TRON LEGACY - IT'S JUST A GAME

Tron Legacy is upon us – the long-awaited, much lauded movie derived from the 1982 original feature. Disney are keen for all to note that this is not a remake and are foggy on even the word ‘sequel’. This is a stand-alone movie with connections to the original. It starts in 2D and finishes in 3D. For the un-initiated in the nerdy glasses, this might not be obvious. To the more technical minded, this switch is breathtaking.

Sam is the son of Kevin Flynn played by Jeff Bridges. The film begins with Sam as a young lad and a motion capture version of Jeff Bridges as a younger man in 1982. It’s a scene setting 20 minutes for those who are not acquainted with the original Tron movie. Flynn Senior has disappeared and his son is now a disgruntled and disaffected heir of his father’s company.

2D gives way to 3D as Sam finds himself on ‘The Grid’ searching for his missing father and finding a whole lot more in a cyber world that has run amok. A dazzling array of games are thrown in the mix with stunning CGI depicting laser Frisbee fights in transparent interlocking containers that rotate in gravity defying life or death combat.

It’s only when the light cycles roar into action that you realise that if ever a movie was made for 3D it was this one. You have to stop yourself flinching as the motorcyclist threatens to land in your lap. Hit the ribbon of light and smash yourself into a flying pile of pixels, clattering and jingling onto a perspex game grid. It becomes a hybrid game/movie – a new genre perhaps closer to machinema than probably the movie industry would care to admit.

Garrett Hedlund plays Sam and he carries the role well for a relative un-known. But it’s Bridges who gets to showcase his laconic style of acting to the full. With his slow drawl he chastises his son by saying “you’re messing with my Zen thing man” as they plan an escape from their entrapment in the grid. Olivia Wilde plays Quorra, the programme that Flynn has salvaged from the grip of his nemesis Clu. She’s a mixture of ‘Amelie’ meets Daryl Hannah’s ‘Pris” from Bladerunner – all wide eyes and kick-ass attitude. A notable performance from Martin Sheen as Castor/Zuse as he camps it up in a style more akin to Clockwork Orange. As Castor befriends Sam in The Grid’s version of a discotheque, the musicians who scored the music, Daft Punk, can be seen in the DJ booth blasting out their single ‘Derezzed’.

And what of Tron himself? Bruce Boxleitner returns to the movie as Alan Bradley/Tron and plays a relatively small but important part in the movie - a little disappointing that more isn’t made of the iconic character.

Word in the aisles is that other distributors pulled their movies out of the way of Tron Legacy for fear of a pounding at the box office on the run up to Christmas. In the land of geek it has been a long-awaited event and it will not disappoint in the visual department but may dip a little in the middle for some. Daft Punk’s Vangelis-type film score helps to lift the movie even higher and what we’re left with is a movie whose high points are marvellous – a technologically groundbreaking piece of cinema, but the establishing scene-setting and dips in the script can weight it back slightly.

4 out of 5 from this reviewer!

J@8pr