Tron: Legacy

If you’re looking for an awesome, action-packed movie to see, Tron: Legacy is not it. Though the movie does indeed boast impressive visual effects, the storyline and acting in the film takes away from the overall effect.

The basic plot is simple enough. Famous video game creator Kevin Flynn leaves one night to go to work and never comes back. Most employees of his company figure that he’s just run away, but twenty years later, his son Sam is still hurting from his abandonment when he was just seven years old. Sam is now the majority stockholder in his father’s gaming company, but feeling unable to run it by himself, he has let others take over and run the company for him.

When his father’s original business partner Allen comes to Sam with important information, Sam pretends that he’s too busy to listen, but eventually goes to examine a mysterious page that his father has somehow sent Allen from his old office at Flynn’s Arcade.

After discovering his father’s secret office, Sam is somehow swept into a cyber world which he quickly figures out is actually the game, Tron, that his father created many years ago. As he begins to put the pieces together, he realizes that when his father was going to “work,” he was actually being swept into the world of the game.

After this point, the plot becomes more muddled than ever. Basically, Sam thinks that he meets his father, but it is really Clu, a video game character that his father created in his own image to help him build the world, but Clu has turned evil. Clu attempts to make Sam battle with other game creations, but because Sam is a “user,” not one of the games controlled pawns, he is able to escape.

Sam is eventually reunited with his father and Quorra, his father’s apprentice. His father explains that Clu will not let him leave and wants desperately to get into the human world. Sam, Kevin, and Quorra then embark on a race across the cyber world to try to get to the portal back to the human world before it closes up.

The creators of the film throw in random characters, plot details, and fantasy creations to try to disguise the fact that all this movie is is a chase across a neon world. The coolest part is probably when Sam first enters the game world and “goes to the grid,” meaning that he races motorcycle like vehicles around a stadium and he attempts to make his opponents crash into the neon trail that his motorcycle leaves behind.

While I recognize that Jeff Bridges is a talented actor, his talents are wasted on this film. It’s hard for the audience to get past the odd CGI version of him that’s meant to make him look younger, and the real character is not much better. The talents of young actors Garrett Hedlund (who plays Sam) and Olivia Wilde (who plays Quorra) are wasted as well with bad dialogue and a forced relationship.

Though this film was mildly entertaining, it was seriously lacking in many areas which took away from the overall impact that it had as a film. If based on the preview you think that you want to see this movie, I would suggest at least waiting until it’s on DVD.