My Thoughts on “Tron: Legacy”

 

(This is the poster for Tron: Legacy.)

I was hoping to get this out by the end of May, but depending on long it takes for me to finish it, I may end up having to post it in June. This might end up being my first post for the month instead of my review of Alien vs. Predator (2004). But, I’m going to try, I going to try to get this out before the month of May ends. I’ll try to keep it short like my review of A Working Man ♂︎ or my review of the first Tron. I would’ve posted this a lot of sooner, I would’ve watched this movie and wrote my review much earlier on in the week, but I ended up seeing A Working Man ♂︎ with my grandma, and I had to write a review of that real quick, and had to push this review back. I had to make room for my first new movie of 2025, as in a new release for the year, 2025. So far this year, I’ve just been reviewing older movies but A Working Man ♂︎ was the first 2025 movie I reviewed this year that was actually released this year. And it ended up being the first entry in my upcoming New Year’s Eve Recap. If you read my review of that earlier this week, you would know that I was still unsure whether or not I wanted to do another New Year’s Eve Recap give that I hadn’t seen any new movies in 2025 up until now. 

 

But, I wrote out an entry for A Working Man ♂︎, and I did decide to do a Recap for this year. I don’t know how many new movies I’ll end up seeing by the end of the year to add to my Recap but I will make one. It may end up being the shortest one I end up doing so far. Going to the movies is expensive now, and I always get preoccupied with other stuff that I end up not watching any of these new releases when they hit streaming or digital (as in, Fandango at Home), and I end up watching them the next year afterwards. That happened with Venom: The Last Dance, a movie I wanted to see in theaters but didn’t get the chance to, and it will happen with other movies from 2024 that I intend on reviewing. I already mentioned them in my review of A Working Man ♂︎, so I won’t repeat them here. You get the point. We’ll see if any of that happens with any of movies from this year, 2025, that I want to see. But, at least I got to see A Working Man ♂︎ before the year ended. At least, I achieved that. 

Right off the bat, the best thing by far about Tron: Legacy is the music by Daft Punk. Their work on this movie is nothing short of fantastic, it’s a testament to matching the right music artist to the right project. And because I watched the first one, I knew where some of the titles for two of the tracks came from, “Derezzed” and “End of Line.” They are of course not film composers by trade, this was the first movie they ever scored, and as far as I know, they haven’t scored a movie since this. The score for the upcoming Tron: Ares is being done by Nine Inch Nails (NIN) rather than Daft Punk since Daft Punk split up in the time in-between these two movies, so they couldn’t do the music for Ares like they did Legacy. It doesn’t always work out when a musician or band who normally doesn’t do film scores is brought in to score a film, but here it worked out. Perhaps a bit too good since there are some older Tron fans who dismiss this movie as nothing more than a Daft Punk music video, and prefer the game, Tron 2.0 instead. The Daft Punk thing isn’t the only reason they prefer 2.0 to Legacy, they also don’t really like it because they don’t like Legacy’s existence nullifies the game and pretty much renders it non-canon, and how the filmmakers involved with the movie refused to acknowledge the game’s existence after the film was released. 

 

 

 

 

(This is the cover art for Tron 2.0.)

 

 

 

I mentioned this in my review of the first Tron movie, but in the early 2000s, there was a Tron video game simply called Tron 2.0. It was a first person shooter game released on PC, Mac 🖥️, GameBoy Advance, and even XBox, and it sought to be the true sequel to the original Tron movie. However, because of this movie, the game is no longer canon…if it was ever considered canon. While these two pieces of media took vastly different approaches to modernizing Tron and bringing it into the 21st century and did it in two vastly different mediums (video games and movies), looking more into it, the game does share a lot of similarities with the movie. In that they’re both about the sons of the main characters from the original going into a virtual reality computer system themselves, Alan’s computer 🖥️ in 2.0 and the Grid in Legacy, usually to find their fathers or help their fathers in someway. The only difference is that Tron 2.0 focuses on the son of Alan Bradley (the character who Bruce Boxlietner played in the original and in this movie and game too), while Legacy focuses on the son of Kevin Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges both in the original movie and in this movie as well). 

