Tron: Legacy - A Review (Or - All Light Bikes, All the Time)

Saw Tron: Legacy last night with 4/5ths of the Guild.  It was really fun and I like seeing my guys on a personal basis as opposed to just listening to them through the headphones as we beat up on pigs and dead things and Scarlet Monastarians.  (No. Monastarians isn't a word, apparently. But I will turn your attention to my being a WORDSMITH. I wrote it in ALL CAPS. It's TRUE)

The thing about this movie is that, like James Cameron's Avatar, it is all about the special effects and the glowy light cape and the awesome light bike scenes.  This Tron is what I erroneously remember the first one being: All Light Bikes, All the Time.  And also some really awesome Frisbee games.  I want to watch a game of Ultimate with the stakes that high some day.  Because damn, that'd be awesome.

Like Avatar, Tron 2.0 isn't that badly affected by the fact that it's essentially just an excuse to watch shiny, pretty things move wonderfully realistically across the screen.  The original movie was all about the special effects, too.  What I cannot do, however, is decide if this negatively impacts the movie.

I knew going into it that I wasn't going to see a work of High Art (I'm going to go see Black Swan for that...what?) and maybe it's just my 21st century talking, but I was expecting a little more plot-wise.

Let me take a minute to summarize for you (Spoilers ahead! Forewarned is forearmed).

The movie starts in 1989 with adorable jewfro!Sam listening to his dad, Jeff Bridges reprising his role, tell him stories about The Grid and all the awesome stuff he does there.  There're some nice shout-outs to the original throughout, and the first few happen in little!Sam's room as we see the original poster (or something that looks a lot like it) hanging next to his bed, little light-cycles, action figures of some of the programs... It's nice and (I thought) tastefully done. Jeff Bridges leaves for the night.  He's had a break-through in his research, he says, and he has to go work on it right then. (As the CEO of what looks to be a Fortune 500 company, I don't understand his night shift, but I guess super secret Grid work must be done at super secret o-dark-thirty. Or something).  Anyhoo, Bridges rides away on his motorcycle (sans helmet!) and is never seen again.

Cut to some good looking guy on a Ducati, weaving through traffic (wearing a helmet) and dropping off expressways with his lights off in order to go...to the ENCOM tower...?  Oh! It's Sam! All growed up! (and a hunk...)

{If shameless expressions of love for well built men unnerve you, please feel free to skip ahead. I won't judge}

(I don't know who that kid is who played Sam Flynn but my goodness I spent the whole movie watching him move and thinking to myself, "Why can't I find one like that?"

Exhibit A:

So. Good. Looking.  And pretty much everything I love in a guy: cute, nice shoulders (homg the shoulders and back...that one scene where he took off his shirt and you could see the bruise from where he B.A.S.E. jumped off the EMCOM tower? ...I'll be in my bunk...) great smile, dimples, sense of humor, geeky appreciation for technology, physical, prone to doing crazy stuff.  And I will be adding "drives a Ducati" to all future lists of boys I want to marry.  Because that is one damn fine bike.  Seriously. Damn.)

*clears throat*

Anyhoo, off of the subject of the unbearably gorgeous Sam Flynn and back to the plot!

So Sam ninjas into the ENCOM building while they're having a super secret Board Meeting (again...at night... although this makes sense I guess since it turns out their stock is about to go live in Japan) and replaces their brand new OS with a lolcat video of his dog.  He then uploads the brand spanking new operating system to the Interwebs and distributes it for free! What insanity! What a crazy plot against the well-being of the company he holds a ton of stock in! What... a great expression of his dad's original vision of cloud computing and a free digital realm...?

...oh. I see what you did there, Tron: Legacy... (please to be speaking to the FCC though? They are confused)

Sam then proceeds to BASE jump off the tower and rides home to his apartment (which is like 3 shipping crates stacked on top of each other and it's awesome and I want it).

This is the view from the back. I think if you click, it'll be bigger.

There he sees Alan (Alan! you remember Alan from the first Tron? He was Tron...) his dad's best friend who was apparently a surrogate father for Sam while Jeff Bridges was...away... Alan says he was paged from Flynn's (the old arcade) and it must be Sam's dad.  Sam is confused as to why Alan is still carrying a pager when he can hack into ENCOM with his phone.  But after some hemming and hawing, he heads off for the old arcade.

Lo! It was a page from the old arcade! Sam traipses down through the secret passage behind the old TRON arcade box (of course he does) and finds his dad's super secret lab.  This is where he went, apparently, that night he never came home. And for some reason that giant laser from the first movie is still around and yea, Sam is sucked into the Grid (sadly without the green light and the dot matrix printer noise).

The Grid is so much sexier this time around, dang. Everything is all these glowy little diodes and the suits are flattering and it looks like a city with streets and everything and Sam really stands out in his awesome leather jacket and pants.  So it's really no wonder those tower things come down and totally take him away.

The action really kicks in after he is swooshed off (oh runaway program that he's seen as) and we get to watch a seriously kick-ass version of the Games from the original Tron. This is how I remember the first movie - Ultimate (Deadly) Frisbee fights that look like jai-alai but more awesome and glowy. The system is very cool and full of spinning cubes that house the competition and a "who vs. who" board floating in the middle of the playing field. Everything is so pretty to look at.

