Tron Legacy was a visually stunning bit of work. The CGI world was rendered perfectly and I liked the way a de-ressed program fell into tiny cubes and sounded like shattered glass.
We saw Tron Legacy in 3D, but it was clearly not made with 3D in mind. It opened with a slug screen telling us that parts of the film were in 2D, but we should keep our glasses on anyway. The most impressive 3D effects were in the Coming Attractions trailers.
I still like 3D, I just wish people would stop adding it to a film as an afterthought. It seems that the makers of Tron Legacy wanted to rip off every movie they could think of, so what they tried to do with the 2D/3D was have that whole B&W to Color thing from The Wizard of Oz. This was completely unnoticed in my viewing of Tron Legacy, but it seems to be what others are saying about the odd use of the visuals.
The story of Tron Legacy is pretty much what you see in the trailer. Daddy Flynn has been missing lo these many years and Flynn Junior goes into the Matrix-I mean, The Grid-to save him.
There were a number of odd elements in Tron Legacy. For one thing Jeff Bridges seems to have the character of Flynn mixed up with the character of The Big Lebowski. He keeps saying things like Cool, Dig, and Man. Kevin Flynn disappeared in 1985, not 1965. Then there is the odd business about the program Tron, who has a small role as one of the villains, but for some reason he isn’t given the Fountain of Youth treatment that Clu (Jeff Bridges alter ego) is given.
Young Flynn meets up with Daddy Flynn in a white world filled with isolated items. Flynn’s room is a near clone of the world the hero from 2001:A Space Odyssey winds up trapped in. Zuse’s dance with the cane reminded me of a Clockwork Orange. The scene with Clu standing before an endless army in perfect formation is straight out of Star Wars-and, of coruse, Nazi Germany.
The story makes little to no sense. Daddy Flynn is a god in the Grid, a world he literally created-and yet he has been hiding out for 20 years or so. A few lines from Tron are tossed in here and there, apparently at random. End of line and Greeting, Programs are spoken a couple of times and That’s a big door near the start of the film-though there is no one there to hear it.
Tron Legacy ends with the setup for a sequel-one that might feature a perfect world without illness or poverty. We can only hope that it has a better screenwriter and a less annoying sound track.
