Joseph Kosinski’s ‘TRON: Legacy’ [6/10]
TRON (1982) 96m.
If you like to hang out at the local arcade, playing video games or just looking over someone’s shaking shoulders for a couple of hours, then you might get a kick out of this attempt by computers (with the aid of “filmmakers”) to take over the cinema. Otherwise you’ll quickly tire of the computer-generated imagery, no matter how impressive and ambitious the visuals are. Weak storyline has computer-games whiz Jeff Bridges literally entering giant video game and battling villain David Warner and his soldiers. Bridges, Warner, Bruce Boxleitner (who plays the computer figure, Tron), and pretty Cindy Morgan themselves become computer-generated characters while in the confines of the video game. Conceived and directed by Steven Lisberger, who allowed story to be too subordinated by technique. Disney production was subject of Time cover story and the talk of the industry before its release. It was feared that its success would at least temporarily change the look of film and start a wave of computer-generated films. Geared to too select an audience, who had better use for $5 of quarters, film flopped, saving us from such a terrible occurence. Whatever you do, don’t see this on television, where it is totally incomprehensible.
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Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986), p444
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Belated and somewhat superfluous sequel to Steven Lisberger’s dimly-remembered so-called “cult classic” from 1982 – a picture which was something of a joke at the time (see above) and hasn’t exactly lingered fondly in the collective popular consciousness.
The two co-stars of the original, Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner, are both back – but TRON: Legacy is very much The Jeff Bridges Show, with Boxleitner now relegated to the sidelines. At least he’s in the movie – it’s a shame no role could be found for David Warner, whose Dillinger was the imposing baddie from the first picture.*
Bridges’ Oscar win for Crazy Heart cemented his status as a popular veteran with unusually wide appeal – and as the award came in the middle of TRON: Legacy‘s reshoots, it’s no surprise to see him so prominently showcased here. After an unspecified period exiled in cyberspace, his Kevin Flynn – opportunistically retrocharacterised as a sort of Mark Zuckerberg of the mid-80s – has aged into a world-weary philosopher king with more than a hint of Jeff Lebowski about him.
And this is very much a case of an ace trump-card sensibly played – the more absurd, pompous and nonsensically incoherent TRON: Legacy (note that majuscule orthography!) becomes, the more amusing the contrast with Bridges’ hangdog stoicism and hippy-visionary philosophical pronouncements. “You’re messin’ with my zen thing, maan,” he moans at a particularly fraught juncture.
The garbled screenplay is – unpromisingly – credited to four writers, none of whom have a single big-screen feature to their name, while director Joseph Kosinski (yet another debutant) seems to have his inexperienced hands full with the elaborate visuals of a megabucks movie intended to be seen in eyepopping IMAX 3-D. And the special-effects, while often impressive in an eye-candy sort of way – Daft Punk’s electronic/orchestral soundtrack adds considerably to their impact – are in relative terms actually less radically innovative than the original Tron‘s technical breakthroughs appeared back in the early eighties.
Story considerations are, once again, secondary at best. The father-quest plot lazily recycles elements of The Matrix, The Wizard of Oz and AI as Kevin’s hotheaded 27-year-old son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) is sucked into a computer mainframe – just like Bridges and Boxleitner in the original. After taking part in elaborate, gladiatorial combats – this being a virtual realm, pixels are copiously shed rather than blood – Sam eventually finds his long-lost dad trapped in a virtual reality of his own making, helpless to stop the villainous, megalomaniac schemes of his villainous avatar CLU (Bridges again).
The latter, a rejuvenated sort of faux-Bridges, is rendered a tad clunkily via Beowulf-style CGI, but nevertheless has rather more screen presence than the hapless Hedlund. Far from being a (micro-) chip off the old block, this blandly handsome lad is a more of an annoying glitch, a charisma-free zone whose deficiencies are emphasised by his copious screen-time, during which he’s upstaged by more flavoursome supporting turns from Olivia Wilde (as his ethereally enigmatic, not-quite-human love-interest Quorra) and Michael Sheen (whose flamboyant, queeny nightclub-boss offers an albino glimpse of how Tilda Swinton might incarnate David Bowie in a Todd Haynes quasi-biopic.)
The main problem for Hedlund, of course, is keeping pace with the perpetually too-cool-for-school Bridges, who in his seventh decade is adding gravitas to his long-established ambling je-m’en-foutisme. Not that there are many twentysomethings kicking around American cinema right now who could have withstood such competition/juxtaposition, of course. But in any TRON The Third, would anyone protest were Hedlund to have magically morphed into The Fast and the Furious – Tokyo Drift‘s Lucas Black? After all, in the worlds of Tron and TRON, anything – in theory – should be possible.
Neil Young
24th December, 2010
TRON: LEGACY
[6/10] : USA 2010 : Joseph KOSINSKI : 125m
seen 17/Dec/10 at Odeon, Mansfield : (£9.45) : {15/28}
* There is a nod in this direction via a fleeting cameo from an unbilled Cillian Murphy, a smarmily smart-alec programmer identified as Ed Dillinger and thus presumably lined up as villain in any subsequent instalment.