1. Logic Gaffes That are Baffling When You Think About Them - In my earlier, I credited Tron Legacy with simply continuing concepts from Tron without feeling the need to reiterate them. There are some really important ones - what the laser in Flynn's office does, who Alan is, Flynn's arcade, why Flynn would bring Tron into his new grid or the "now that is a big door" joke that nobody caught when I saw it. The creative team didn't feel the need to explain what a Recognizer was, and rather than re-explain the I/O Tower, they tied its purpose into the specific story at hand. This is all fine and well, but they also made a really stupid, obvious mistake - a mistake so obvious that you simply overlook it both times - that is groan inducing.In Tron, the story establishes that "water" (for lack of a better term) provides energy to overworked programs. There's a whole scene devoted to it where Tron, Flynn, and Ram find a "data stream" and use their identity discs to collect "water" and drink it (look, I'm not going to pretend that Tron doesn't have some silly elements too). In Tron Legacy, Flynn appears to be drinking something that looks suspiciously like the "water" during the dinner scene, so it seems to be a logical extension of the first film, another component of the "world" of Tron that doesn't bear repeating.
That is, until Sam Flynn returns to the Grid, and it's raining. Raining energy. Let that sink in. And if that's not enough, Gem - one of the "sirens" that fits Sam into his Grid outfit - is wandering around in a raincoat with an umbrella. Why? I suppose because it's a good excuse to put Beau Garrett in a plastic raincoat and borrow imagery from Blade Runner (more on borrowed - or stolen - imagery in a moment). So, aesthetic decision aside, why exactly does this happen? Why is their "rain" on the Grid? What purpose would that serve, exactly?
But we're not done with the water yet: the second time it happens, you're so overwhelmed by the shameless theft from Star Wars, you probably didn't stop to think that Tron, who makes a last-minute shift back to good, falls into the Grid's equivalent of an OCEAN, guaranteeing he's not "dead," even if that wasn't evident in the first place (see #4). It's one thing not to need to explain something from the first film, but to then to forget the ramifications of including elements randomly for people who HAVE seen Tron is just asinine.
Beyond that, let's just for a moment consider what would happen if CLU had succeeded in his plan, bringing hundreds (or thousands) of programs into the real world. Is the fact that Quorra an ISO the reason she could come through? Because she was some hybrid of programming and DNA? That's not something I think anyone wanted to get into, but if CLU (who is completely a program) came through with his army, what makes them so invincible? Their weapons are energy based, and the discs give off "heat," as is evidenced from the extreme close-ups when Sam is forced to fight. How exactly would that translate in the real world? Is it simply assumed that light discs are going to return to their owners (which, by the way, are their identity discs) before somebody shoots them? The programs only know what they've been encoded with, and would be at a massive disadvantage outside of the confines of the Grid.
2. The Star Wars Ripoffs - One could argue the "chicken or the egg" point for a few lifts here - CLU's guards do look like Imperial Guards, but then again their appearance and energy staffs are consistent with the original Tron, which was released a year before Return of the Jedi (where the Emperor's Guards first appeared). I'm even willing to overlook the Hero's Journey elements because Star Wars and Tron Legacy are copping from Joseph Campbell equally.
What I can't let slide is the Millenium Falcon / Tie-Fighter shoot-out lifted almost directly during the "chase" flight to the I/O tower. Sam hoots and hollers like Luke Skywalker, comes very close to saying the exact same lines - to the point I expected to hear Kevin Flynn say "Great kid, don't get cocky - man!" or something to that effect.
Considering that Tron also "borrowed" concepts from Star Wars, let's move to a newer kid on the block that also borrowed from and is copied wholesale for Tron Legacy...
3. The Matrix Ripoffs - One of the chief complaints about Flynn's presence in the End of Line club is that when he appears, he doesn't demonstrate his "User" powers more. Trust me, that's actually for the best, considering how similar Tron Legacy is to another high profile sequel, The Matrix Reloaded.
I don't know if anybody else noticed this, as the sequels to The Matrix have largely been forgotten, but the central plot point to The Matrix Reloaded, even more than Neo discovering his "destiny" was Agent Smith infiltrating the real world by escaping the Matrix. Does that sound familiar to anybody? Like, maybe exactly what CLU is trying to do in Tron Legacy? And wait, wasn't the idea that Agent Smith, like CLU, had some desire to wipe out humanity because of their "imperfections"? Oh right, it was.
Give credit where credit's due and let's at least suggest that the computer world of Tron was in some way an influence on the Wachowski's version of a virtual reality, but that doesn't really give Tron Legacy carte blanche to lift the villain's master plan wholesale and drop it into your sequel. As mentioned in point #1, the logic doesn't even hold up in Tron Legacy: at least in The Matrix Reloaded (and continues into Revolutions) Agent Smith has to "infect" an avatar in the Matrix in order to "possess" him in the real world. There's a logic, albeit a wonky one, at work there.
In Tron Legacy, they borrow the concept, but never bother to think out how a virtual representation of a program could assume tangible form outside of the machine. It doesn't really matter that Tron Legacy is ripping off a bad sequel to a not-that-great-in-the-first-place-movie, because the parallels are so obvious that people are still asking why Flynn didn't "go all Neo" in the Grid.
4. The Film Exists in Service of Sequels, and Nothing Else - Tron Legacy is kind of a continuation of Tron, but it makes a critical mistake in assuming that leaving important details out or simply not addressing plot points is okay because there's going to be a Tron 3. Oh, you didn't know that? Well, Disney did - they're including a series of teasers for the next Tron sequel on the Blu-Ray for Tron Legacy.
In some cases, you can tease sequels or leave certain plot threads hanging in order to drum up interest in another film, but it can backfire, particularly if your audience isn't aware that more films are coming. It failed miserably with The Golden Compass, for example, because the poor box office prevented the other His Dark Materials novels from being adapted, leaving viewers with a film that does nothing BUT set up plot points for films that don't and won't exist. Assuming that there will be a Tron 3 is not enough of a rationale to introduce plot points that seem out of place or wholly irrelevant in Tron Legacy.
For example, let's look at Cillian Murphy's Edward Dillinger II, a glorified, uncredited, cameo that seems to serve no purpose whatsoever in Tron Legacy except to a) identify that David Warner's Ed Dillinger has a son and b) tease Cillian Murphy being in Tron 3, a movie nobody knows for certain is coming going into T:L. That's not the only open ended, seemingly pointless development in Legacy, however: including the character of Tron, to the point that it's abundantly clear that Tron is Rinzler well before Kevin Flynn says it out loud, is essentially a tease.
Tron "dying" after turning back to good is about as believable as saying that Kevin Flynn actually died killing CLU. The suggestion of the former ensures the inevitability of the latter, particularly in light that Disney has already begun work on Tron 3, with footage that implies Flynn is alive, that the Dillinger family planned Sam's trip to the Grid, and that Ram's "User" is behind the "Flynn Lives" campaign, something Alan knew about all along. Quite a few balls to leave in the air for a film that didn't have much to offer in the way of a plot in the first place.
So Tron Legacy is a silly movie, bordering on stupid in some ways: it borrows heavily from two very well known series, it takes advantage of not explaining things in order to make arbitrary choices we're expected not to notice, and all of this is in service of another movie, one no one was assured was coming, let alone were aware was possible. Could Tron Legacy simply be the "difficult second album" that allows for a better third film? It's possible, but there needs to be a demonstration that all of the thought going into this teased third film actually makes sense given the sequel we had to sit through to get there. Lazy writing isn't going to cut it next time.
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