(courtesy IMP Awards)
Long delayed movie sequels are pretty thick on the ground with Hollywood having taken up the rallying cry of “Leverage the IP!” with bottom-line scanning gusto.
Like anything driven partly by a desire to expand a franchise rather than coming up with a startling new idea, some of these long-gestating films are a treat while others, far too many others, manifestly, are not.
Thankfully, Tron: Legacy is one of the former, albeit with some caveats on a story that dances between trying something new and simply rehashing the plot of its long-in-the-past, now classic predecessor, Tron.
Like any movie picking up the events of a decades-past storyline whose actors have grown older – although these days that’s not an issue with de-ageing all the rage, something Legacy makes somewhat merry with – then then-new kid on the Tron franchise block (2010) opts to go all next generation with Samuel “Sam” Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), the son of the first film’s freedom fighting hero, Kevin Flynn, sucked into the digital world this time around.
With his devoted dad MIA for reasons best left to the watching of Tron: Legacy, Sam has grown up into a disaffected brilliant computer programmer who is the majority shareholder in Encom but who refuses, despite entreaties from his dad’s BFF Alan Bradley aka Tron himself (Bruce Boxleitner), to have anything to do with the company.
It’s very much a chopping off your nose to spite your face scenario, and you could well ask what Sam thinks he’s gaining from refusing to play ball with the incumbent CEO and board who are, quite frankly, way to ineffectually cartoon villainish to be much in the way of a threat.
The real Big Bad this time around is the CLU (Codified Likeness Utility) – mentioning who the actor is here is too much of a spoiler so let’s leave that one to the watch shall we? – which has been charged by an idealistic Kevin Flynn with devising and implementing the perfect digital system.
What could go wrong here?
Plenty as it turns out because while perfection sounds like a nice idea, far too often the road to such a de-flawed world is paved with authoritarian impulses and actions.
And so it is in Tron: Legacy where the CLU is a dictator who holds digital gladiatorial contests, which are not that dissimilar to the first film’s sparring save, of course, for dramatically better CGI which apes the original’s graphics while polishing them up to a brilliant 21st century sheen, and who has his eyes on invading the user’s world aka the human realm to bring some perfection to our deeply flawed world.
That aim is readily apparent at first, with Sam spending much of the first part of the film trying to stay alive as some fiendishly nasty programs try to take him out.
So very much a redux in many ways of the first film which isn’t so noticeable because of the very pretty, luminously immersive graphics which give a vibrant arena glow to proceedings and which mask the fact that much of the gladiatorial fight scenes are lots of “BIFF!” and “BAMM!” and not a whole lot of narrative progression.
That really only picks up when Sam finds himself, and yes, saying how is too much of a spoiler and trust us when we say it’s pretty cool, far out off the grid, in the digital desert wastelands from the CLU’s glowing citadel of power where he ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- is reunited with his dad who went missing because the CLU refused to let Kevin reach the portal to our world in time.
His rescuer is Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a so-called “isomorphic algorithm” whom Kevin hails as a perfect creation of the digital world which arose spontaneously and which the CLU hates because while they are complex and amazingly capable, they are not perfect which is a big no-no in his perfection-is-everything world.
But while Tron went all bloody digital revolution, Tron: Legacy goes a little more inert with the middle section of the film sagging into a woe-is-me contemplative scene which may tick all kinds of angsty, existential naval gazing boxes but which slows the narrative down to a not all that enthralling crawl.
Still, that remedied reasonably quickly when Kevin, Sam and Quorra make a dash for the portal, which is drawing perilously close to shutting off – it can only be opened from the users’ world so if they miss the window when it’s open, they’re stuck in the digital world for good – with their aim not to stop the CLU doing its thing but simply to get Kevin’s disc back into the users’ universe so the digital dictator can’t use it to invade us.
That should be super exciting and to an extent it is, but again there is some lag because there’s no great battles to be fought and when they do crop up, they are over before they’ve really begun.
Much of the fun of the final act again comes down to seeing how smart and vivacious the digital world looks with modern technology’s evocatively creative glow.
Sure, you are invested in the CLU being thwarted and Sam and Quorra and Kevin making it home, but with the Big Bad being not that much of a threat – he’s no Master Control Program which loomed menacingly over the first film’s far more alive and involving plot – any race to the portal doesn’t feel all that thrilling.
Having said that, and acknowledging that the narrative is a little thin this time around, relying more on nostalgia and diversionary gee-whiz new graphics to mask it lack of depth and substance, Tron: Legacy is nevertheless a fun watch, doing a nice nod to its predecessor while expanding and growing the franchise universe which gets another substantial kick along the IP-leveraging road with this year’s new entry, Tron: Ares which explores the fact that not taking down the CLU may not have been the smartest idea even if it’s damn good hook for the third entry in the trilogy.