Mithmeoi

I grew up watching Tron, it always amazed me as a child. The whole world of Tron. The vehicles, buildings, characters(programs). The concept of transporting a human being into the digital realm always interested me. So anyways, here’s my opinion on Tron Legacy. I might drop a few spoilers here, but I’ll mark them if I do.

Here comes the story plot, spoilerish, I won’t give away TOO much though. So the movie starts off with a little filler about Flynn’s son, Sam, why Flynn himself is missing, and it shows his son and how he reacted to his father disappearing. Then it shoots forward to present day. His son is all grown up etc, his dad’s partner gets a page from Flynn’s old arcade and for whatever reason the partner tells him to toodle off to check it out. He somehow activates the lazer that sucks him into “the Grid”. He meets C.L.U., a program coded by his father ages ago to create the perfect virtual world. However C.L.U. is corrupt and he sends Same to the “games” and is almost killed. Then Kora comes and rescues him, takes him to his father, his father doesn’t agree to come with him because C.L.U. is after his memory disc and will surely find him if he comes to the portal. His corrupt program wants the disc so he can enter the world and purge it of it’s impurities. I won’t say how it ends though so not the WHOLE story. Anywho! So now that I’ve gotten the setting put out, I’ll delve into my opinion on this film.

I DID enjoy this movie. I did however find it had a lot of plot holes and some pooey character development. If they had built up the characters more, and there were some pretty interesting ones in there, it would have made the movie much better. If they had showed C.L.U.’s obsession for perfection rather than just showing him as the random bad program here and there it would have given him so much more depth. Kora, this random sentient coded life form, she apparently was created by Flynn and C.L.U. I guess? Well they never really explain much about her. They do explain why she is the only one left but they don’t really show much of her “people” … programs… Anyways. I didn’t expect them to build up Flynn since he was already in the first, I did however wish they had built up his back story on how he stayed hidden for so long from C.L.U. There was one character I absolutely hated, that was Zuess. The owner of a bar. He was so over the top and obnoxious. What was his point? Just something to throw in to break up the movie a little. They could have used those extra minutes to build up C.L.U. or Kora.

*spoiler* Flynn lives in this “rugged” area of the grid where there’s virtual mountains, only he and Kora can go there because they’ve encoded their vehicles to be able to handle it somehow. Regular “light cycles” and whatever else cannot go there or they’ll basically derezz. So the first thing they don’t explain is how C.L.U. and a few of his minions manage to get into this “rugged” area after tracking down Flynn’s light cycle. Do they figure out how to adjust their vehicles to accept this terrain or what? Nor do they explain why C.L.U. never found Flynn. If he’s so obsessed on perfection wouldn’t he start to attack that rugged area of the grid to clean it up and perfect it? Wouldn’t he stop at nothing to find that disc? Or does Flynn set up some kind of firewall to keep C.L.U. from finding him? I mean how does it work? It’s never really explained. I also wanted to know how on earth they were eating pork and greens in this virtual world. In the original they had this fluid power source, that made a lot more sense than this did. *spoiler end*

Comparing this to the original is hard because they really are super different. It’s totally updated and most of it does not feel at all like the older one. This doesn’t make it bad, it just doesn’t seem like a continuation of the same story. The programs don’t really seem to have a purpose now, or maybe they do they just don’t do a good job of explaining it like they did in the old one. There were little easter eggs here and there referring back to the old film, which was kind of neat to see, but other than a few vehicles being similar to the original the similarities pretty much end. I do admit the new costumes were pretty awesome, but it would have been nice to see them mix in a little of the older more digital feel of the original.

The story, it could have been better. It was good enough, it was interesting but they left so much of it open, it almost leaves too much up to the audience to piece together. I think they could have done better on it. The visuals were pretty cool, the new light cycle race was cool and the disc throwing thing too, but the light cycles kind of lost something. They ran too smoothly, there wasn’t this sharp turning and total accuracy thing going on that the first had. It didn’t seem as dangerous and threatening. The “train” was pretty cool looking and the planes were neat though. It was fun to see the action scenes in 3D. The music was also really good, probably one of the best parts of the movie.

So my overall opinion of this movie, it was pretty good. It has it’s flaws, oh yes and quite a few, but I still enjoyed it. Maybe cause I’m just a sucker for these kind of movies, or cause I liked the original Tron and just thought it was neat to see parts of that universe updated. I don’t know, but for all it’s flaws I still enjoyed it. Would I buy it on DVD? Yea, I probably will, especially if it comes in a two pack with the original. I mighta had a couple more things to say about this movie, but I’ve forgotten what they were so I’ll just end this review now.