A great score, some bland nostalgia, and a dark prophecy.
Close your eyes duringTron: Legacyand you’re able to still see the movie it should have been.
Daft Punk’s soundtrack is, like, an okay Daft Punk album.
Credit: Disney
There were bad John Williams impressions, then bad Hans Zimmer impressions, and now bad Michael Giacchino impressions.
ForTron: Legacy, a couple French robots pretended they were writing symphonies for a lovelorn cyberpunk war disco.
Were they closing their eyes, too?
Hard to tell, they wear helmets.
On the all-time-great track “Recognizer,” strings tapdance across a roaring synth bass line.
The vibe is The Immortal Duel Between Analog and Virtual: actual instruments clashing then soaring with musical machines.
The opening minutes get it right, at least.
The Walt Disney Pictures logo appears, renderedTron-ish.
Strings flutter as the screen dissolves into a nighttime city street.
Audio and video tell a unified story: digital and analog, virtual reality becoming (conquering?)
“I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see,” Bridges explains.
“And then one day, I got in.”
The movie’s title appears, sort of.Tronis the only word we see.
Maybe that’s appropriate.
Ten years later,Tron: Legacyhas less of a legacy than the original film it worshipped.
There are eternal rumors about a follow-up.
It will happen, eventually, but the sun will also burn out eventually.
Disney just announced a thousand things, andTron 3wasn’t one of them.
CGI never really ages well.
The cheese has flavor, though.
It’s a movie star introduction, for an actor giving maybe the 27th best performance of his career.
InTron: Legacy, Bridges reappears in the prologue, set in 1989.
Something is wrong, and the movie doesn’t realize it.
Digital de-aging is a terrible invention for humanity, one thatLegacyinfamously doubles down on.
This new film dwindling in its first scene, andOlivia Wildewon’t appear for 45 minutes.
Almost 30 years of cult fandom is some kind of accomplishment.
The echo chamber of sequelization always requires extra chest beating.
“In there is our future!”
he declares at an ’80s version of a TED talk.
“In there is our destiny!”
Turning Flynn into, like, the Che Guevara version of Steve Jobs has some historical weight.
In the originalTron, Flynn was a brilliant creative nudged out of a company he built by monolithic suits.
The world will never feel that optimism again.
Sam Flynn becomes a man, and Hedlund never looks comfortable for a second.
The movie straitjackets him with daddy issues and the Disney version of rebellious daredevil-ism.
It’s a void performance, begging you to grab a controller that isn’t there.
He drives his dad’s motorcycle and might be wearing his dad’s leather jacket.
He sure doesn’t mind daddy’s money.
Here is how we meet this market-tested protagonist.
He speeds down a freeway, too fast for cops to catch him.
He hijacks ENCOM’s new product launch, a 10-figure heist at least.
And then he base-jumps off a skyscraper.
Police arrest him, and in the next scene he’s merrily strolling out of the police station.
What joy to live without consequences!
An archaic beeper call sends Sam back to his dad’s old arcade.
By 2010, Culver City was on its way to a high-price real estate renaissance.
Today,Amazon and Apple are carving it up.
YetLegacyrelocates the arcade to a broken-down corner of its nowhere city.
Forget the boarded up storefronts and the graffiti.
There aren’t even any people around; that would require too much imagination.
Did Joseph Kosinski even care about this part of the movie?
The plot and the fun aims toward the Grid, I know.
But if you might’t get the reality right, how good can your fantasy be?
The messages we’re being sent are incoherent, yet telling.
On one hand,Legacyneeds to build up its own legacy.
(His son’s opening heist posts ENCOM’s expensive new operating system online for free.)
His disappearance has bleached the world of color.
A resurrection is required, maybe even an urban renewal.
It’s also a company line almost every franchise would peddle in the 2010s.
What the hell happened to our movie heroes?
This trend ran alongside the vampiric vogue for pop culture icons with literal magic blood.
How many people inLoganare Wolverine’s illegitimate test-tube children?
All movies were sequels or adaptations, standing on the shoulders of giants they had to worship.
The grievance is complicated, yet by now eerily conventional: Why isn’tnowas fun as it wasthen?
There must have been something in the water; something very similar happens inLegacy.
Kevin comes gilded with cultural signifiers.
his house has the white-panel-floor Victorian austerity of2001’s climax.
He declares “The only way to win is not to play,” a near-quote ofWarGames.
Legacyshould obviously star Wilde.
A few years later, it would have.
This would not have fixed the movie, of course.
Daisy Ridley had to spend three movies getting oldsplained by the originalStar Warsactors.
We find out she loves reading, which matters less storywise than her martial arts background.
Hell, the originalTronwas colorful, whileLegacy’s desaturation never doesn’t feel like an advertising filter.
In the nightclub scene, Quorra gets knocked comatose.
So she’s unconscious for the big scene where the two heroic guys talk about how important she is.
See,Legacyreallyisabout legacy; dueling legacies.
Kevin’s son, Sam, wants to bring his father back to the world.
He’s a program built decades ago to design a perfect digital world.
He’s another digital native, really, without any of Quorra’s curiosity.
He doesn’t read old library books, or wonder what a sunshine looks like.
His version of perfection requires maximum efficiency.
His whole existence seems to be an act of brutal grievance.
And it takes forever, but when the film finally reveals his plan, it’s a doozy.
The prescience is uncanny.
“I will make their world open and available to all of us!”
“Out there is a new world!
Out there is our destiny!”
The meanings are all a bit jumbled here, inevitable from a franchise product killed by a thousand cuts.
Yet it all sets up a climax rife with unexpected meaning.
He sacrifices himself by re-absorbing Clu, removing the source of the toxicity by, well, removing himself.
The hero musical theme recurs with a horn section!
Her jazz is pure bio, no digital.
It’s a frail bit of hope, beamed forward from 10 bad years ago.
The real world is still here, even if only the algorithms are left to see it.
