There are good reasons for people to feel nostalgic about the 1982 live action-computer animation hybrid Tron. If you were a little kid when it came out, the spectacle of it might have dazzled you; if you were an older kid, of any age, the novelty of it might have mesmerized you. And from what I've seen, the imagery does look original for the movie's time. That's all the more reason for fans of Tron to feel cheated by the bloated, nonsensical, exhausting sequel that is Tron: Legacy. Even the name seems crass, as if some Disney marketing exec figured that all the studio had to do was slap "Legacy" at the end of the old title and the thing would be good to go.
Right here I must come clean and admit that I've never seen the original Tron. I'm a victim of the Great Tron Shortage of 2010: The DVD is out of print and much in demand, recently fetching upwards of $60 on eBay. A remastered Blu-ray is in the works, but it won't be available until 2011. And although my local rental joint has one copy, there was a waiting list for it, one that unfortunately stretched beyond my deadline.
I realize that to some of you, my lack of familiarity with Tron -- even though I made every effort to see it -- makes me unfit to walk the Earth, let alone bask in the miserable experience that is Tron: Legacy. On the other hand, going in cold has its advantages: It's the best way to tell whether a sequel can stand on its own or whether it demands an insider's knowledge and affection to make any kind of sense.
I certainly hope the latter is the case. Tron: Legacy is an ungodly mess that's great fun to look at for about 15 minutes and exhausting the rest of the time. As far as I can tell, here's what Tron: Legacy is about: The movie opens with a figure who looks a little like the young Jeff Bridges (at least as far as we can tell, from the clever one-quarter-profile shot), and sounds something like the current Jeff Bridges, telling his young son about some Utopia he's on the verge of discovering, or building. When we finally get a good look at the guy's face, we see that he actually does look something like the young Jeff Bridges -- except he appears to have been Animatronicized, or Robert Zemeckisized, or something, and his scarily youthful lips don't quite sync with what he's saying. This isn't Jeff Bridges as he once was -- this is Jeff Bridges as you'd never want to see him.
Bridges, reprising the role he played in the first movie, is Kevin Flynn, and he's about to make a big breakthrough having to do with "the grid" or something like that. Then he disappears. Flash-forward a bunch of years. His kid, Sam, is now grown, and he's being played by a boring actor, Garrett Hedlund. The little computer-game outfit Flynn used to run with his partner, Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner, who shows up looking, thank God, his actual age), is now a faceless conglomerate that won't give its software away for free. The script and story -- which have no fewer than six screenwriter pawmarks smudged all over them, although some of them belong to Steven Lisberger, who created the characters and directed the original -- briefly introduce a potentially boring open-source software debate. That unpromising thread is dropped, only to be replaced by a thread -- if you could call it that -- that's actually more boring.
Alan, summoned by a buzz on his good old pager (it ostensibly comes from the long-missing Flynn), brings Sam to his dad's old arcade. Shortly thereafter, Sam is scooped into a spacecraft that resembles a giant crab and is transported, along with a bunch of other poor slobs, to a shiny neon kingdom where they're forced to fight a series of opponents, gladiator-style, by flinging deadly neon Frisbees at one another.
Suddenly, Sam's dad appears, in the guise of Creepy-Young Jeff Bridges. But this CGI-Botox'ed creature is not really his dad -- it's Clu, Flynn's alter-ego gone bad. Clu wants to destroy Sam. But luckily, an adorable brunette pixie in a Louise Brooks hairdo (her name is Quorra, and she's played by Olivia Wilde -- she's the only character here who seems human, and she isn't even human!) shows up in her roadster-of-the-future just in time and whisks him away to see his real dad, the Thankfully-Old Jeff Bridges. The three of them sit around a big Plexiglass Louis XIV table with a papier-mâché roast pig plopped inexplicably in the middle, while Dad bores Son with a seemingly endless backstory about how fantastic Woodstock was. Or something.
And that's barely the beginning. There's more extraneous stuff, including a race of special individuals (known as "Isos") who have been wiped out by genocide, a giant glowing estrogen ring that gets screwed into one's back to help one do, well, something or other, and Michael Sheen camping it up in a David Bowie outfit.
Maybe all of that makes Tron: Legacy sound like the movie Burlesque should have been. If only! Impenetrable and repetitive, Tron: Legacy -- directed by first-timer Joseph Kosinski -- keeps introducing new characters, plot points and invented mythologies, possibly to distract us from the old characters, plot points and invented mythologies it never bothered to explain in the first place. Even Jeff Bridges doesn't really give a performance here. He shuffles around in his Issey Miyake-meets-Armani kimono suit, looking grizzled and amused while fondly recalling his hippie-programmer days in a laid-back drawl: "We were jamming, man -- building Utopia." What Bridges does here isn't acting; it's barely even Duding.
But, look: Movies aren't always "about" their plots, and a picture can sometimes carry you along on its visuals, or on a fantastic vibe of feeling, alone. So how does Tron: Legacy stack up in those terms? When Sam first appears in that bright, gleaming gaming universe, the whole shebang is actually rather shiny and seductive. (I saw it in IMAX 3-D, though I think I would have preferred the 2-D experience -- I find the murkiness of most 3-D exhausting.) The movie's retro-futuristic design is, when it's first shown to us, something to behold: Sam gets outfitted in a skintight neoprene unitard, his muscles defined by black-light stripes. During those gladiator fights, the unlucky souls who get zapped by those flying discs shatter into a million gleaming crystals, which shimmer in the air before falling away to nothing. In one of the movie's 1,001 chase sequences (an early one), the poor sods being pursued by Clu's baddies leap into the air, and as they do, cad/cam motorcycles miraculously appear between their thighs to spirit them away. That's computer-animation magic at its best, but it accounts for only a stingy portion of Tron: Legacy. There's no legacy to be found here; you'll be lucky if you even find a sequel.