The best part is the light-cycles though.  After being outed as a User (by bleeding when cut by Tron Rimzler), Sam is sent to die in the Light Cycle tourney.  Which is really an excuse for moar pretty.  The designers and animators really outdid themselves here.  I mean, look at this bad ass piece of machinery and tell me you don't want one:

So The Stig (see below) and his team of "evil programs" take on Sam and the other unlucky "nice" programs in a battle of light bikes.

Look at The Stig and tell me you're not reminded...

The Big Bad Boss is CLU - the evil version of Jeff Bridges that is now in charge of The Grid. And he wants Sam annihilated because he knows that once Users get all up in the Grid's workings, it will no longer be Perfect (remember this, it will be important later).  Sam is emotionally shaken by seeing his not-dad, but kicks butt at the light-cycle joust. For a little while, at least.

Here's where the plot starts to get...interesting?  I want to say "convoluted" but I also don't want to dump on this film because I really did like it a lot.  Sam escapes with the help of Quorra, the hot girl program who is really awesome.  She takes him "off-grid" (I laughed, come on) and there he sees... Real!Jeff Bridges who looks old as opposed to the (sometimes) Uncanny Valley-ness of CLU's Young!Jeff Bridges face.

But Sam's dad, after embracing his son and tearing up a little, explains that he is going the Zen route and has chosen to make inaction his choice of action. This does not sit well with his BASE-jumping son who just wants to fetch his dad and go home. Preferably in a really action-y sequence where stuff explodes.

What follows is really neat and leads up to the ultimate showdown between CLU and Kevin Flynn, a meeting that Quorra says early on-ish will destroy them both should it happen. (Oh come on. That's not even foreshadowing, that's portending!)  There is a quest to find a way out of the city, a betrayal, a really neat scene in a club where Daft Punk make a cameo, and a barkeep who acts like Ziggy Stardust in all the best possible ways. 

Plus his name is Castor. How cool is that?

There are flashbacks to Kevin Flynn's original time in the Grid throughout the film which are neat (although I could have done without the fuzzy green edges {I know it's a flashback guys...come on}) and reveal that CLU is just doing what he was programmed to do: create the Perfect system.  And with some heavy-handed spoon-feeding, it is revealed that there is no Perfect System.

There's also some plot point involving Quorra and her position as the last of the...I always call them Isotopes...it's not that...it's...some "computer word" with an I.  They're the pure creations of the machine - they evolved from the Grid (or something) and so aren't limited by either the failings of programs or humans.  All the perfection of a computer, all of the ingenuity of a human.  They're what Kevin Flynn disappeared at the beginning of the movie looking for.  But CLU genocides them because they aren't in keeping with the perfectness of the Grid.  Except Quorra. Cause Jeff Bridges saves her...

Look. It's not that I didn't like the plot. I did.  And it was a vast improvement over the first one in that it actually had something that looks a lot like a plot.  But I know they were trying to say something about religion here and it really wasn't necessary. Or, I guess if you're going to say something about religion, try not to whap me over the head with it because seriously. I know Olivia Wilde said that she based Quorra off of Joan of Arc, and I get it.  Actually, I think that saved her characterization for me, knowing that.  She's full of devotion to her master and sword skills and, given her position as a more evolved life form, she has a better connection to the Users, I guess.  I can respect that. (Plus, Joan of Arc? I love her. Mad props.)

But once you start slinging around devoted acolytes and zen-masters I start expecting you to jump up to the next level of story-telling.  There's an entire sub plot where it's revealed that Kevin Flynn has been training Quorra and part of that training is the ability to "remove yourself from the equation" which is all well and good, but you can't throw something that big out there without backing it up with more solid story-telling. Programs are all about the equation! And even if Quorra is Programus novus, we don't get enough information on how that impacts her decision making to be able to really feel the turmoil that should be inherent in her choices.

I wanted to jump off the deep end with these characters and really get into the motivations behind their actions.  After all, it feels like 2.0 was trying to say something about programming as well as "programming" and the nature of technology in our world. The vague allusions to a Purpose and Imperfection are cool but ultimately unsubstantiated.  If you're going to give me a glimpse of the movie behind your movie, why not open up a little more of a hole for me to slip through?

CLU could even be viewed as almost a tragic character in that he was merely performing what he was literally built to do.  And Kevin Flynn, in full on God mode, didn't know what he actually wanted when he Created CLU so his original design was flawed.

That's a big thing! That's a thing that we could have analyzed! And the final showdown between what is essentially the two sides of Flynn had a lot of potential that I felt was wasted by the constant rush to blow something else up.  I wish we'd been left to stew on the nature of Creation and Purpose and Life. I think the movie would have been stronger for it. 

Overall, Tron:Legacy was exactly what I thought it'd be: a beautiful movie full of glowing light cycles, neat sets, and a real expression of how far we've come since Tron.  Both of the movies are cutting edge for their respective time periods, and I cannot get over how far technology has come in the space of two decades.  I mean:

From this....

...to this?

Humans are made of magic.  

I give this movie a Solid A-.  I was blown away by the special effects. It was beautiful, and I was moved by the ending (if for no other reason than I went, "noooo!").  I wish it had a tad more substance, or we could see more of the Grid.  But it was really really great.  I recommend it.