A simulacrum of cool

Remember Light-Brite? It was a toy in the ‘70s where you made designs out of little multicolored pegs on the surface of a battery-lit box. We kids thought that was cool, until along came Tron in 1982. That was like watching a movie inside of a Light-Brite box: the story of Kevin Flynn, a games designer who is unwittingly “trapped in a world where love — and escape — do not compute…” (as the trailer tagline had it.)

Yet Tron didn’t set the box office on fire. It didn’t spawn a bunch of action figures or glowing Halloween costumes. The game franchise it was meant to launch didn’t topple Asteroids or Pacman or any other video arcade games out there. It sputtered, and was soon forgotten.

Yet geeks and Comic Con types still mutter in hushed tones about how light years ahead that Disney movie was in terms of special effects. It’s like the Zapruder film of geekism.

Those fan boys tend to forget how clunky the script and acting were, hampered by a Light-Brite design that mixed real characters and first-generation computer graphics. The music is dated too, but boy, the look of the film has been seared into most movie geeks’ collective memories. It truly was the first movie completely designed with computers.

…Excellent battle scenes in virtual reality are another.

Now (oddly, 28 years later; guess Disney doesn’t care for round figures) comes Tron: Legacy, a sequel set in the future where Flynn’s son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) is lured back into the Tron virtual world by what he thinks is a distress signal from his father (played by Jeff Bridges). There’s a brief bit showing Flynn’s company, ENCOM, being taken over by greedy board members who don’t want to give away software for free (Hello, Steve Jobs! Hello, Bill Gates!), but this intriguing subplot is abandoned once Sam wanders back into the old, boarded-up arcade once owned by his dad and finds a secret testing lab. There, he’s whisked into the world of The Grid, finds himself arrested and dressed for battle.

This is where Tron: Legacy really takes off. A quarter century after pioneering these special effects, the boys over at Disney have taken Tron’s potential and blasted it into brave new dimensions. It’s Light-Brite times infinity. As the disc battles commence, you keep going “Wow!” Then the next scene comes, where they slip onto souped-up virtual motorcycles, and you go “Whoa!” Then you see Olivia Wilde reclining on a sofa in leather boots, and you go “Whoo!”

But after a while, even a film as relentlessly cool as Tron: Legacy starts to show its nuts and bolts. The script — by Adam Horowitz and Eddie Kitsis — doesn’t exactly set the virtual world on fire. It’s the usual scenario: a rescue, an escape attempt, a sacrifice. Basically, a film such as Tron can only draw its inspiration from the gaming world; so a quest of sorts is what sets things in motion, just like in Donkey Kong or Mario Brothers. Along the way, not much time or virtual space is devoted to real character development or acting.

Couch tomato: Olivia Wilde lights up a sofa in Tron: Legacy.

Oh, thanks to CGI scanning, Jeff Bridges does get to do some interesting dual acting, playing himself and a 1982 version of his evil alter ego, Clu (you geeks will know what that acronym stands for; I don’t need to spell it out). His shaggier, present-day self manages to riff on his earlier Jeff Lebowski character from the Coens’ The Big Lebowski (“You’re messing with my Zen thing, here…”). But other than looking craggy, peering meaningfully and rueing the lost time with his son (hey, nobody forced you to get sucked into virtual reality, Dude), he doesn’t possess a lot of dimensionality as a character.

Son Sam is the typical Disney upstart, a cocky kid with some technical/acrobatic skills who, with the brashness of youth, insists the future is worth fighting for. Wilde, with her asymmetric bob, big eyes and leather ensemble, plays Quorra, a program designed by Flynn. Her acting skills match that of a computer.

Unfortunately, director Joseph Kosinski commits the movie to a blue-gray color scheme that is, like the recent Harry Potter movie, tiresome to look at after about 20 minutes. It’s up to British scene-stealer Michael Sheen to lift the lethargy by the middle of the film, as Sam and Quorra head into The Grid to retrieve, oh, something or other that will allow them to escape. Sheen does some shameless mugging, with his Ziggy Stardust mullet, air guitar antics, and Chaplinesque bits with a cane. Presumably he (along with Olivia Wilde’s outfit) is trying to supply the livewire energy that a special-effects movie often lacks, even in IMAX 3D.

With a budget of $170 million (yeah, you read that right), Tron: Legacy is definitely all about the details. But sometimes the devil is in the details, too: you can forget about more pressing matters, such as do we actually care about any of these characters? Not even Kevin Flynn was fleshed out enough in the original movie (Bridges hadn’t honed his acting skills back then) to really feel much for him here.

Get a Clu: Jeff Bridges plays Kevin Flynn and a computer program called Clu in Tron: Legacy.

Maybe some perspective is needed. If you take a step back, you come to realize that Tron: Legacy is largely about Disney’s hyping the mere existence of this sequel which has so many geek fans salivating. Like Inception and The Social Network, two very good, interesting and original films that perhaps garnered way too much attention and frothing fan reaction, Tron: Legacy is being liked for all the wrong reasons.

Like the Emperor’s New Clothes, if you take an objective look you realize there’s really not much “there” there, other than some incredible, bar-raising special effects that might influence the look of future movies. True, there are references aplenty to classic, ground-breaking sci-fi films in Tron: Legacy, as though director Kosinski wishes to place his film right up there in the pantheon alongside Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and The Matrix. But even if your Daft Punk soundtrack mimics Vangelis, your End of Line Club recalls the Milk Bar in Clockwork Orange, and your tubular aerial shuttle resembles the Discovery One ship from 2001 — and even if film geek fans know this and applaud this — it doesn’t automatically register you as a classic.

It might have been more interesting to show how the antics in The Grid affect or intersect with the real outside world, along with exploring our current relationship to the Internet and our obsessive entertainment choices. But that may be coming in Tron 3 (hopefully not 28 years from now).

Full disclosure: I fell asleep watching the first Tron, and I nodded out somewhere an hour into this sequel. I guess some things never change.