There is a problem in robotics and computer animation called "the uncanny valley," and it goes something like this: There is a point at which the attempt to make a robot or a CGI person as realistic as possible will backfire and result in revulsion in actual humans. Eventually, the theory goes, we'll create something indistinguishable from a real person, but until then, we have a lot of being creeped out by the almost-lifelike to do.
It takes only one look at the terrifying, digitally de-aged Jeff Bridges as the evil program Clu (and a young, real-world Kevin Flynn) in "Tron: Legacy" to realize that the movie has built a summer home in the uncanny valley. And yet, this is the least of the problems, as motive, coherent plot and meaningful dialogue are sacrificed for a movie that's too busy admiring itself in the monitor to realize how boring it is.
We open at Flynn's home in 1989, as he tells his son Sam a bedtime story about "the grid," the vast fields of data that Flynn entered in the original "Tron." A model of an original light cycle sits on Sam's shelf, as do two figures involved in a disc battle. Wait, did Flynn market his trip into the computer? Or is it a secret that only he (and now, Sam) knows? This is never quite cleared up, as Flynn walks out on his son, never to return.
Cut to now. Sam (Garrett Hedlund) is the majority shareholder in his dad's company, Encom, content to do little but prank the suits who have taken it over and zip around the (rather gridlike) city on his dad's old Ducati. Flynn's old pal Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) shows up to tell Sam his long-lost dad just paged him (hah!) from a dormant line at Flynn's long-closed arcade.
Sam investigates and finds himself in a dazzling computer world - almost the same shade of green as "The Matrix," which dealt with all this in much savvier fashion - and starts looking for Dad.
And that's about it as far as coherence goes. This world is run by Clu (the CGI-de-aged Bridges), a Lex Luthor-ish program who wants to find the original Flynn and cross over to the real world for some reason or other. With the help of Quorra (Olivia Wilde, doing her best), Sam navigates this new world, playing the games fans expect (identity disc combat is more deadly! Light cycle races are multi-level!) and looking only slightly less bored than the audience.
Bridges (who has somehow aged in the grid?) plays Flynn as a cross between the Dude from "The Big Lebowski" and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and it's frustrating to see him struggle with the part. Bridges' greatest strength as a an actor is his gung-ho attitude. Even when he's in a bad movie, he's never the reason it's bad.
The 1982 "Tron" is a perfect example of this - Bridges embodied the sort of casual-cool nerd that much of the generation who built or refined the Internet aspired to be. But even he can't make chicken salad out of the quasi-Zen hooey he's given here.
From the hammy Michael Sheen (with Ziggy Stardust mullet) as the club-owner Castor to poor James Frain as Clu's aide Jarvis, "Tron: Legacy," helmed by first-time feature director Joseph Kosinski, takes skilled actors and gives them nothing meaningful to do. Let's not even discuss the indelicate homages to "Star Wars," "Batman Begins," "2001" and "Blade Runner."
How did we get here? "Tron" remains something of a cinematic black sheep, a Disney movie that didn't act like one and was largely panned at the time, yet beloved by thirtysomething dudes. Few people even owned personal computers, let alone knew how they worked, which helped the suspension of disbelief, especially if you were about eight at the time. What would a world inside a computer program actually look like? (It's worth noting that "Blade Runner" was released in 1982, while William Gibson was refining his notion of cyberspace while writing "Neuromancer" at the same time - this stuff was in the air.)
The iconic costumes and vehicles were designed by French comics artist Jean "Moebius" Giraud and legendary industrial conceptualist Syd Mead. Very little of "Tron" was computer-animated, so the world was given a strange tinting, as if a black and white movie had been colorized, then most of the color removed. "Tron" doesn't quite look like any movie before or since. Many a nose was smashed by a flying Frisbee in attempts to replicate the movie's disc-war game. The main allegory was subtly anxiety-producing: What if the "lives" that we spend playing a computer game were conscious beings?
As anyone looking at it recently has noticed, "Tron" was more fun to think about and look at than actually track as a story. Even at its best, the original's plot was muddled, and "Legacy" seems to double down on the vagaries, which is exactly the wrong way to go. Computing has evolved many generations since "Tron"; almost everyone is on the Internet on an hourly basis. Average users, as they say in "Tron," know far more about how computers work (or at least how they are supposed to work) than anyone 20 years ago.
Yet the vision of "Tron: Legacy" remains strangely retrograde, even in 3-D. Perhaps this is appropriate, given that this is a project that seemed to generate out of pure nostalgia and fan goodwill.
One suspects those fans will be especially disappointed to see it squandered so completely.
'Tron: Legacy'
Our grade: C-
Genre: Science Fiction
Running Time: 126 min
MPAA rating: PG
Release Date: Dec 17, 2010
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