 

The movie puts a lot of emphasis on Flynn, while it pushes Alan to the side mostly. Which I suppose isn’t too different to how it was in the original since it was only Kevin Flynn who went into the ENCOM Mainframe while Alan and Lora stayed behind in the real world and we don’t see them again until the very end, but they still had a presence throughout the story and still felt like main characters, mostly because the first half almost exclusively focuses on them, and they’re represented in the ENCOM Mainframe by their programs, Tron and Yori. Alan in this movie though, is just a side character who’s there to introduce Sam Flynn to this world, and tell him to go to his dad’s arcade after he receives a page from him 📟. A page 📟 that we later learn was actually from C.L.U. rather than Kevin Flynn. But, he doesn’t do anything else beyond that. He doesn’t get to meet Flynn again after these years, after his friend disappeared and got trapped in the Grid in 1989. It would’ve nice to have one reunion with him. 

 

I don’t even think he meets Quorra, or is even aware of her existence despite the fact that she came back through the portal with Sam. It’s also implied that Alan never had a son, and remained childless, which means 2.0 is definitely not canon. Lora is never brought up once in Legacy, and doesn’t return. I don’t know why since the actress that played her, Cindy Morgan was still alive when Legacy was made, and did provide her voice for 2.0. And it is very clear in the first movie that Alan was in love with her, as they were not only dating, their programs, Tron and Yori are also in love 🥰, but in the game, Alan literally creates an AI program that looks and sound exactly like her. You don’t do that unless you’re in love with someone ❤️, and yet, Alan had nothing to say about her in Tron: Legacy. Tron 2.0 is the completely opposite of this, where Kevin Flynn is the one who’s barely mentioned (if he’s even mentioned at all) and never actually appears, not even in voice clips in those email messages 📧 you can access throughout the game that fill in the gaps and tell the story outside of the cutscenes, like fleshing out the characters and explaining the events in-between the original film and this game. Jeff Bridges did not come back to reprise his role for the game, and probably wasn’t even asked to come back, just like how Cindy Morgan probably wasn’t asked to come back to reprise her role as Lora in Tron: Legacy. 

 

In a way, it’s sort of like how the Tremors franchise branched out and went in vastly different directions with different protagonists for each of them. With most of sequels and the 2003 TV series focusing on Burt Gummer and only featuring Burt Gummer as the only returning character from the first movie, with him being the only character who’s in all 8 films (yes, there are 8 of them) and played by the same actor, Michael Gross. And yet the second movie, Tremors 2: Aftershocks focused on Earl Bassett (played once again by Fred Ward) and Burt was just a side character in that just like he was in the first one, and then there was that pilot that was filmed for a new Tremors TV show on SyFy (the 2003 series was also on Sci-Fi back when it was still spelt like that and not with ys, which is the incorrect spelling for sci-fi since sci-fi is supposed to be science fiction shortened or abbreviated) that was going to feature Kevin Bacon reprising his role as Valentine “Val” McKee that was never aired and didn’t get picked up for a series. 

 

My guess as to why they chose to focus the movie so much more on Flynn is that Jeff Bridges is a much bigger and more bankable star than either Bruce Boxlietner or Cindy Morgan, they figured that people would be a lot more interested in the movie if Jeff Bridges was in it than if he wasn’t in it. Think of what happened to Independence Day: Resurgence when Will Smith chose not to come back and chose to do Suicide Squad (2016) instead. They also figured that Kevin Flynn was more of the main character in the first Tron movie and Alan and Lora were more supporting characters. Sure, they find him and they recruit him to try to hack into ENCOM’s system and get them Group 6 access, but once he gets digitized and sent to the Grid, they’re not in the movie anymore until the very end. We even meet Kevin Flynn before we meet Alan Bradley or Lora Baines. So, if you’re going to do a sequel, especially a legacy sequel, then you might as well center it around the son of the main character, the guy ♂︎ who had the majority of the screen time, and in Tron (1982), that was undoubtedly Jeff Bridges. 

