Tron Legacy is not a good film. Tron Legacy is not a smart film, or a film that hides its corporate intentions. That being said, I enjoyed watching Tron Legacy; I was never bored, in part because the 3-D cinematography does a marvelous job of carrying audiences through the many ridiculous moments, including the over-reliance on exposition and insistence of hybridizing Kevin Flynn with Jeff Lebowski, but we'll get back to that. I need to set the stage a little bit.
Most - if not all - of the negative reviews of Tron Legacy I read came from critics who either hadn't seen Tron in years or simply didn't like Tron in the first place. Disney's quest for commercial prospects aside (including the borderline ridiculous overuse of Ducati motorcycles in the film), this is not the ideal position to be in going into the film. Many of the complaints centered around a story that explains ad nauseum what happened between the first and second film, but in no way addresses fundamentals like: what is the grid? how did it get there? why can Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) travel in and out of it? how does it exist once CLU (also Bridges, but digitally younger) forces Flynn into exile?There are other concerns, like how the premise of programs looking and behaving like humans can even happen, which Tron Legacy doesn't address. Honestly, I don't believe it has to: all of this is explained in some capacity in Tron. For example, programs manifest the physical appearance of their users but behave in the manner they were programmed. They're self aware to a degree, although Tron (Bruce Boxleitner) initially doubts Kevin Flynn is a user when they team up to destroy the Master Control Program. Almost all of this backstory is jettisoned from Tron Legacy, in part because writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz felt audiences familiar with the first film wouldn't need it in order to follow Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund)'s quest to find his father inside the machine*. Whether this is wise or not, considering that Tron Legacy is a sequel that arrived 28 years after the original, is a fair subject for debate**. I don't know what I can do to help with people who already hated Tron and still went to see its sequel.
There's still plenty of problems with the story in Tron Legacy, which is at times mind-numbingly stupid and complicated, but a lot of that stems from the fact that Kitsis, Horowitz, and director Joseph Kosinski tend to grind any forward momentum generated in the film to a halt by having characters literally tell Sam (and the audience) what happened after Flynn took over Encom at the end of Tron. Nearly every character, from Alan Bradley (Boxleitner) to CLU to Kevin Flynn to Quorra (Olivia Wilde) to Castor / Zeus (Michael Sheen) to Gem (Beau Garrett) has a monologue where they explain something to Sam, who doesn't have much to do except react or say things like "that's what I'm talking about!" during action scenes.
The film is packed with flashbacks about Flynn bringing Tron and CLU to the grid, finding ISO's - some spontaneously generated form of life on the Grid - to being betrayed, or how Zeus used to monitor the games (I'm guessing when the MCP shut down) or how this character knows that one or why Flynn refuses to fight CLU or why Sam is in the Grid at all; after a while, the audience simply stops caring, because the very simple story of "Flynn disappears, his son comes to find him, they try to escape, battle ensues" is overshadowed by events we can't possibly need to know about. On top of that, Cillian Murphy appears in the beginning of the film as the son of David Warner's Ed Dillinger (the human face of evil in Tron) but never appears again, nor is his presence particularly noteworthy other than to add to the many suggestions of a third Tron film in the near future.
People have, rightfully, pointed out that Jeff Bridges seems to be playing Kevin Flynn as "The Dude" at times: he has a number of laugh-out-loud lines, not limited to "biodigital jazz, man!" or "you're harshing my zen!" Kevin Flynn was a bit of a flake in the first film - if you hadn't figured this out already, I've seen Tron many, many times - but Tron Legacy somehow feels the need to insert Flynn's idiosyncrasies into a character that is supposedly older, more jaded, and beaten down by his creation. As for Bridges CLU, I suppose there's nothing really wrong with the performance, although as I feared the digital "enhancement" to Bridges face leaves CLU looking waxy, with lips that just don't seem to work. The dead eyes do persist the "uncanny" feeling about his character, and it can be distracting to the point of frustration***.
And yet, as I said, I was never bored during Tron Legacy. I didn't regret seeing the film, as I have with other sequels this year (specifically Resident Evil: Afterlife), and while it may have had something to do with the faux-IMAX 3-D, the arresting visual style of the film is not its only strength. Olivia Wilde's wide-eyed Quorra and Michael Sheen's scenery chewing Castor pick up sections of the film that might drag otherwise, and Daft Punk's score carries the film even at its lowest points. The world of the Grid is logically updated from Steven Lisberger's 1982 Tron design, and there are many tiny callbacks to the first film that aren't intrusive (like a well placed Journey song early in the film). The story has some interesting ideas, even if they are largely bungled - Kevin Flynn assumes a sort-of "mad scientist" role, a man whose creation turned on him and left him trapped, unable to escape. At the same time, CLU can't adapt: he's limited by what Flynn programmed him with and his ambition is continually frustrated.
Will I see Tron Legacy again? Possibly, if its Blu-Ray 3D release coincides with my ability to watch it on a large screen again. I think that the bumpy, over-expository story could be improved in another film, and if Disney could scale back their obvious desire for tie-in rides, toys, video games, and welcoming of product placement (seriously, the film is a Ducati commercial!) or Garrett Hedlund could have more to do in the film, Tron Legacy might just be the "difficult second album" that sets up better things to come. Without spoiling anything, there are plenty of directions another Tron movie could go in.
Does that change the fact that this is not a good movie? Probably not. I had a similar reaction to Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland earlier this year: the film was visually engaging but narratively underwhelming, and yet I had the opposite reaction leaving Tron Legacy. I would consider watching the film again, and it actually has little to do with being a Tron "fanboy": I recognize the flaws in this film, and don't excuse them. At the same time, I cannot deny that when we left the film, the two other gentlemen with me both agreed that we found the film entertaining. Reconcile that, if you can...
* Normally, when discussing source material vs. films, I tend to argue that a film should be able to stand on its own, but when the film is a direct continuation, a sequel to a film that sets up most of the rules of a world, I am not so stringent. No one held it against The Matrix Reloaded that it doesn't explain the rules again, and since both films actually deal with the "can a program enter the real world" without really addressing the logistics of it, I stand by my point (although The Matrix Reloaded, like Tron Legacy, is not a great or even good movie).
** Also fair is discontent about not being able to re-watch Tron because Disney pulled the DVD from shelves earlier this year.
*** For those that argue he should look fake, consider that every other program in the grid is clearly played by a flesh and blood actor with minimal to no digital enhancement.
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