January 21, 2011: TRON: Legacy
I don’t know what made anyone decide that now was the time for a sequel to TRON, but it’s actually a fitting point in history to revisit the concepts explored by the original film. In the early 1980s society was struggling with the question of what great worlds could be opened up by computers and their capabilities, and now we’ve come to a point where the influence of computers on our world, often figuratively sucking us away from reality and into a manufactured universe in the way that the original TRON did literally, is itself being questioned and many are turning back to humanity for fulfillment while others are irretrievably lost in technology, as happens in this sequel. TRON: Legacy could have been an incisive examination of this phenomenon and how far wrong things have gone, but instead it’s just a cookie-cutter technology-based action flick with good guys and bad guys and not much in between other than special effects.
The central story concerns Jeff Bridges’ character of Kevin Flynn and his realization that the pursuit of perfection is fruitless and instead we should rejoice in the imperfection we see around us every day. It has taken the equivalent of centuries of meditation, lost inside the computer world, for him to come to this conclusion. Now everything in his manufactured world is about to be blown apart as his son comes in to find and retrieve him, and is forced through a series of challenges not unlike what Flynn suffered back in 1982. It’s my feeling that this is really just an excuse for some action set-piece video game chases, but I guess it had to go there.
The music in this film, with a Terminator-esque 1980s synthesizer feel to it, is great and helps to hold the movie together and remind us of its origin. However, I found that the visuals were not as impressive as I had hoped they would be. Missing are the bold and striking colours of the first film, and now most characters are in dark uniforms with coloured accents. Is this a deliberate stylistic choice because of the dystopia we witness here compared with the utopian computer world of the first film, or is it just that the current 3D technology makes everything so dim that any bold futuristic vision can’t help but appear dark and muddy? I saw this 3D presentation in the theatre, and noted critic Roger Ebert laments the obsession with the current technology because the polarized filtering glasses end up effectively halving the brightness of any given film, and I have definitely noticed this myself. TRON: Legacy makes the wise decision to incorporate the third dimension in order to add depth and richness rather than to jam things into our eyeballs, but there’s so much darkness in this world that it’s hard to distinguish anything.
Stylistic and technological choices aside, however, I couldn’t get past TRON: Legacy being merely a hokey and predictable story, complete with a villain clinging desperately to a precipice at the climax before facing his doom, as the good guys escaped back to the real world, wizened by their encounter with the reality of a perfection-obsessed computer program gone rogue. Come to think of it, everyone in this film is clearly “good” or “bad”, and it seems to me that the films which I praise the most highly tend to acknowledge both sides of each character. I’m certainly not saying that the earlier TRON film captured my heart – not by a long shot – but TRON: Legacy fails to even top the original.
Sci-fi concept worth revisiting, but fails.
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