The reasons for Alan’s son, Jethro “Jet” Bradley and Kevin’s son, Samuel “Sam” Flynn going into Alan’s computer or the Grid in both 2.0 and Legacy are vastly different. In 2.0, Jet is brought into his father’s computer by Ma3a, an artificial intelligence created by Alan in the image of Lora. It has her voice and her likeness, hence Cindy Morgan came back to do voice work for the game. The reason Ma3a gives for wanting Jet’s help is that she needs him to help her defeat J.D. Throne, a top executive at FCon (ENCOM no longer exists in the game’s universe, and has fully been taken over by a company called FCon, or Future Control Industries) who tried to digitize himself into Alan’s computer 🖥️, but got corrupted during the process and turned into a computer virus in the system. And also find out what happened to his father since he was kidnapped by the bad guys in the real world…I think, and is later brought into the computer world. 

 

I keep saying “computer 🖥️” because this game doesn’t take place in the Grid at all. Neither did the original movie. It’s a common misconception that the original 1982 movie took place in the Grid and the Grid was always a thing in the franchise, but it wasn’t. The Grid was a thing created specifically for Tron: Legacy and the Tron media that came afterwards. It was entirely Kevin’s invention, it was his pet project after he took over ENCOM. It’s not even technically called the Grid, it’s actually called the Tron system, the Grid is just one part of that system. A vast part, but still a part. But I’m mostly going to just calling it the Grid for most of this review unless it’s relevant for me to refer to as the Tron system, I mean everyone in the movie refers to it as the Grid. He built it along with C.L.U., with Tron providing security for the entire system. He essentially used Tron as an antivirus software within the Grid. The original movie took place in the ENCOM Mainframe (in Legacy, it’s just referred to as “the old system”), and then Tron 2.0 takes place mainly inside of Alan’s computer 🖥️ as well as parts of the ENCOM Mainframe I’m guessing, now the FCon Mainframe since ENCOM was bought out by FCon and effectively no longer exists as FCon renamed the company after themselves. 

 

While, in Legacy, the reason Sam goes into the Grid that Alan tells him that he received a page from Kevin, and to go his dad’s old arcade, and that’s where Sam stumbles upon his dad’s secret lab hidden by the Tron arcade machine, and gets digitized sent to the Grid by mistake. There’s no AI, there’s no corporate intrigue on the outside beyond what we see at the beginning. We do see Dillinger’s son in the movie, Edward Dillinger Jr., he’s played by Cillian Murphy (the same actor who played Dr. Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow in the Dark Knight movies and Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer). The conflict isn’t tied to anything happening in the real world like in the first movie or in 2.0. It’s like in that movie or that game where we’re seeing this corporate stuff taking on a computer scale, and playing out as a sci-fi epic in cyberspace. The only bad guy is the program known as C.L.U. and the only conflict is Sam trying to get back to the portal, hopefully with his dad, Kevin, and preventing C.L.U. from escaping into the real world and destroying in his endless pursuit of perfection. It’s the same type of plot we’ve seen blockbusters like this numerous times, it’s really nothing new. It’s actually similar to the plot of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania 🐜 or rather the plot of that movie is similar to the plot of this movie, except you know, this movie is actually good. 

 

There is one similarity that 2.0 and Legacy share beyond just the basic premise, and that’s the two sons in each story meet a female program ♀︎ and fall in love with them as they become their companion and partner and help them out in their respective journeys and missions. In 2.0, it’s a program named Mercury, while Legacy, it’s a program named Quorra. However, what makes these two programs different is that Quorra is special because she’s what is called an ISO (Isomorphic algorithm), a program that is not created by a human but rather emerged spontaneously within the system and evolved on their own. Her and the other ISOs are seen by Kevin as a new life form, a new species that should be studied and used to improve upon the real world. She becomes the key to everything in the film since she (and the other ISOs before they were wiped out by C.L.U.) have the power to change the world, science, technology, mathematics, religion, and even medicine since Kevin states their digital DNA 🧬 could be used to cure diseases. 2.0 also features a source code called “Tron Legacy” prominently and integral to the game’s story, so obviously that’s where they got the title for this movie. Makes it weird and more frustrating for fans of this game why the filmmakers involved in making the movie refused to acknowledge the game’s existence when asked about it and removed it from canon.

