I was 12 when the first TRON movie came out – which as far as I can tell was the intended demographic for the movie.

I was so impressed with the then-unbelievable graphics (“Hey, how come you can’t see the pixels?”) that I ran out of the cinema and back around the front to buy another ticket for the following day.

So I was kinda-excited to see that Disney were going to reactivate the franchise with a new movie this year.

Spoilers Ahead

I got a ticket to the IMAX 3D version, which as a format is always impressive – but after about 30 minutes I began to get the sinking feeling that something was wrong with this movie. When I think about all the things they could have done – Facebook, Twitter, Spam Email… The list goes on and on.

I thought we were being set up for this with the introductory sequence about ENCOM 12’s potential worldwide market, but alas it was not to be. As far as I can tell all the action took place in a dusty old “mainframe” in the back of a video arcade.

The plot seemed to be incomprehensible – mixing religion and first person shooters – but then so was the first movie, so no real problem with that.

Maybe we’ve all become way too savvy about the inner workings of computers, but the world of TRON : Legacy no longer seemed representative of a “computer” environment. The video game TRON 2.0 did a great job of this – moving from different devices, setting “jumpers” and overclocking a CPU all added to create the illusion that this world was somehow inside the machine.

Anyway back to Legacy, my top 10 list of personal gripes:

Grid world too real – would have preferred a completely rendered world – including all the programs, save maybe Flynn 1 + 2. (Could have saved some money with Clu2, and hired more writers…) Token British villain – check. utterly pointless “cameo” by Martin Sheen Recognizers don’t need engines, the first ones came from a game – hence the funky noise, but these didn’t (AFAIK) so the only engines they need are these : y=y+n; Ditto Light Cycles. What was the point of building the fastest cycle on the grid, just to mosey-on-downtown in it, then forget about it? And while we’re on it – if you make lightcycles operate in 3D, and curve and bank gently, it weakens the challenge of the game. if (Cycle.TurnRight && y_vel = 0) { y_vel = x_vel; x_vel = 0;} // DO NOT REMOVE No David Warner (my British villain of choice) – just his Cillian Murphy look-a-like of a son. The shameless TRON 3.0 setup. What the *flip* do ISOs actually do? OK so this thing kind of worked in Pulp Fiction / Ronin – but a little more work on the plot, please.

I postulate (like Walter Bishop does) that the ISO’s were the first glimpse of true AI, and so would probably accelerate technological development towards a “singularity” [Until they decide they don’t need us any more – but that’s a whole different franchise – Ed]

To provide some balance, here are my 5 favourite bits:

The big door – ok the first references to the original movie were cool, but they soon got old. The slo-mo, jump-in-the-air, breaking-the-rod, lightcycle-res-up thingy. The Wardrobe Fembots – nice bit of coordinated walking in insanely high heels WarGames reference Daft Punk

For me, this updated computer world was just too tangible and real. What made the original TRON fun was that its world could be affected and controlled with abstract computer operations. This is what gave the ‘users’ their power – they knew about the wiring under the board.

The world of TRON : Legacy was just too close to our own.

All things considered, I think South Park did it better…

Yahtzee.