity – motorcycle, leather jacket, and expensive, destructive pranks – it’s also another entry in the revived ‘80s hero stakes pairing the older dude with a young buck, a la Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and Live Free and Die Hard (2007). In this case the father is Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), who disappears in the late ‘80s after leaving his home and young son Sam one night. His IT company ENCOM evolves into a huge Apple-like power run by greasy modern corporate types. There’s a touch of meta-textual jest at the start, with Kevin and Sam conversing with the toys Kevin extrapolated from his adventures in the first film decorating Sam’s bedroom, thus making Sam the surrogate for everyone who played with an action figure as a kid and wished they could slip into that fantasy realm; later on he recognises characters from their plastic stand-ins. A poster for The Black Hole decorates his wall, too. Sam, once he’s grown into the generically handsome sight of Garrett Hedlund, likes to get the ENCOM bosses hot and bothered once a year: this time he sneaks into the executive building, uploads the company’s brand-new OS onto the internet, and takes a BASE jump off the roof, only to fall almost directly into police hands. When he’s released, board member and surrogate father Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) comes to Sam’s house to tell him he received a page from the telephone in Kevin’s old arcade, which has been disconnected for years. Initially dismissive, Sam eventually checks out the arcade, and, fiddling about with his father’s computer, is zapped straight into the virtual world, “The Grid”, where Kevin had originally done battle against MCP.
Once on The Grid, Sam is immediately captured, processed, and coalesced into a fascistic digital world where “programmes”, limited but sentient beings, are forced to battle each other to death in violent games, in order to weed out prospective soldiers for an army being put together by CLU (Bridges), a simulacrum Kevin created of himself to run and perfect The Grid. Years before, CLU, who looks exactly like the young Kevin, exiled his master, seemed to kill their mutual friend TRON (Boxleitner again), the super-warrior, and took over the The Grid. He declared genocidal war on anything that did not fit the system, in particular a new race of life-forms that sprang out of the chaos of digital chaos, “Isos”, whose coding replicates and improves upon human DNA. Flung into one of the death-matches by CLU, who lured him to the arcade so as to get the laser portal opened, Kevin is rescued by a stranger in a fast car who proves to be Quorra (Olivia Wilde), the lithesome protégé of the real Kevin, who’s become a clapped-out old hippie Zen master living in virtual luxury, unable to think of a way to break CLU’s power. Quorra is the last of the Isos, as such a possible bridge of new evolution between the human and digital worlds. After an awkward but emotional reunion between father and son, Sam is frustrated by Kevin’s professed helplessness, and, at Quorra’s suggestion goes to visit Zuse (Michael Sheen), a powerful programme who’s reinvented himself as a Bowie-esque nightclub manager. But he gladly sells out the Flynns to CLU, precipitating a battle in which Quorra is near-fatally wounded and Sam and Kevin are forced to try and flee with her to the portal in spite of all dangers.
Tron Legacy starts out better than it has any right to be. Kosinski shows off his intelligent, supple visual sensibility throughout: his cutting is mostly coherent, and the framing exceptionally clean. If the opening scenes are dramatically clichéd, they’re at least played in such a fashion that lets the mystique and trauma of a past on the edge of living memory seep through the antics, in both the dark-sodden visual palate and the haunted features of Boxleitner, who, like Bridges, seems more than vaguely surprised at just how long ago 1982 was. When Sam visits Flynn’s Arcade, Kosinski lingers over shots of Sam bringing the now-antique, once-super technology to life, to the strains of ‘80s synth-pop: as Sam explores the bowels of the building, the Eurhythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” vibrates spacily in the distance, a felicitous little touch that’s both appropriately retro yet just a little menacing, as if the past still has its wicked little secrets. Once on The Grid, Kosinski offers a lean, chitinous, monochromatic sheen that’s genuinely impressive, and the special effects, which are consistently brilliant, are also rarities in being both appropriate to the world the filmmakers are creating, and hypnotically beautiful. Part of the joke of the original film was in the notion that those space invaders you were blasting the hell out of might be able to blast you back in the right circumstance, and the early games sequences are thrilling in a boyish fashion, as Sam quickly adapts and takes on CLU’s secretive super-warrior, Rinzler (Anis Cheurfa), and takes charge, Gladiator-fashion, of a group of victimised programmes in a battle of light-cycles with CLU’s henchmen.
