TRON: Lega­cy

A seduc­tive open­ing sequence to Joseph Kosinski’s ambi­tious TRON sequel sees our hero Sam Fly­nn (Gar­rett Hed­lund) weave his way down a free­way on a Ducati before he breaks into his father’s com­pa­ny and releas­es secret soft­ware onto the inter­net, just as ENCOM’s CEO is about to launch a grand trade announce­ment. The infer­ence is clear – these days, the kids want it for free. Kevin Fly­nn (Jeff Bridges), for those unversed in the orig­i­nal, was a vision­ary pro­gram­mer who became trapped in his own vir­tu­al cre­ation, and the ​‘We’re not in Kansas any­more’ moment arrives swift­ly when Sam joins him.

With­in min­utes, Sam dis­cov­ers his father’s hid­den office and is launched from 2D real­i­ty into The Grid, a cir­cuit board world of chromed cityscapes and char­coal skies streaked with puls­ing light that morphs and stretch­es out of the screen towards you.

The ensu­ing action sequences are as impres­sive as they are pro­longed. The cam­era swoops and dives in impos­si­ble curlicues as Sam tries to sur­vive ​‘the game’, while the first light cycle chase switch­es in the blink of an eye from one muta­ble plat­form to anoth­er. With jet-streams of elec­tric colour cours­ing behind and ignit­ing the screen, it is a tru­ly remark­able use of 3D tech­nol­o­gy. When the nar­ra­tive even­tu­al­ly kicks in it’s easy to sit back and expect some com­ment on our increas­ing­ly inti­mate rela­tion­ship with tech­nol­o­gy. But TRON: Lega­cy declines to go down that route. Instead, it tries to bring eugen­ics back into fashion.

The Grid, in Kosinski’s telling, is a fas­cist state con­trolled by CLU, a com­put­er pro­gram cre­at­ed in the image of Kevin Fly­nn. Fly­nn pro­grammed CLU to remorse­less­ly pur­sue per­fec­tion, and sub­se­quent­ly it destroys any­thing organ­ic and raw. The world of TRON: Lega­cy is one where colour defines alle­giance – tan­ger­ine-red for the author­i­ties loy­al to CLU; bleach-blue for the repressed under­lings – the whole place is replete with Third Reich archi­tec­ture and uni­formed mil­i­taris­tic rallies.

This dig­i­tal riff on Niet­zsche isn’t new, as the remas­tered ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis will attest, yet theme-park cin­e­ma like TRON: Lega­cy seems a lit­tle too com­fort­able with repack­ag­ing estab­lished images of geno­cide – like a stream of croc­o­dil­ing refugees, or tum­bling build­ings full of peo­ple – to advance a nar­ra­tive that revolves around killer games of ulti­mate fris­bee, all set to the thump­ing beats of Daft Punk.

That is post-mod­ernism at its most vapid.

Grant­ed, this was nev­er going to be an opus of pro­fun­di­ty, but what real­ly is inex­cus­able about TRON: Lega­cy is the android stan­dard of per­for­mance. Gar­rett Hed­lund per­forms the phys­i­cal scenes well but fails com­pre­hen­sive­ly on the rare occa­sions when he’s required to con­vey empa­thy. Olivia Wilde, the love inter­est, has a lego bob and milk-white skin, but her role is large­ly reduced to fix­ing her giant sap­phire eyes on Sam before Kosin­s­ki cuts away. Jeff Bridges, dressed like The Dude in a sauna, rhap­sodis­es about über-con­cepts with the cred­i­bil­i­ty of a Goan hip­pie. Michael Sheen, obvi­ous­ly appre­ci­at­ing the depres­sion of his sur­round­ings, adds his imper­son­ation of Zig­gy Star­dust, but is more like some awful hybrid of The Mad Hat­ter and Tony Blair.

It’s clear that Kosin­s­ki, a trained archi­tect, has designs on the eyes rather than your mind. He has cre­at­ed a dig­i­tal world of graphite and neon in which a lex­i­con of dis­parate ideas exists, but it’s dif­fi­cult to com­pli­ment him for the over­all direc­tion of the film. TRON: Lega­cy undoubtably push­es at the aes­thet­ics of cin­e­ma. It’s as dystopi­an as Blade Run­ner and as mys­ti­cal as Avatar, but with­out James Cameron’s com­mand of melo­dra­ma or Rid­ley Scott’s meld­ing of thematics.