Tron Legacy (2010)

Title, Year:  Tron Legacy (2010)

Director:  Joseph Kosinski

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Tron Legacy is one of the coolest movies I’ve ever seen.  It’s already a personal favorite of mine.  I grew up in the age of the blockbuster.  One of the first films I recall seeing in the theater was the rerelease of the original Star Wars.  I learned at an early age that movies could be transporting, huge spectacles of sound, sight, and emotion if done just right.  To me, Tron Legacy is done just right. 

The original Tron was a post-Star Wars attempt at bringing computer generated imagery into an epic format.  Tron turned out to be very limiting in its appeal and I recall it being the butt of more than a few jokes.   I’ll admit that I wasn’t overly thrilled when I first heard they were making a sequel (over 20 years later).  However, from the first trailer for Tron Legacy I was counting the days until this movie hit theaters. 

Tron Legacy contains a well thought out evolution of the story from the original.  It’s updated with modern pacing and makes the smart decision to create a father-son reunion to build the action around.  We find that Jeff Bridges character from the first film, Billy Flynn, vanished shortly after the first Tron left off, leaving behind a son, Sam, who is now grown.  Sam, who inherited the controlling stock interest of his dad’s company Encom, has become a misguided young man who performs acts of sabotage against the greedy corporate heads who are now in control.  I thought it was a very nice point to make Encom a future world Microsoft who dares to charge people for the latest version of their operating system.  It’s a nice wink to the Linux fans out there writing code and sharing updates for the benefit of a user community.  Flynn thinks the technology that makes people’s lives better should be free.  This is a philosophy that I found interesting to depict in a Disney film targeted to both geeks and families of geeks, and please don’t take this as an endorsement. 

That’s all I’ll say about the plot.  The meat of the movie is in the wonderful play of light, sound and very cool, heavily synthesized music provided by Daft Punk.  Everything blends so well together on screen.  The phrase “eye candy” is more than appropriate.  The movie should be watched on nothing less than Blu-Ray high definition to get the full effect.  The visual effects are a marvel to watch and certainly cutting edge.  The movie ends up coming off as The Matrix – lite.  Something you can bring your kids to and get a real kick out of yourself. 

Tron Legacy is a top notch production with state of the art technology pushing it to the highest levels of presentation.  It may not appeal to you, and you probably know before reading any review of a movie called Tron Legacy whether it has a shot or not, but I highly recommend it.