Tron Legacy Archive

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Writing Without Word and a New Ending to Tron Legacy

By
Adam Shaftoe
– July 23, 2012Posted in: Criticism, Movies, The Daily Shaft

Some time ago, I can’t quite say when, somebody, I can’t recall who, put an idea in my head. It was the sort of idea that was so simple I couldn’t believe I had not thought of it before. At the same time, this idea was so grand that it had the capacity to drastically change how I do a lot of my writing. What was this magical moment of near-incpetion?

I don’t have to use Microsoft Word to do all my writing.

I know that might not sound like much, but it’s quite the revelation for me. I’ve been using Word, in some iteration or another, since 1997. If I include everything I’ve written since then (two years of high school papers, undergraduate and graduate degrees in the humanities/social sciences, countless short stories, one play, a half dozen published op-ed pieces, two unpublished novels, one-hundred fifty posts on my old blog, three-hundred fifty posts here, and more cover letters than I care to count) I’ve probably produced at least a million words with Microsoft’s flagship word processor. The very notion that I could use something else seems…wrong. Wrong in the sense that people thought a heliocentric view of the universe was wrong.

Recently though, my faith in Word has been faltering. My doubts began during the 2011 NaNoWriMo. Once my novel got up to about 30,000 words in length, Word would take an age to buffer the entire document. Gods help me if I wanted to find a specific chapter. Sure, I could have broken up each chapter into a separate file, but who has the time for that? After a bit of public whinging, a few writers I know recommended trying Scrivener. Today, I gave it a test drive. The results were quite promising.

Rather than transplanting a section of my novel, I decided to test out Scrivener’s script writing functionality. Compared to Celtx, the program I dread to use when I want to work on a screenplay, Scrivener is a dream. I barely need to take my hands off the key board to shift from character names to dialogue to scene direction. Where Celtx offers a constant battle with a brainless spell check, Scrivener doesn’t flag character names when, out of instinct, I type them with a capitalized first letter. Perhaps most impressive, so far, is Scrivener’s ability to lend itself to collaboration. With Celtx a screenplay must be edited in Celtx. The only option for export is PDF file. Scrivener will compile and export a project into any industry standard file format, including Word files. This is the sort of program that makes me want to finish the final edits on the first season of my space opera radio play.

While I don’t anticipate giving up Word for academic papers, work documents, and article length non-fiction. I can’t imagine trying to do my next long project in anything other than Scrivener. As for short fiction, that remains a grey area. I can see some benefits to using Scrivener, if only for organizing character information and back story that doesn’t appear in the actual finished product, but I don’t quite know if they outweigh the convenience of banging out a couple thousand words in Word from hand written notes. As for screenplays, well I’ll let my revised ending to Tron: Legacy speak to that.

Click here to download a copy of the PDF


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Derezzed is the new Dead: The Brilliance of Tron Uprising

By
Adam Shaftoe
– June 20, 2012Posted in: Criticism, Television, The Daily Shaft, TV Reviews

The arena is filled with tens of thousands of spectators. A calmed hush descends over the crowd as a regal figure walks forward from the recesses of his private box. He points to the floor below. Two men emerge, and the crowd cheers as the warriors who have fought so valiantly during the day’s games are presented for their approval. Both men have killed countless others during the day. Neither allows himself the luxury of thinking about the cost of his survival. That’s really what it’s all about: survival for the warriors, and entertainment for the crowd. But the crowd hungers for more. They want worthy foes to face the men who have bested all challengers.

From his box, the master of ceremonies announces the combatants for the day’s final battle. The two men will fight each other. The winner will be set free from the games, the loser will die at the hands of the winner. The crowd roars. Their lust for battle, for a distraction from the privations of their real lives, is palpable within every atom of the arena.

The two warriors refuse to fight at first. A bond of loyalty exists between the strangers made allies through shared bloodshed. The crowd simmers. They could get ugly at any moment.  The master declares both will be killed if neither fight, and the arena bends to his will. The crowd is appeased. He knows the games are a dangerous necessity. There is no better way to showcase the futility of resistance than through the games. But no matter what else happens, the games can never become a breeding ground for heroes.

Unwilling to be slaughtered, unable to take his own life, one of the warriors makes the first strike. He wants to die at the hands of his brother, not his enemy.