Those fans dislike Legacy because they feel that it strayed too far away from the original in terms of its aesthetic, while they prefer Tron 2.0 over Legacy for the reason that they felt that it stayed truer to the original in terms of the aesthetic as well as in terms of the lore and how the computer world works. For this reason, they see 2.0 as the real definitive sequel to the original Tron. This isn’t a majority opinion of course, it’s a very small minority opinion in a very small niche corner of the Tron fandom, which is already pretty small and niche. Tron isn’t exactly the most popular franchise out there. But it is still an opinion that’s out there, Legacy isn’t as universally loved by all the fans of Tron as you might think. 

 

And looking at the game, yeah, it does look a lot closer to the original Tron than Legacy does. It tries to maintain the same aesthetic and look as the original while Legacy goes in its own direction and goes about modernizing Tron in a different way than 2.0. The fans who do prefer 2.0 to Legacy say that the computer world in 2.0 looks more like an actual computer world, like the inside of a computer visually represented and personified (it looks like an actual grid in certain parts), whereas the Grid in Legacy looks more like a typical cyberpunk setting and doesn’t look at all like it’s in a computer. I guess it just depends on what you prefer, do you prefer the somewhat dated, bright, colorful, geometric and abstract look of the original and Tron 2.0 or do you prefer the more dark, monochromatic, clean, sleek, realistic cyberpunk look of Tron: Legacy, Tron: Evolution, Tron: Uprising, and Tron: Ares?

Where do I stand on the issue? Well, I can’t really speak on Tron 2.0 since I’ve never played it (I didn’t know it even existed until recently), and I haven’t watched any longplays of it and everything I know about comes from watching reviews of it on YouTube and reading the Wikipedia page about it, but I do like Tron: Legacy. I liked it a lot more rewatching it for this review than I did when I first saw it in theaters in 2010. I saw it as a kid, and I didn’t really care for it. I guess I just thought it was boring despite the cool visuals and great music, but rewatching it again, I actually really liked it. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it’s because I’m seeing it now through the lens of an adult, maybe it’s because I actually watched the original and actually understood what was going on and who these characters were, whatever it is, I enjoyed it a lot more than I did when I saw it in theaters as a kid. Not a bad feature film directorial debut for ol’ Mr. Joseph Kosinski. 

 

This wasn’t his directorial debut overall since he did direct commercials before this, but this was the first feature film he directed. He also had a background in architecture, which made him uniquely qualified to make this. It informed his decision on how to approach the world of Tron and redesign the world of the Grid. And he went onto have an amazing career, directing Oblivion with Tom Cruise, which is another movie I didn’t like when I originally saw it in theaters and plan on revisiting some day, and then directing Top Gun: Maverick, the legacy sequel to Top Gun, which grossed over a billion dollars 💵 at the worldwide box office, bringing the film industry out of the pandemic 😷🦠 and back to a place of normalcy and business as usual. At least until the SAG-AFTRA and Writer’s Guild of America 🇺🇸 strikes 🪧 in 2023. He’s got a new movie coming out called F1, which stars Brad Pitt and it’s about Formula One racing 🏎️. Not that interested in watching it, it’s not really my thing. It looks a lot like Neill Blomkamp’s movie from 2023 ironically enough, Gran Turismo, only instead of sports car racing, it’s formula racing 🏎️ (or open wheel racing 🏎️ as it’s referred to as here in North America). 

As much as some fans didn’t like that Legacy ignored 2.0 and 2.0 was removed from canon, I can see why Kosinski chose to do it. He didn’t want to be beholden to the game, and have to account for it when he writing the movie and designing the world of the Grid with the screenwriters and his team of concept artists, and wanted to just do his own thing. If he even heard of the game at all, which I highly doubt it since hardly anyone played it when it came out, and even now it has largely faded into obscurity and is only remembered by a select few people. That is always the challenge with doing a tie-in game to something. Even if you did intend for it to be a canonical part of the franchise and did everything you could to make as authentic and faithful to the source material as you could, someone can easily just come along stomp all over, delegitimizing it and decanonizing it. 