Kosinski seems smartly aware of how the lexicon of the “futuristic” is actually now quite old, and nothing new has evolved to replace them; thus ‘70s glam-rock looks and stripped-down Swedish moderne decor permeate the design. Flickers of adolescent erotica bubble throughout, as Sam is fitted out for The Grid by a quartet of colour-balanced, tightly outfitted sirens, who seem to threaten gang-rape of the bland young stud by android cabal, and Quorra, with her wicked flapper hairstyle, wears leather pants exceedingly well. The film’s best scene comes in Zuse’s club, as Sam and Quorra battle off CLU’s goons, whilst Zuse dances in campy fashion and fires off his ray-gun cane with joy at the spetacle, as if it’s the most fun he’s had in ages, all to the thumping strains played out by the club DJs, played, of course, by the film’s composers, Daft Punk, who didn’t even require a change of costume. It’s a derivative scene, but still possesses a kind of zany, off-kilter energy, building to a memorable moments in which Quorra has her arm severed, the loosened limb falling to the ground and disintegrating in a shower of glistening digits, and Kevin enters, immediately driving away the opponents with his aura of awesome. It’s a pity Sheen’s role is so small, as he’s just exactly the sort of rogue programme a blockbuster like this needs. Wilde, who I’ve been expecting to become the biggest thing in the universe for some time now, makes a tremendous impression with very little, in her brief scene discussing the human literature Kevin’s had her read and admitting Jules Verne is her favourite, asking with guileless enthusiasm, when Sam says he “knows” the writer, what he’s like, as if he’s a still-living being. Whilst Quorra, in look and costuming, is very much the regulation cyber-warrior babe, Wilde plays her with an edge of good-humoured, naïve charm that seems, aptly, the most human element in the film. Equally interesting is the fact that whilst Sam quickly displays talents in the digital realm, Quorra is the fiercely protective one, constantly placing herself between Sam and villains wishing to do him harm.
Much more disappointing is Bridges, whose performance as the elder Flynn is rather zestless, not that he’s really given much to do, and he’s actually more interesting as CLU, even if painted over with cheesy digital youth, doing a good job, as he did in Iron Man (2008), of playing charismatic evil. But he’s held in check by the perfunctory villainy he’s given to play out. Unfortunately, Tron Legacy trips badly on the basic element of story. A problem the filmmakers faced is that a lot of the natural story ground for continuing Tron was already played out by The Matrix (1999), and the tale being told here is far too lacking in complexity. The moment Sam is dumped on The Grid, apart from a bludgeoning with a combination of character interaction and info dump in Sam and Kevin’s reunion, the film hews to an uninspired storyline as the heroes must beat CLU to the laser portal, which, in the digital world, manifests as a volcanic rupture in the fabric of reality. Whilst the screenplay’s dialogue at least allows the actors opportunity to develop some depth of by-play, it’s still a sad by-product of contemporary Hollywood functionality, with the more eccentric touches – Kevin’s being allowed to be an unregenerate hippy idealist, Quorra’s geeky edge, Zuse’s cavorting – zipping by like lonely house lights along the blockbuster highway. Tron Legacy is in far too much of a rush to get us on The Grid and then to get us out of The Grid: there’s a surprising lack of conceptual depth to the whole thing, and so many unanswered questions about why things are like they are in this unreal universe where technically anything should be possible and yet so much is subject to the mundane. I mentioned Island at the Top of the World for a reason at the beginning, as this film has almost exactly the same basic plot structure, except the relationship of the family member searching for another in a lost world is reversed. Disney has its story templates and does not give them up without a fight.
Kosinski knowingly quotes a few solid genre models, apart from the original, from Kevin’s house, clearly based on the equally Euclidian home at the end of the universe Dave Bowman found in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to The Grid’s rain-drenched, neon-striated cityscapes, indebted to Blade Runner (1981), and a final fight-in-flight paying homage to the battle in fleeing the Death Star in Star Wars (1977). These quotes do however begin to reveal the fundamental lack of real generic inspiration operating here. Kosinski, whilst his work is mostly praiseworthy, is too inexperienced a director to offer the kind of minutiae in gesture and emotion that might make the finale’s lengthy chase much more than a load of pretty lights going pop and fizz. The subplot of Rinzler, who is actually a brainwashed Tron, demands much more care and depth than it receives: after all, the series is supposed to be his, and his final reawakening to help the other heroes and fight off CLU is so throwaway that you wonder why Kosinski and the writers bothered introducing this element. Still, in spite of the film’s lack of thematic and story ambition, it’s one of the most visually interesting films Hollywood’s FX alchemists have coughed up lately, and it’s quite fun if not expecting too much. There are glimpses of a kind of sci-fi poetry not unworthy of Blade Runner, in many visuals throughout the film, but also in Quorra and Sam’s interactions, as Sam tries to describe the sunrise to the girl who can only liken it to the portal’s hazily beautiful gleam. The very last moment, as Sam, having brought Quorra out into the physical world, rides with her on his motorcycle, having escaped technological alienation and experiencing the sensations of speed and space, resembles, oddly and probably coincidentally, Hsiao-hsien Hou’s depiction of new-age love speeding through the cityscape in Three Times (2005). Best of all is the Daft Punk duo’s score, commissioned to expand upon Wendy Carlos’ score for the original: their work here is so good it offers hope that intelligent, full-blooded electronic scores might make a resurgence in mainstream cinema.