It could be a scene from one of Spartacus’ various screen adaptations. Perhaps it’s an excerpt from Ridley Scott’s pitch session for Gladiator? Obviously neither given the title of the post. But who would have thought a pretty, if unremarkable, sequel to Tron would incubate an animated series that dares to march where angels fear to tread?

Tron Uprising is a story of terrorism, or freedom fighting, depending on how you look at such things. It’s a story of a hegemonic empire imposing a world view on otherwise free people. We could even make a case for the show as an inquiry into social control through spectacle; what will a people abide so long as you give them bread and circuses? In short, Tron Uprising has restored the philosophical backbone that was essential to the first feature film, but subdued, if not entirely missing, from the Legacy. Only now the discourse has shifted from something that explored Enlightment ideas pertaining to man’s relationship with god to the philosophies of Edmund Burke and Hannah Arendt. In donning the guise of Tron, thought dead at the hands of Clu, Beck, takes up a banner which preaches evil triumphing if good programs do nothing. Moreover Uprising constructs a totalitarian state so that the narrative might safely explore ideas of resistance within it.

How then does Tron Uprising enact an exploration of such lofty ideas while remaining a Disney branded product? Through exploiting one very simple loophole in standards and practices: that which is not alive can not be killed.

Giving the show a prime time spot also helps, but so does that last bit. Allow me to explain.

The Grid, the world of Tron, is set inside a computer. Like any computer, The Grid is full of programs. These programs look and sound very much like humans or, as we are known the programs, users. But when a program is cleaved in twain with another program’s identity disc, the weapon of choice within the grid, they don’t die, they de-resolve or in the common parlance, they derezz. The null program takes on the appearance of a piece of cubist art before crumbling into so many bloodless sugar cubes. To other programs, the sight of de-resolution is abhorrent. To the censors, who are primarily concerned with violent visual cues, there’s little ground for objection. Remember that audience emulation is paramount among the concerns of the censor; will an impressionable idiot child attempt to replicate the actions that they see on screen? Should they do so in this case, the result will be an army of children throwing Frisbees at each other. Given North America’s childhood obesity problem, this is hardly something to be eschewed.

Within the story, however, the derezzing of a program has all the permanence of death within the human world. There are no “saved” programs or such gimmicks that would invalidate the finality of deresolution. Once you’re derezzed, you’re as good as dead, but conveniently not dead since you were never alive in the first place.

The potential payoff for narrative development here is boundless. With derezzing as a practical alternative to death, Uprising can actually explore how/why Clu went about purging the ISOs from The Grid. If said story ends with a camera pan back to a flash of light that sees two million programs getting mass derezzed, then so be it.

Why not go on to measure the greater good of programs sacrificing themselves for the idea of Tron against Clu’s attempts to create order as a moral chiaroscuro? Three episodes in and we’ve already seen programs sent to the games to be derezzed as a means of combating Beck’s subversive message of resistance. Extending that to its natural conclusion would make Uprising something that is as laden with political subtext as V for Vendetta. Political, but still something that is safe for the Disney brand. With nobody dying there’s nothing to tarnish the corporations family friendly veneer.

The only risk is that Tron Uprising may suffer the same fate as Exo-Squad and Transformers: Beast Machines. Therein both shows had a decidedly grown up subtext, but couldn’t convince adult audiences to watch. Arguably the success of series like The Clone Wars and Avatar: The Last Airbender (pay no attention to the horror show that was the movie of the same name) have done much to legitimize western animation for an adult audience. Time will tell of Tron Uprising follows suit.


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Television Review: First Impressions of Tron Uprising

By
Adam Shaftoe
– May 16, 2012Posted in: TV Reviews

He fights for the users

Summary Judgement: Landing somewhere between V for Vendetta and Batman Begins, this is what Tron Legacy should have been.

Starring the voices of: Elijah Wood, Mandy Moore, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Lance Henriksen, and Bruce Boxleitner

*Some minor spoilers ahead but  nothing that you wouldn’t have figured out from a trailer*

My wait for the first episode of Tron Legacy brought about feelings of excitement and anxiety. Behind the excitement was a number of trailers that looked and sounded sensational while also offering a glimmer of hope for intelligent story telling. Anxiety because, well, Tron Legacy looked and sounded great, but pretty much plateaued there. And over everything hung the looming shadow of The Mouse, the trademark that promises family friendly drivel entertainment at every turn.