 

I think the only couple of things that a tie-in game was acknowledged by the creators of the source material and was considered canon, was the Futurama game, which is considered canon to the series and all of the cutscenes in the game were compiled and edited together into an episode called The Beast with a Billion Backs that was included on one of the Futurama series DVDs 📀. As well as The Matrix Online, which is still considered canon to the Matrix series by the Wachowskis, as Morpheus is dead in The Matrix Resurrections because of what happened in The Matrix Online and the way he died in that game was left intact and still considered by the Wachowskis as the way he died. That’s going the extra mile for the fans, those are the exceptions not the rule. 

 

Besides, even if the events of 2.0 aren’t acknowledged or canon at all, I do still feel that the movie respects the character of Alan. It doesn’t erase his contributions or give it all to Kevin, his importance to the Tron universe is still acknowledged and honored. It’s stated in that exposition scene at the dinner table that the reason why the Grid is so different from the computer world presented in the original is that it isn’t the same world. The Grid, or the Tron system as it’s actually called, was a completely new computer world created by Flynn for scientific research and technological development since it could process things much faster than a normal computer and was a technological improvement over the ENCOM Mainframe. Time works differently inside the Grid (it runs faster), and you can accomplish a task inside the Grid that it would take you far longer to do in the real world. 

It was from built some pieces from the ENCOM Mainframe, which is where the first movie actually took place and is referred to in this film as “the old system,” but for the most part, the Grid is a completely new system, a virtual reality world that was meant to revolutionize computing and change our understanding of science and technology. What constitutes a life form and would we even recognize it if a new form of life emerged? Those kind of questions. Especially with the emergence of the ISOs, which emerged on their own in a sort of abiogenesis type of way inside the Grid without human assistance or human interference according to Kevin. They were still programs, yes, but they were programs that had no prior user, they were not written or created by a human. It was the first example of a process similar to abiogenesis taking place inside of a computer 🖥️ or a computer system. That’s the in-universe canonical explanation for why everything looks different now, it’s because it’s technically a new system, with pieces of the old system still left within. Combine that with what C.L.U. did, and you got a computer world that’s pretty unrecognizable from the old one. 

 

The way I look at it, it’s like how a new game has updated graphics and technology compared to its predecessor, like even if these games are part of the same franchise and are supposed to take place in the same universe, they do still different because of the passage of time and the advancement in technology. If it might technically be the same world, but it was updated over time and was remade with more advanced graphics and technology. I actually really do like this movie’s aesthetic, I really do think it works for this film and the other Tron media that followed it, and while 2.0 did show that it was possible to do a modern 21st century take on Tron while maintaining the same look as the original, I don’t mind that this movie took the franchise in the direction that it did because it does look pretty cool. 

The visuals and the CGI hold up tremendously well. You know we’re doing something wrong when a movie from 2010, 15 years ago, looks way better than some movies coming out today. The technology is more advanced now than it was back then, and yet, the results often don’t hold a candle 🕯️ to what’s in this movie and in other CGI heavy movies from that same period. There are various reasons for that, like the effects process being rushed and micromanaged by the studio and even the individual filmmakers, interfering with the process, making the VFX artists to hit unrealistic deadlines while making last minute changes, and the general working conditions and pay for these VFX artists being really poor and inadequate for the work that they do. 

 

VFX artists are disrespected throughout the whole industry, and it shows in a lot of the end product of these CGI heavy movies. Movies that were almost entirely shot on green screens. And even if they do use practical effects and do use real sets and real locations, their work is still unacknowledged since the big thing now is to pretend that movies didn’t use CGI at all and were entirely practical effects even though that isn’t true and is always a lie since CGI is often used to augment practical effects, add to them and make them better, or use CGI backgrounds or additions. Conditions for CGI artists back then were much better than they are now, and that’s why the CGI work from that period (late 2000s-early 2010s) still looks better than what we often get now even though the technology used for those effects is technically inferior to the technology CGI artists have at their disposal now. 

