The one lasting influence the movie TRON placed upon the world of pop culture is its neon stamp. The CGI design is still hip to this day, trendsetting and back then, who did not want to play glow-in-the-dark Frisbee? TRON Legacy lives up to everything the first film defined and goes even further.
Original director/writer Steven Lisberger tapped into the same mythos that embraced a Star Wars generation. Instead of a lightsaber, there is an identity disc. There’s no doubt of some copycat moments, and this film is simply recognising what audiences are already familiar with. In this film, the relationship between two individuals, Sam (Garrett Hedlund) and his father, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), is explored. Pops disappeared off the face of the earth and when a page arrives on Alan Bradley’s (Bruce Boxleitner) cell phone, that’s when Sam’s world gets turned around.
In the digital domain both Flynns come through as arrogant, and what happens next is an attempt to look at the consequences of playing God. The senior believed he could create a perfect system, and in his arrogance he got more than he bargained for. He did not realize what he opened up is just a Pandora’s box. Some of it was of his own making, and the rest is a Frankenstein tale where his creation is fighting back, just wanting to be loved than ignored.
There is an exceptional tale to be found in TRON Legacy as long as audiences look beyond what’s being visually said. To have director Joseph Kosinski and several writers try to instill Lisberger’s vision almost worked, but what they really needed to settle on was one central idea rather than mixing concepts around.
Someone in the production team must have echoed Dillenger’s anarchist sentimentality from the first film, since it was difficult for the team to deal with the spiritual message Lisberger wanted. He is producing this time and while he may have insisted on preserving his vision, everyone else focused on wowing crowds with the visual effects. They are catering to moviegoers who want eye candy over religious fanaticism.
Sadly, like the first movie, this film’s spiritual message is lost in the shuffle. Not many movie goers may have taken the line Dr. Walter Gibbs said to heart: “You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it. And our spirit remains in every program we design for this computer.”
In TRON Legacy, not everyone will understand what senior Flynn has become. Jeff Bridges brilliantly succeeds in fooling many people to following a new path to the light. That is, to show that there’s more to just the 0s and 1s they are made of, and there’s a higher calling. And the imperfect CGI in creating the younger looking Flynn actually works in favour of showing that he’s a simulacrum rather than a fully realized human, flaws and all.
The future of this franchise really has to be told in graphic novel or television format where the story matters more than the military games being played out. Thankfully, TRON Uprising fills this gap by looking at how CLU (the secret antagonist of this series) slowly took over Argon city. Instead of an old protector, Beck is slated to become the next protector of the ‘Unimatrix,’ He will become the next TRON.
The character of TRON did come first and like the first film, the questions asked back then are still relevant now. TRON Legacy attempts to answer what is creation, but if one doesn’t even get it after leaving the grid, perhaps a revisit to Oz is needed.
If you get it, click your heels three times and we can all go home.
TRON Legacy Movie Trailer
