TRON: Legacy |
  • USA • 2010 • 125m •   • Directed by: Joseph Kosinski. • Starring: Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, Bruce Boxleitner, James Frain, Beau Garrett, Michael Sheen, Anis Cheurfa, Serinda Swan, Yaya DaCosta, Elizabeth Mathis, Kis Yurij, Conrad Coates. • Music by: Thomas Bangalter, Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo, Daft Punk.      Sam Flynn, the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn, looks into his father's disappearance and finds himself pulled into the same world of fierce programs and gladiatorial games where his father has been living for 20 years. Along with Kevin's loyal confidant Quorra, father and son embark on a life-and-death journey across a visually-stunning cyber universe that has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous. Meanwhile, the malevolent program CLU, who dominates the digital world, plans to invade the real world and will stop at nothing to prevent their escape.
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Joseph Kosinski's "Tron: Legacy" kills its predecessor's faith in the emancipatory power of technology. In Kosinski's hands, the franchise unintentionally becomes not only about a mankind stuck inside technology, but the tyranny of technology, its relentless spread, and the stranglehold of its supposed, "divine perfection". For Kosinski, all technology is warped by the body, and primarily repackages its wants, neuroses and failings. Technology may be transformative, but not necessarily positively so, so long as it is made in man's image.
And so "Legacy" finds Jeff Bridges (a Buddhist in real life) playing a Big Lebowski inspired Zen hero trapped in a cyber-landscape. Here he oscillates between inaction and actively standing up to a computer program called CLU. Like Genesis' Adam was created in God's image, CLU was created in Bridges' likeness, and was tasked with designing, constructing, populating and maintaining "The Grid" (a sort of digital "Eden"), a cyber-utopian dream project ("We built a system where all information was free and open, man!").
Unfortunately CLU finds himself needing to exert more and more control in his effort to forge "The Grid" into a utopia. It's the old notion that utopias always lead to dictatorship; that orchestrating "consistent, good behaviour" through various hierarchal arrangements is analogous to a soulless, fascistic, mechanical system with predictable results. Because of such thinking, the status quo, for all its inherent injustices, is always perceived as being far better than any deliberate attempt to create a more fair, egalitarian, and just society.
And so "The Grid" is portrayed, somewhat paradoxically, as a kind of totalitarian utopia. Its CGI landscapes are perfect, their renderings flawless, and yet everything remains resolutely dreary; Nazi chic meets "The Matrix". Thus, Bridges resolves to destroy The Grid. He does this by "merging" with CLU, his other half, leading to a system collapse which spits the film's heroes out of the machine and into the loving embrace of the "real" planet Earth, whose "flawed reality" is deemed oh so much better than a sexy, mediated, authoritarian virtual world. It's a bit like "Avatar", another zillion dollar big studio CGI laden movie which told us to "reconnect to nature".
Interestingly, Bridges' tactic to defeat CLU is "to do nothing" (what Buddhist's call "Wuwei": action through inaction). Meanwhile, CLU is Freud's classic neurotic (ie - neuroses stem from the need to exert controlorder; hence many artists are neurotic), determined to exert total, god-like control over every aspect of his little computer haven. CLU's quest for perfection itself mirrors CGI's quest to both perfectly capture reality, and then go beyond it. To offer hyper-reality. A reality better than reality.
To defeat totalitarianism, or the tyranny of technology, our heroes merge the extremes of both Bridges and CLU; a kind of mixture of inactionfreedomchaos and authoritarianismactionorder. This is too vague to have any real world relevance. Like most "cyberspace" movies, "Legacy" also remains stuck at the level of what Baudrillard called the second and third levels of simulacra, believing that clear, meaningful distinctions exist between "reality" and "the simulation"; that experiences "off the grid" are intrinsically "authentic".
Aesthetically, the film is gorgeous. Kosinski's a professor of architecture, and so he photographs spacesroomsstructures well. His lines are all clean, his camera work, shot flow, shot selection, framing and cutting super precise, and powerfully classical. There is a rare intelligence behind the film's shots and cuts. Kosinski's flow or rhythm of cuts - medium, long, close up, medium close etc - is also hyper textbook. Hitchcock or Depalma level. Powerful.
The film's script (somewhat derivative of the first film) is stripped of as much dialogue as possible, Kosinski telling his tale primarily with visuals and electronic music. Some of the first films to make heavy use of electro-scores were "Forbidden Planet" and "Clockwork Orange", the latter's score by Wendy Carlos, who also worked on "Tron 1". For "Legacy" Kosinski hires synth-band Daft Punk. Their score consists of powerful housedisco inspired simple 4, 3 or 2 beat rhythms, upon which other layers of sounds (and religious orchestrals) are progressively added. They also make heavy use of appoggiaturas, which musical psychologists essentially deem to be "the most effective type of music". This results in a "wall of sound" (think Vangelis, Philip Glass, Korzeniowski, New Order etc) which builds slowly but dramatically to a prolonged climax (a type of "glue" score which is slowly becoming a cliché as the shape and structure of action movies change; "Heat", "Kundun", Nolan etc). Because of this mounting, somber aesthetic, it is "Legacy's" moments of exposition and down time, rather than its big, generic, studio-forced (and often awful) action scenes, which create a buzz.
810 -' Will be mocked by many, even as it becomes a cult movie for a very specific type of aesthete.
Review by tieman64 from the Internet Movie Database.
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