 

The only aspect of the CGI doesn’t hold up is the de-aging effects on Jeff Bridges…and Bruce Boxlietner to a lesser extent since we don’t see him as Tron for very long in the film. Most of the time, Tron’s face is covered up with a helmet, probably so they wouldn’t have to animate two CGI faces that dip into the Uncanny Valley and be doubly scrutinized for it. I don’t know they actually used Bruce Boxlietner’s voice for Tron either, it sounds a bit different, not that Tron talks that much in the movie. He only has a couple of lines in the whole movie, one in the flashback scenes and one at the end when he overcomes C.L.U.’s reprogramming and reverts back to being Tron again (C.L.U. turned him into Rinzler and he’s Rinzler for most of the movie), and he says “I fight for the users.” And then he gets shot down, falls into the Sea of Simulation, turns from orange to blue and then is never seen again for the rest of the movie. That’s the one thing that everyone agrees, the CGI to make Jeff Bridges look younger in the flashback scenes as Kevin Flynn and in the present day scenes as C.L.U. doesn’t look good at all. 

 

It looks rubbery and digital, almost like the characters in the Polar Express ❄️🚂 movie with Tom Hanks and directed by Robert Zemeckis. Or like the T-800 in Terminator Salvation, that CGI Arnold Schwarzenegger definitely doesn’t look good anymore, if it ever looked good at all. I actually don’t think it looks as bad as a lot of made it out to be. There are some scenes where it looks fine, but there are other scenes where it undeniably looks horrible. I get it, it was necessary for the story, it was a new thing, it was ambitious and groundbreaking for the time, but there had to be a better way of doing it without using de-aging effects that were definitely not advanced enough to pull off what they needed to do in this film. Even Jeff Bridges didn’t like the CGI recreation of him in the film, and he’s on record saying that he thought the younger CGI version of him used in the film looked more like Bill Maher than it did him 😆. They probably would’ve been better off just hiring a younger actor to play Kevin Flynn in those scenes as well as play C.L.U. throughout the whole movie. Does Jeff Bridges have a son who looks and sounds enough like him that he could’ve pulled it off?

 

I have seen people try to defend the de-aging effects in this movie or excuse it by saying it works in-universe because it’s like a computer’s failed attempt at recreating a human being and not quite getting right. It’s the same excuse people use to explain the dated CGI in the Burly Brawl fight in The Matrix Reloaded. While that argument may work for C.L.U. since he’s a program (same with Tron), it doesn’t work with Kevin. A lot of people who use that argument or excuse seemingly forget that we also see a younger Kevin Flynn who’s obviously supposed to look like young Jeff Bridges from the 80s. That argument/excuse completely falls apart when you realize we see Kevin Flynn in flashback scenes and it’s the CGI Jeff Bridges that looks just as bad for Kevin as it does for C.L.U..

The action sequences in this movie are tremendous. My favorite by far is the light cycle scene, where Sam is competing in the games in that arena that C.L.U. set up, and has to race C.L.U. with some light cycles. The design of the bikes, the sound design, the lighting, color grading, and cinematography, the quality of the CGI, everything in that scene is perfect 👌, beyond well done. I was surprised that they actually brought the old light cycle back in this movie. I don’t remember that when I saw this movie in theaters, or perhaps it didn’t really register because I hadn’t seen the original, but they do show Kevin’s light cycle that he custom made, and it is the old design from the movie. He still held onto it after all these years, and Sam uses to go to the city to meet Zuse (who’s going by the name Castor by the time the events of the movie take place). It’s also much faster than the light cycles used in the arena, fastest thing on the Grid as Quorra says, which is why Sam is able to make it to the city so quickly. We don’t see it make a light trail though, which is a bit disappointing, I would’ve liked to have seen how they would’ve adapted the light trail with the old bike design. Further proof that this new system was built on top of the old one and remnants of still remain in the system. 

