Somewhere in Hollywood, I find myself wondering if there were some kind of cattle call put out for four people to show up, write a quarter of a movie script each, and then the whole thing would be filmed. The writers likely put up a bit of a protest, but they were whacked over the head with huge bags of money and then told, don’t worry, it would look so pretty that no one but the critics would care that the writing made absolutely no sense at all. The movie was Tron: Legacy, and I don’t know what’s worse: that this thing got made in the first place, or that it took four people to write it.
Tron: Legacy is the kind-of-sequel to the original Tron, joining Sam Flynn, a bitter, depressed computer geek who’s surprisingly pretty for a bitter, depressed computer geek. And don’t worry–this won’t be the last bizarre logic failure Tron: Legacy will throw out there. Sam’s been looking for his father for the last twenty years, and it helps that he’s now the majority shareholder of Encom, his father’s company, because now he has lots of free time on his hands to fix motorcycles, search for Daddy, and occasionally play pranks on Encom that probably should have destroyed them. Like, for example, releasing their latest operating system, free of charge, to the public, which probably should’ve cratered their stock value in seconds leaving them all penniless, but hey! Logic failure number two, I guess–don’t have a drinking game around all the plotholes because it’d probably kill you.
Anyway, Sam finds his dad’s old office under a long-shuttered arcade that still has working electricity but a disconnected phone line, and discovers the way into the Grid, the futuristic computer world of the original Tron. Interestingly, that’s exactly where Sam’s father is, but he’s also neck-deep in a world gone made as Clu from the original Tron has taken over in a bid to follow Kevin Flynn’s original program design of making the perfect system. Now, Sam’s got to get himself and his father back home, keep Clu from crossing over into the real world with his father’s identity disk, and also keep Quorra, the last of a kind of independently generated computer program from being snuffed out as well.
If you’re confused by that, don’t worry, because after seeing this drivel I think eighty percent of the point was to show off a bunch of pretty lights and colors to keep you distracted and comfortably numb against the fact that this movie made about as much sense as Microsoft’s annual report. Maybe I’m just missing something here, but so much of this movie is just a complete loss. I saw the original. Just a couple months ago, too. And I’m so abjectly lost in this movie that will explain nothing at all that I’m wondering if everyone else has no clue here either or it’s just me. And then, I watch the end credits, and I’m left to marvel at the fact that, somehow, this godawful extravaganza took four people to write it.
Make no mistake, though, Tron: Legacy is beautiful. It’s downright stunning in its way. Visually, I can’t remember the last time I saw something quite like this. But there is absolutely nothing in it. It’s an empty Armani, like light reflecting off snow, a beautiful suit with absolutely no substance whatsoever. The plot is a confused wreckage but the special effects are patently mindblowing.
And as we all know, a great script can save shoddy effects, but beautiful effects can never truly save a bad script. The best it can get is what the Screenhead Ten Scale hands out right now, a five out of ten. It’s beautiful, almost ethereal, but it can’t disguise the fact that there’s just nothing in there.