In a mere thirty minute premiere, series writers Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz, who also wrote the screenplay for Tron Legacy as well as created the now hit series Once Upon a Time, struck upon something that adds a depth to the Grid that has never before been seen.

Cubism is the new death

The series is situated after Clu’s initial rebellion against Flynn, but before the events of Tron Legacy. Within Argon City, a place at the very edge of the Grid, a maintenance program named Beck (Elijah Wood) witnesses his home annexed by Clu’s army. Shortly after the successful occupation begins and ends, General Tesler (Lance Henriksen) converts the city’s communal and non-lethal game grid into a plaza commemorating Clu (now voiced by Fred Tatasciore who does a phenomenal imitation of an evil Jeff Bridges). Beck’s friend Bhodi protests Tesler’s occupation and is immediately derezzed for his troubles. The capricious murder stirs Beck to action. Hoping that he will inspire others to resist, Beck assumes the mantle of Tron. His first act is to decapitate a statue of Clu before destroying the plaza that housed it. Fleeing from security programs, Beck is chased into the wastelands by Paige (Emmanuelle Chriqui – whose voice you may recognize from the contemporary Thundercats series) Tesler’s right hand program.

Alone in the wilderness, Beck discovers another program, a program long since thought dead, Tron. And Tron is looking for a successor.

So, let’s start with the big question, how does the series get around the Rinzler issue? Quite well, actually. Legacy left us to assume that Tron was converted into Rinzler immediately following his defeat. That assumption is false. Clu left Tron for dead after beating him down. The defeated, but still living, security program then went into self-imposed exile. It’s not so much a retcon as a subtle manipulation of existing canon. Before you complain, consider that this action keeps Tron as a central figure within the series; whereas both Tron and Tron Legacy could have just as easily been called Flynn and Flynn Legacy. After thirty years, it’s about time Tron actually gets explored as a character.

Don't mind my arm, it's just a flesh wound

I’m also quite impressed with how the writers are managing the issue of violence within the Grid. Despite being a House of Mouse creation, the world of Tron has always been a dangerous place. Programs who aren’t appropriated as soldiers often end up as gladiators, fighting to the death for the amusement of the masses. A given program’s free will is often limited by strong external forces. Hell, the MCP could easily be seen as the inspiration for Star Trek’s Borg. The Grid is not the sort of place that lends itself to a “nobody dies” philosophy. Yet programs of all varieties are derezzed within the series premiere. Note the verb, derezzed. Nobody is killed, per se, but they still die. When guts and gore are represented on the Grid as cubist art, it’s pretty easy to get away with things that no other animated feature could imagine. The difference may be arbitrary, but it’s enough to make the stakes feel real without becoming excessively gruesome or reducing the action to GI Joe’s level of last second bail outs.

Still, the real appeal of the writing is its ability to establish legitimacy in the story’s central conflict while avoiding a head-on collision with the various horrors that come with totalitarian rule. Consider Beck’s first act of rebellion against Clu’s occupying force: in donning Tron’s garb and destroying a propaganda symbol, he hopes to incite violent change within his society. By any modern definition it’s an act of terrorism. Yet the word is never so much as whispered. Instead, Beck’s branded a renegade program. Once again, the devil’s in the details, but that’s what makes it so clever. Even little things like Tesler loading “volunteers” for the Games into “light-trains” speaks to a 20th century historical context. No twelve year old will ever see this decision as a reference to the holocaust, but any adult with half a brain will catch on to the symbolism.

Overall, Tron Uprising has set itself up to be the true legacy to a movie that genre fans fell in love with thirty years ago. Various remixes and additions to Daft Punk’s already amazing Tron Legacy soundtrack combine with a unique visual aesthetic to bring the grid to life. With Tron training Beck, much as an aged and broken Bruce Wayne took Terry McGinnis under his wing, Uprising looks like a smart, emotionally charged, and poignant addition to the franchise.

Tron Uprising makes its official premiere on June 7, 2012 on Disney XD.


