Tron: Legacy

I'm still chasing down films nominated for Oscars in the last go-round, and I'm down to just a few. I can cross of the list Tron: Legacy, which was nominated for Best Sound Editing.

I have not seen the original Tron, but I'm old enough to have played the arcade game in the basement of my college's student union. I didn't care for the game much, preferring Mousetrap and Berserker. But I take it that it was about a video-game creator who somehow launched himself into his digital world, and the exposition laid out by the bushel full in the sequel covers any information I might have missed.

In this second film, we learn that the hero of the first film, Jeff Bridges, has gone missing. His son (Garret Hedlund) is the largest shareholder of his father's now huge corporation, but he mostly just goofs off and rides his motorcycle dangerously. When his father's trusted friend (Bruce Boxleitner, who played Tron in the original film) says that he got a text from his father's old arcade, which has been shut down for twenty years, Hedlund investigates.

One of the first signs that I knew this film didn't really concern itself with details was when the abandoned arcade came to life when Hedlund through the switch in the fuse box. Just who was paying the electric bill all that time? In about two minutes he finds his father's secret office, and in another two minutes manages to type in the code in a computer that zaps him into "the Grid," the world of his father's creation. He's mistaken for just another program, an army of PVC-wearing drones, and put in a fighting arena. But when he bleeds, he's outed as a "user," and brought before the leader.

The leader, CLU, looks just like Jeff Bridges from thirty years ago, in a process that is slightly creepy. He's the bad guy, for he was programmed to create a perfect world, and took his orders so seriously that he purged anything that was imperfect, including a synthetic life form that sprung to life parthenogenetically. The real Bridges headed out in the wilderness to live a Zen existence with Olivia Wilde, the last of that life form, who wears her jumpsuit like it was painted on and is one of the best reasons to watch this film.

Father and son team up to get out of the Grid so they can deprogram CLU, and there's lots of chasing and fighting and mumbo jumbo computer talk that doesn't make much sense. There are allusions to fascist ideology, as when CLU addresses his army of programs like Hitler at Munich, and to Frankenstein, as Bridges must confront and destroy his creation.

The film, directed by Joseph Kosinski, is certainly technically expert, particularly a motorcycle chase through a series of levels. But the plot is so preposterous and ham-fisted that it's difficult to care what happens.