TRON: Legacy (2010)

In the 28 years since the original Tron movie, there have been, oh, a few innovations in the world of computers, networks, electronics, and communications. But somehow, the makers of this sequel seem to have missed inventions such as "The World Wide Web". They passed on a tremendous opportunity to make "Tron Legacy" as innovative and powerful as the original. Instead, they've merely sullied our memories by reducing what was a tremendous and ominous world into the digital equivalent of Smalltown, USA.

In 1982, few people had computers, far fewer had even heard of computer networks, and hardly anyone outside the military had heard of "the internet." The creators of the original movie crafted an entire alternate plane of existence, accessible only to computer programmers, in a time when the words "virtual" and "reality" both still meant "true." Their inspired fantasy gave audiences an entirely new perspective on the nascent digital age.

The original's bold, limitless universe, is limited in the sequel to "The Grid", a small city from which good guys escape from effortlessly, and from which bad guys seem to have no trouble leaving, though you're given the impression it never occurred to them to look beyond the borders of their extremely small town before. And the entire world is wholly disconnected from any computer system used by anyone on Earth. The only link to reality is the exact same machine hidden in a forgotten room. It's as if the film-makers hoped we'd forget that now, 30 years later, almost EVERYONE is on a computer network in one way or another.

The original Tron also created real tension by crafting a plot where what happened inside the system mattered. Even before the original Jeff Bridges character was sucked into the digital netherworld, the audience had a palpable sense of the impending doom to all humanity posed by the growing strength of the computer network. In this sequel, the "real-world" angle is a lame-duck corporation's unapologetically pathetic efforts at keeping market share. Even that side story introduced in the beginning, isn't given any relevance to anything that happens in the rest of the movie. The larger threat of a digital character emerging from "The Grid" into the real world is repeated throughout the film, but never in a credible way. Why should we be scared about him getting out? What would he do here? How would a computer program have any power outside a computer system?

There were endless ways the filmmakers could have used today's globally integrated technologies and on-line mania to make Tron Legacy as relevant as the original. The bad guys could have tried to empower Wii systems to control people instead of the other way around, or to animate an army of Second Life avatars, or to rewrite all of Wikipedia to brainwash every student in America, or to take control of every electronic device on Earth (think Y2K).

Tron Legacy has dazzling visual graphics, but it falls into that disappointing category of films that match astronomically high priced production values with cut-rate B-movie plots, acting, and character development. Saddest of all is that no one bothered to spend a dime of those hundreds of millions of dollars to follow the true legacy of Tron: to inspire us with the possibilities of where the next digital universe might take us.