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The Daily Shaft: A Quick Look at Tron: Uprising

By
Adam Shaftoe
– April 18, 2012Posted in: Television, The Daily Shaft

Shortly after the release of TRON: Legacy, Disney began hinting that they would reformat 1982’s favourite security program for the small screen. The concept seemed interesting, but in the wake of Legacy’s painfully mediocre storytelling, I wasn’t quite ready to let myself get invested in this project. Months past and thoughts of Tron on television drifted from my mind. This morning, as I waited for the Wednesday update to one of my guilty pleasures, a gaming web series called Continue?, I saw the brand new preview trailer for TRON: Uprising. I don’t know how Disney keeps doing it, but once again they’ve managed to suck me into the grid. Here’s the video.

The concept actually seems like something that could work. Given that Legacy glazed over CLU’s rise to power, the very conflict that the series is set to explore, there’s certainly room for some creative freedom. Yet CLU’s war against Flynn, free programs, and the ISOs had a particularly dark air about it; words like “purge” and “holocaust” featured prominently within the discourse, if I recall correctly. Beyond that, there’s the “Bread and Circuses” nature of life in CLU’s regime that sees unregistered programs and political dissidents executed in public spectacles. To my recollection, only two western animated series have ever dealt with ideas of genocide, asynchronous warfare, and the totalitarian state with any level of sophistication: Exo-Squad and Transformers: Beast Machines. I’d love it if TRON: Uprising became the third, but the giant Disney production stamp gives me pause for consideration.

I’m also interested to see what sort of hand waving, or perhaps even retconning, will be used to deal with the Tron/Rinzler question. The trailer suggests that Tron is dead. Yet the implication is that Beck is being trained by a growly voiced Bruce Boxleitner. I imagine the series will give us an episode or two of Tron training Beck before Bruce Boxleitner gets too expensive bad things happen and a fully indoctrinated Rinzler emerges. Then again, if they can afford Elijah Wood, Lance Henriksen, Mandy Moore, and Emmanuelle Chriqui, Boxleitner’s presence might be more than a short-term way to lure existing fans into the series.

Speaking of luring people in, I really hope that the series keeps using Daft Punk’s TRON: Legacy soundtrack. The mind boggles at how it didn’t earn an Oscar nomination for best original soundtrack.

The only other concern that comes to mind after watching Uprising’s trailer is the inevitable question of prequels: how do you keep the audience interested if they already know the ending? It’s certainly possible, as evidenced by the success of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which is returning for a fifth season in the Fall of 2012.

So let’s recap. If we take it as a given that Tron: Uprising is going to look pretty as all hell, the series is already teasing us with solid voice actors, a potentially smart concept, and more Daft Punk. I think that’s a win.

TRON: Uprising releases on Disney XD and bit torrents near you in June of 2012.


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Geek News: February 28, 2011

By
Adam Shaftoe
– February 28, 2011Posted in: Geek News

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today in geek news: The eventual sequel to the Star Trek reboot, how Warhammer 40,000 is keeping PC gaming alive and nerd rage on Oscar night.  Spoiler alert: Colin Firth was charming.

The wait for a follow up to 2009’s critically acclaimed Star Trek, continues.  This very morning Simon Pegg posted the following on his twitter feed.

 

 

 

 

 

Looks like it might be a while before nerds, geeks and trekkies get to drag their otherwise uninterested partners to see a movie that they would never see under their own volition.  Rumours persist that this film won’t introduce a new canon species as the primary antagonist, rather it will draw upon some other foe from the Star Trek mythology.  I for one am hoping for the half-white half-black aliens; nothing says allegory like painfully fucking obvious allegory.

In video games, tomorrow marks the launch of the newest expansion to the long running Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War franchise.  Dawn of War II: Retribution offers a single player campaign for each of the game’s six playable races, which after a long wait now includes the rather wimpy (except for theri tanks) Imperial Guard.  I for one am happy about this turn of events.  Being forced to play as the elite super-human Space Marines always leaves me feeling a little insecure about the fact that I spend more time writing and gaming than I do at the gym.  As a standalone expansion, the game will retail for about $29.99.  Like many of my fellow Canucks, I’ll take extra pleasure in using my rainbow coloured currency to buy a copy off Steam.

