Tron legacy movie video clip

The idea to make a sequel to the 1982 movie Tron—which was a hit neither with most critics nor with the public and which has amassed, at best, a campy cult following among a niche of gamers and sci-fi fans—is an arrogant overestimation of the original's value. The grandiose hype for Tron: Legacy (Disney Pictures) reminds me of those Manhattan "vintage" stores that try to trick you into paying $120 for a stained raincoat because, hey, it's old! Well, no, I don't want an expensive old raincoat that was unremarkable the first time around, nor do I want an expensive ($170 million) remodel of a 28-year-old matinee flick that was forgotten for a reason.

 

Tron legacy cast and crew

Directed by
Joseph Kosinski



Jeff Bridges

Garrett Hedlund

Olivia Wilde

Bruce Boxleitner

James Frain

Beau Garrett

Michael Sheen

Anis Cheurfa

Serinda Swan


Yaya Alafia

Elizabeth Mathis

Kis Yurij

Conrad Coates

Tron legacy movie images

Tron legacy movie overview

The idea to make a sequel to the 1982 movie Tron—which was a hit neither with most critics nor with the public and which has amassed, at best, a campy cult following among a niche of gamers and sci-fi fans—is an arrogant overestimation of the original's value. The grandiose hype for Tron: Legacy (Disney Pictures) reminds me of those Manhattan "vintage" stores that try to trick you into paying $120 for a stained raincoat because, hey, it's old! Well, no, I don't want an expensive old raincoat that was unremarkable the first time around, nor do I want an expensive ($170 million) remodel of a 28-year-old matinee flick that was forgotten for a reason.
Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is the now-grown son of computer visionary Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), who disappeared years before in the midst of working on a mysterious breakthrough in digital technology. While poking around his father's abandoned video-game arcade—a fun set that should have been put to more extensive use—Sam finds himself transported through some kind of cosmic wormhole into an all-digital alternate universe where, it turns out, Kevin Flynn has been trapped all these years. This universe is a dark, featureless place peopled by artificially-created beings in black suits with neon piping, who spend their days watching gladiatorial motorcycle fights and deadly games of Glo-Frisbee. Their dictatorial ruler, Clu, is played by some amalgam of present-day Jeff Bridges and his CGI-youthened face and body. Unlike many critics who found this technology visually creepy, I was actually pretty impressed by the film's ability to conjure a young Jeff Bridges—even when Clu was interacting with flesh-and-blood characters, his face looked surprisingly realistic and expressive. I just wish he had something notable to express.
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So father and son are reunited in Kevin's alternate-universe apartment, which looks like the white room from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, redecorated by Charles and Ray Eames. (Another nifty set, by the way; when Tron: Legacy isn't submerging us in boring green-striped blackness, it gets high marks for production design.) Young Sam also meets the latex-catsuit-clad Quorra (Olivia Wilde), the last survivor of a super-race of digital beings who were killed off by the evil Clu. Sensing that the arrival of this outsider threatens his empire with extinction, Clu institutes a repressive crackdown. Quorra, Sam, and Kevin join forces to make it back to the wormhole between the two worlds before Clu manages to get through it himself and wreak havoc in the "real," neon-piping-free world. When they reach the portal, Kevin and his self-created avatar face off in a confrontation that's disappointingly similar to any action-movie climax. Did we endure all that blather about the "digital frontier" to watch two guys slug it out on a ledge?

So, does everything about Tron: Legacy completely lack? A lot of people are praising this movie's Daft Punk soundtrack, and it might sound cool on its own, through headphones, but I experienced it mostly as very, very loud and unrelenting ambient noise. Bridges gets a couple of laughs riffing on his Big Lebowski persona of enlightened stonerhood ("You're messing with my Zen thing, man," he warns his excitable son). And Michael Sheen minces through an enjoyably campy scene or two as a fey villain who seems inspired by David Bowie's Thin White Duke persona. But the rest of the performances range from unremarkable (Wilde) to laughably bad. (Especially Hedlund, who resembles Hayden Christensen but lacks even one convincing facial expression—Christensen at least has the scowl.) Tron: Legacy is the kind of sensory-onslaught blockbuster that tends to put me to sleep, the way babies will nap to block out overwhelming stimuli. I confess I may have snoozed through one or two climactic battles only to be startled awake by an incoming neon Frisbee.

Tron legacy movie review

If you were born around 1970 and grew up sporting a Casio digital watch, totally rocking Ms. Pac-Man and all but sleeping with your Commodore 64, you remember “Tron.”
That was the 1982 Disney film that had games guru Jeff Bridges “digitized” and trapped inside a computer — where he explored cyber-reality and had dangerous neon Frisbee fights.
Although all that was pretty cool if you were an 11-year-old geek, the movie was not a hit with the masses. But this is now 2010, and the geeks have inherited the earth.
So here comes an enormous, expensive, belated sequel, “TRON: Legacy,” to warm your memory chips. (Although, good luck finding the original — it’s oddly unavailable on DVD, suggesting the studio doesn’t want you drawing any unflattering comparisons).
And, admitted, the new “TRON” looks great. Tricked out in IMAX and 3D, it’s a trippy fun-ride. Diagrams turn into objects and objects disintegrate into glittering shards; the depth illusion isn’t used merely to make things come at you, but to have characters slip in and out of different levels. It’s yet another step forward for 3D and computer-generated effects.
 Directed by Joseph Kosinski. With Garrett Hedlund, Jeff Bridges, Olivia Wilde. Now playing in New Jersey.

For human-generated effects … er, not so much.
The story has Sam, the grown son of the first film’s Kevin Flynn, entering his dad’s bizarro computer world. There, he finds his missing father in two versions — his own aged self and Clu, an evil, eternally youthful, completely computerized version.
But Garrett Hedlund, who plays Sam, may be the least exciting young actor in a sci-fi epic since Hayden Christensen in “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones.” And the digitally created Clu — played by a digitally enhanced Jeff Bridges — looks like a Macy’s mannequin. Bridges is a lot more fun as the older version, partly because he looks like himself. Also because the character has been conceived as a sort of burned-out mystic, padding around in yoga pants and telling someone off with an angry “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man!”
Yes, it’s the byte Lebowski.
But Hedlund is still a pretty-boy bore (the only unintentionally amusing thing about his character is that the script — from the perpetually trademark-obsessed Disney empire — presents his copyrights-be-damned hacking as heroic). The only interesting thing about his love interest, Olivia Wilde, is her asymmetrical haircut.
Meanwhile, unlike “Inception,” which made you work for your fun, the muddled script just makes you work. Kevin’s occasional unearthly powers, an oddly campy “program” who runs a nightclub, a genocidal war against a race of living algorithms — this is a story fueled not so much by ideas, as by ideas for ideas.
Perhaps all this is enough to rekindle some fond memories in nostalgic nerds. And it is genuinely exciting to see where this brave new world of CGI and 3D is leading. But on the whole, this isn’t really much of a legacy — or even as much fun as a round of Space Invaders.