Tron Legacy

Full disclosure:  I don't really remember the original Tron.  I was eight years old when it was released in 1982, and I remember that it looked really cool and that I really wanted to see it, but I never got there (ET, on the other hand, I saw three times that summer).  I finally got to check it out when it aired on HBO, but even by then the special effects looked pretty cheesy and I remember being so bored by it that I don't think I ever made it through the entire movie, and I haven't tried watching it again since.

Regardless, I did check out Tron Legacy in IMAX/3D, since, like its predecessor, it still did look really cool.  And the visuals were, particularly the lightcycles and the arena games where the 3D looked amazing. Unfortunately, I wish I could say the same for the story.  I figured since Disney seems to have hidden the DVD of the original film into some sort of home video witness protection program (the last release was in 2002 and it's gone MIA on Netflix) that it wouldn't matter that I hadn't seen the first movie in a long time.   Either it did matter or the story was just so lackluster that it just wasn't interesting enough to follow.

Tron Legacy is the story of Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), the son of Tron's genius video game designer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges).  Essentially orphaned after his father disappeared some 20 years earlier, Sam follows a mysterious page to his dad's old arcade one night and winds up being swept away into The Grid, a virtual world created by his father.  There, he's not only reunited with his long-lost dad, but he also confronts Clu (also Jeff Bridges) his father's genocidal virtual double gone bad, and Quorra (Olivia Wilde) a sentient computer program that Kevin has been protecting from Clu, who's planning to escape with all of his virtual badness through a portal into the real world.

Again, the special effects are really terrific.  When Sam first arrives in The Grid, he's captured and forced to participate in these gladiator-type games in a huge virtual arena.  It's one of the best sequences in the film, and if that had been the story and there had been more scenes like that I probably would have enjoyed the movie a lot more.  That stuff was much more fun.  Once Sam escapes off-Grid with Quorra it just became a not-particularly interesting sci-fi movie.  And I hate boring sci-fi.  It was great to see Jeff Bridges in the dual role as Kevin Flynn and de-aged to his 1982 self as Clu (although in a few shots he looked too much like a Polar Express character), but most of his scenes kept reminding me how much more excited I was for True Grit instead of this.  It was also nice to see Bruce Boxleitner reprise his role as Tron, but his character seemed totally shoehorned into the story.

It's a perfect movie for a 3D junkie (and I enjoy 3D when it's done right), but like the first movie, it suffers mostly from a lot of wasted potential.  Great visuals, but couldn't they have spent some of that budget on a better story?