For anybody who didn’t watch the Oscars last night, a historically inaccurate movie about the British royal family won best picture, director, leading actor and original screenplay.  I think we should all take a moment to say “God save the King for saving us from having the Facebook movie win any of the important awards.”  Meanwhile, Inception struck a blow for things geeky by winning a few of the technical awards.  Also, Christian Bale’s best supporting actor win has likely washed away the Terminator Salvation stink that has been following him around for the last couple of years.  Despite underwhelming in almost every other consideration, Franco and Hathaway managed to not screw up an Inception homage which offered up a few more natural choices to host the Oscars.

Despite the fact that Hollywood self-congratulated in a way that was mostly in line with critical opinion, there was one gross injustice.  How the hell did the Tron Legacy soundtrack not get a nomination for best original score?  Did anybody on the academy even listen to that CD?  That one song, De-Rezzed, makes me want to get in a Frisbee fight deathmatch.  I can understand why Inception didn’t get best score; the academy didn’t want to give a statue to a soundtrack full of BWAGNGGGGGGGGGGGGG.  Still, considering the soundtrack’s commercial success would a token nomination for Daft Punk really have been that hard?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is your geek news for February 28th 2011.  Force be with you.


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Movie Review/Rant: The Plot Holes of Tron Legacy

By
Adam Shaftoe
– January 1, 2011Posted in: Movie Reviews, Rants

The more I listen to Daft Punk’s awesome Tron Legacy soundtrack, the more I find myself thinking about how I could drive a Recognizer through some of the movie’s plot holes.  For brevity’s sake, I didn’t bother to mention these plot holes in my initial review.  Also, I’m not sure how much of this evaluation is tainted by fanboy outrage.  Nevertheless, I have assembled eight significant problems with Tron Legacy.

*Serious and unrepentant spoilers ahead*

1 – Why doesn’t everybody look like Jeff Bridges?

The original Tron movie showed us that there is a spiritual relationship between users and their programs.  The old man who founded Encom stated that a user’s spirit is imbued within their programs.  The nature of this relationship is demonstrated as we see the original CLU looking like young Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), Tron bearing a striking resemblance to Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) and Yori as a digital doppelganger for Lori Baines (Cindy Morgan).  Hell even Sark, the MCP’s bad-ass digital Smithers, seems to be created in the image of Ed Dillinger (David Warner  – that’s right David Warner, I remember you were in Tron.  Just like I remember Christopher Plummer as a Klingon in Star Trek 6).  Tron: Legacy shows the same thing in that new CLU is a digital copy of young Kevin Flynn.  This seems fine and dandy until Flynn states that CLU can’t make new programs, only repurpose existing ones.  Flynn also tells us that nobody else knew about The Grid.  Thus, there is no way that all the other programs on The Grid are anything other than Kevin Flynn creations.   So why the hell don’t all of the programs look like Flynn?  For a moment, let’s suppose Flynn has ability to create any sort of program that he wants, as well as the artistic ability to build millions of unique human forms.  That brings me to my next point.

2 – Where is Flynn’s “user magic”?

During Flynn’s first foray into the digital world he demonstrated some impressive “user magic”.  Flynn seemingly uses the force to rebuild a Recognizer and even turns his body into a conduit between two beams of energy.  If Flynn could do that in the Encom mainframe and if Flynn is godlike enough to create millions of programs outside of his own image, then why the hell can’t he fire lighting out of his fingers Emperor Palpatine style?  Too dramatic?  Let’s try something a little more down to Earth; why can’t Flynn hack the system from the inside?  Or why can’t Flynn write an army of kill-bot programs to overthrow CLU and his goons?

3 – What’s up with dinner time?

Let’s assume for a moment that food on The Grid is an avatar for electrical energy.  If that is the case, Grid food is subject to the laws of energy conservation.  That means that the food can’t simply grow, it has to come from somewhere.  You’d think that a dictator like CLU would have some way of tracking stray resources within his “perfect system”.  Also, if we consider that Flynn said one minute in The Grid was an hour in the real world (If you do the math that means one day in The Grid is sixty days in the real world and thus making Flynn about 1200 years old) he could have been up there for centuries leeching system resources without CLU noticing.

4 – Nightclubs?

So CLU wanted to create a perfect system.  If you ask me, a perfect system is an efficient system.  So why create a society where your programs have so much downtime as to necessitate nightclubs?

