TRON LEGACY (2010)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, metaphysical*

I watched TRON LEGACY on DVD years ago, and retained no real memory of the story. This suggests to me that, because I wasn't intending to review the flick, I simply watched it without much critical attention. Now that I've given LEGACY such attention, I find it to be much better than the original.

In my review of TRON, I pointed out that for all its advances in CGI cinematic design, its SPARTACUS-derived plot was pretty simplistic. Software designer Kevin Flynn gets translated into the cyberspace of the system he co-created along with two other designers, and there he finds a conflict between programs who are "believers" in the extraneous "users" who made them, and programs who simply bend the knee to the tyranny of the Master Control Program.

Director Joseph Kosinski and his four scriptwriters improved on the original template in two ways. First, knowing that they could hardly be as radical as the first film was in terms of pure design, Kosinski et al did not seek to outdo TRON in terms of pure design, but instead made the cyber-world more fluid, more cinematic-- which was also easier in 2010, when one didn't have to worry about having actors walk around in suits that were going to be "lit up" later by computer animation. Second, Kosinski et al made the conflict much more personal by shifting the focus to the son of Kevin Flynn. And whereas Kevin's problem was entirely external-- what does he do in order to defeat the Master Control Program and the evil human who created it-- Sam Flynn's conundrum was more about how to cope with the disappearance of his father.

Four years after the events of TRON, Kevin (Jeff Bridges, repeating his original role) is seen bonding with his young son Sam, telling him about his great adventures in cyberspace. Then Kevin disappears, and for twenty years, no one knows what happened to him, not even his closest friend Alan (Bruce Boxleitner, also reprising his TRON character). The grownup Sam (Garrett Hedlund) does his best to emulate his father's belief in "free data" for all users, but deep down he's still motivated by the pain of losing his father, and not knowing whether or not Kevin may have deserted Sam and his (barely seen) mother.

Alan finds a clue to Kevin's disappearance and passes it on to Sam. The clue, however, is a piece of deception from the entity who entrapped Kevin, and that entity uses a digitizing laser to transport Sam into the cyberspace of the Grid, even as his father was transported twenty years ago. Like Kevin, Sam is almost immediately drafted to enter a series of gladiatorial games capable of annihilating the integrity of any program. The entity responsible for the transportation, though, does not recognize Sam's identity until Sam is struck by one of the discs used by the warrior-programs. (The flying discs, by the way, are much neater weapons than the rather oddball "jai alai" devices from the first film.)

When Sam meets the entity responsible for his abduction, he intially thinks it's Kevin himself, albeit preserved at the age he was when he disappeared. But it's not Kevin. The entity who sent Sam the clue is, fittingly enough, Clu, a reborn version of a Kevin-created program that perished in TRON (as in the first film, also played by Bridges, albeit with digital "makeup"). Clu has become the new lord of the Grid, and he means to use Sam to escape into the "user world."

Sam is saved from Clu, "the bad father," and taken to meet "the good father," for Kevin was also abducted into the cyberworld by Clu. Whereas in TRON Kevin received succor from Tron and Yori, two programs created by Kevin's human colleagues, Sam receives aid from both a new version of Tron (still essayed by Boxleitner) and a female program, Quorra (Olivia Wilde), who was like Clu created by Kevin. Kevin welcomes his son but explains that it will be difficult for them to return to the real world without giving Clu the chance to escape as well. And once this setup is done, we again get a lot of wild graphic battles between good programs and bad programs. There's far less emphasis of the "believer" trope seen in TRON, though in a sense Clu and Quorra duplicate the functions respectively of the infidel and the faithful believer. Surprisingly though, the story does not end with "God" returning to his "heavenly" realm. Kevin merges with his rebellious son to keep him in his cyber-purgatory, and the faithful "daughter" Quorra is rewarded with the chance to enter the real world with Sam.

I've seen an analysis comparing Quorra to Persephone, but that myth-trope, while possibly valid, didn't engage me as much as the alleged modeling of the female program on the historical Joan of Arc. It's at least of some sociological interest that the female lead of LEGACY is much more of an "action girl" than the female lead of TRON. At the same time, while there are no explicit romantic scenes between Sam and Quorra, it's hard not to see their mutual escape to Sam's world as a sort of hieros gamos between reality and cyberspace. Then again, in a symbolic sense Sam and Quorra are brother and sister, so maybe it's just as well that the writers didn't invoke that particular mythic LEGACY.