5 – Seriously, Nightclubs?

We all know that the nightclubs are driven by overpriced drinks and sexual energy.  The same holds true in The Grid.  Within the walls of the End of Line club, we see CLU’s security programs distracted by sexy vixen programs.  But if programs can’t make other programs then what the hell is the point of a program having a sex drive let alone sex organs?

6 – Why can’t shit work off the game grid?

Lightcycles won’t work off the game grid even though Lightjets will and they both seem to come from the same stick that one wears on their upper thigh.  Don’t even get me started on how CLU couldn’t track Sam and Quorra back to the mountains but they somehow could trace the path that Sam took into the city on Flynn’s retro Lightcycle.

7 – He’s a program, just make a few copies…

Tron is supposed to be the most righteously awesome security program in cyberspace.  He’s so awesome that Flynn brings him over from the Encom mainframe to The Grid.  Because Tron is a program you can do fun things to him in the real world, like copy him or create a back-up version.  Why wouldn’t Flynn copy him ten thousand times to create the most loyal police force ever imagined.  Or if we don’t want to turn Tron into Agent Smith, why not keep a back-up or “legacy” copy of Tron stored somewhere, just in case of an emergency.  But no, we don’t do that.  We have Tron get ganked by a few of CLU’s goons in a crappy greyscale-as-to-save-budget scene so that Bruce Boxleitner’s role in the movie is minimized to a bit part, despite portraying the eponymous character.   Okay, this one is not so much a plot hole as a script revision.

8 – Rinzler’s identity crisis?

What the hell is with Tron/Rinzler’s identity crisis.  At the most convenient plot point possible, Rinzler remembers that he is in fact Tron and not the mindless growling enforcer Rinzler.  One contrived backstab of CLU later, Rinzler plummets to his death like a good self-sacrificing hero.  As he sinks to the bottom of the Sea of Simulations he shifts colour from red to blue.  Aww, isn’t it nice when the hero is so very obviously redeemed?  Sure, except for when it doesn’t make even an ounce of fucking sense.  If a file is corrupted, it is corrupted.  It can’t magically un-corrupt itself and go back to normal.  You have to delete corrupted files and start over again.

“But, Adam,” some nerd whines from the peanut gallery.  “When Rinzler saw Flynn it triggered his memories and he rebooted himself.”

Okay, I might be able to buy that weak sauce excuse if Flynn had got his hands on Rinzler’s disc and reprogrammed him like he did when Quorra’s arm got lopped off.  Any other alternative explanations necessarily involve some sort of Jedi mind trick against Tron/Rinzler and given Flynn’s otherwise absent “user magic”, I’m not going to buy it.

Why, Disney?  Why couldn’t you just let me like the movie?  Why did you have to make me use my brain despite my best efforts to enjoy the ride?

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Movie Review: Tron Legacy

By
Adam Shaftoe
– December 19, 2010Posted in: Movie Reviews, Watched with girlfriend

Summary Judgement:  Twenty years ago I would have loved this movie.  Eight months shy of thirty, I find Tron: Legacy to be an acceptable action picture, but not much else.

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, James Frain, Garrett Hedlund, Michael Sheen and Olivia Wilde

Directed by: Joseph Kosinski

Perhaps marking three score of undergraduate exams in the last three days has liquefied my brain to stale tapioca, but I didn’t hate Tron: Legacy.  That isn’t to say that it is a good movie, per se.  Were I god-emperor of entertainment, I would change a great many things about Tron.  First, I would balance out the Bridges to Boxleitner ratio a little more evenly.  Then, I would teach the writing team that it is okay to let the images tell the story, rather than making the dialogue chock-a-block full of exposition.  Despite these and other flaws, I still found Tron: Legacy a passable action movie/sequel.  I mean, it’s not like we’re dealing with The Phantom Menace or Robocop 3. The simple fact is that Tron: Legacy is too average to do anything to my childhood memories of light cycles and the ring game.

*Minor Spoilers Ahead*

Tron: Legacy is a story about a world built inside of a computer.  Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) creates this world after he’s digitized into his former employer’s mainframe during the original Tron movie.  This virtual world, known as The Grid, was to be a place of perfection and equity between people and their programs.  To help build this world, Flynn created a program in his own image called CLU (CGI Jeff Bridges).  CLU, however, interprets his directive to create the perfect system a little too literally and starts purging all imperfections.  These imperfections include a group of programs who spontaneously appear on The Grid and, for some reason that I didn’t quite understand, hold the key to humanity’s future.  Skip ahead in the story and Flynn’s spoiled brat of a trust fund offspring Sam (Garrett Hedlund) gets digitized into The Grid when CLU, who has turned himself into the Mr. Burns of cyberspace, sent a pager message to Kevin Flynn’s trusted friend and colleague Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner).  While this works without painfully taxing the part of my neo-cortex that manages suspended disbelief, it could have worked better if there was even an ounce of nuance in the storytelling.

I suppose there’s nothing wrong with  CLU being so megalomaniacal that you might mistake him for a 1930s European dictator, especially when other characters start talking about his purges and his “Black Guard”.  It even fits with established canon because it’s not like the MCP from the original movie was up there with Shakespeare’s Iago in the playbook of complex antagonists.  Similarly, I can’t find fault with programs dropping to their knees when they see Kevin “The Creator” Flynn lay some hurt upon CLU’s security goons.  I mean he made The Grid and probably everything in it, so that likely makes him  akin to The Dude God.  Then there are all the references to Steve Jobs in the form of Kevin Flynn’s trade shows or the exorbitant pricing of Encom’s OS 12 when the only innovation is putting the number 12 on the box.  My issue is that where the original Tron nudged me in the elbow and asked, “hey, did you get that reference to technology or religion that we just made?”  Legacy has sexy ladies in glowing spandex slap me in the face with a hot skillet before asking me if I want some more.

Granted an action movie can sometimes get away with such heavy handedness, an unfortunate side effect of Tron’s aversion to subtlety is that most of the characters come off as horribly one-dimensional archetypes.  Kevin Flynn is The Dude the wise master Jedi.  Sam Flynn is the spoiled rich kid with a heart of gold.  Quorra (Olivia Wilde) while not a bimbo, is indeed a token female character who will likely end up having sex with Sam.   CLU is Hans Gruber.  Jarvis (James Frain) is CLU’s Wayland Smithers.  Occasionally the movie attempts to add some depth to the characters.  One such example sees Sam and Quorra leafing through Kevin Flynn’s library and name-dropping nineteenth century writers like insecure English lit students.  But rather than offer character depth, this struck me as an attempt to show the audience that one of the writers watches Frasier on a regular basis.  Despite all this, I still didn’t hate the movie.

So what the hell is wrong with me?  Am I blinded by nostalgia?  Normally, cookie cutter characters and a predilection to exposition would motivate me to cut a movie up like a civil war barber-surgeon in the aftermath of Gettysburg.   Strangely enough, I think the movie’s biggest flaws are working together in a very weird way to keep the movie above water; the movie follows the action film formula (exposition, introduction, petit conflict, relaxation, escalation, deus ex machina, resolution) so perfectly and uses well-established action hero archetypes so effectively that it becomes a triumph of mediocrity.  Tron: Legacy is a safe movie for Disney precisely because it is so firmly entrenched inside the box.  Even the shiny visuals don’t really do anything new thanks to James Cameron and his movie that shall not be named.  The only genuinely good thing about this movie is Daft Punk’s soundtrack – which I listened to while I wrote this review.  Actually, there are two good things, Daft Punk and Toby Turner’s literal trailer.

While the first Tron was hardly Citizen Kane, at least it offered the audience something new.  Tron: Legacy offers the audience something utterly familiar, but perfectly adheres to the conventions of popular narrative.  In short, I don’t hate the movie because the story, uninspired as it may be, was well told for the masses.  Tron: Legacy connects to that part of my brain that seeks entertainment without critical thought.  Granted, that didn’t stop me from filling my yellow legal pad with the movie’s plot holes as I knocked back a few post-movie pints.  Still, credit where credit is due for getting one past my ninja-like impulse to eviscerate bad movies.

Tron: Legacy might have avoided my hatred, but that does not stop me from branding it as a mostly thoughtless action movie that lacks any of the charm, subtlety or novelty of the first film.  If you love the original, you can watch this sequel without fearing for your precious childhood memories.  End of line.

Overall Score: 0

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