 

Sort of like how in the Matrix films, old programs from older versions of the Matrix called “Exiled programs” remained in the current version despite the Architect and the Agent’s attempts at stomping them. It wasn’t until the Analyst came along and successfully got rid most of the old Exiled programs, except for the Merovingian and a small group of his goons. Even the character, Zuse/Castor is very similar to the Merovingian from the Matrix series, although I like the Merovingian a lot more than Zuse/Castor. Or it’s like how in real life, some old code and files still remain inside of video games even though they aren’t implemented, and it only takes a clever modder and cheats to access those codes and files and make those previously inaccessible elements of the game accessible to players. A good example of this is Godzilla: Save the Earth 🌎, the character Biollante was supposed to be in the game as a playable character, but was rejected and left out of the final version, but her files and code were still left in the game and some modders were able to access her files and code and make her playable in the game. 

 

I have seen clips of this movie in 4K on YouTube, including this scene, and yeah, it is a movie that looks great in 4K. Another thing that aids in this movie looking good is the aspect ratio. At certain points throughout the film, the aspect ratio will change from 2.39:1 to 1.78:1, which is a taller aspect ratio usually reserved for IMAX. Though plenty of non-IMAX movies (movies not released in IMAX) have used that aspect ratio or aspect ratios similar to it, usually independent ones. While this movie wasn’t shot in IMAX, it was shot in 3D (using 3D digital cameras) and formatted for IMAX in certain scenes. Most just the action scenes, but there a few instances where more slower talkie scenes were vertically enhanced for IMAX, like the Solar Sailer scene. The aspect ratio stays tall for longer stretches of time than other movies that also change their aspect ratios to suit the IMAX format like Transformers: The Last Knight or Transformers: Age of Extinction (though Age of Extinction came before The Last Knight), or even Chris Nolan’s other movies after The Dark Knight, except for Inception. 

I liked Sam Flynn as a character more this time around than I did when I originally saw this in the theaters. I just thought he was bland, and his actor was another one generic white guys ♂︎ who Hollywood was picking to lead their big blockbuster tentpole movies even though their performances weren’t that great or the roles they were given, didn’t give them much to work with. Think Sam Worthington, Taylor Kitsch, Armie Hammer, Jai Courtney, and Charlie Hunnam, most of them happen to either Australian 🇦🇺 or British 🇬🇧. Taylor Kitsch and Armie Hammer are the only ones that I listed there who are not from Australia 🇦🇺 or the UK 🇬🇧. Taylor Kitsch is Canadian 🇨🇦 and Armie Hammer is American 🇺🇸. These actors have been in more interesting movies and given more interesting roles that allow them to flex their acting muscles, except for Sam Worthington, than their work as leading men ♂︎ in blockbusters. But, I actually liked Sam Flynn a lot more this time around. Even though he is ultimately just an audience surrogate for us to reenter this world again, I thought he actually had personality, and I sort of knew where he was coming from, and was able to root for him rather than just be bored by him, and I think Garrett Hedlund’s performance as Sam Flynn is a lot better than what I originally gave it credit for. 

 

Olivia Wilde is pretty great as Quorra. I like her a lot more in this movie than in Cowboys & Aliens 🤠👽, which is another movie I haven’t seen in years and didn’t think about until now when Cody reviewed it on his PointlessHub channel. She was able to make Quorra both endearing and cool at the same time. You’re in awe of her when she does cool stuff like save Sam from the arena or save him at the night club, and you’re protective of her when she gets hurt and you learn that she’s the last of her kind. You want her to escape into the real world with Sam and be his love interest ❤️, which is what she is. She mostly exists to be Sam’s love interest ❤️, but they do enough with her to where she’s more than that and is a good character in her own right. 

 

Didn’t care for Michael Sheen as Castor/Zuse, I thought his character was kind of annoying and was glad when he died (when C.L.U. killed him), and he was one of the things critics praised about the movie when it originally came out. And of course, can’t go wrong with Jeff Bridges, he’s great in this movie in his dual role as Kevin Flynn and C.L.U.. This was still a time when Jeff Bridges still talked with a surfer guy 🏄‍♂️ voice, his inflection, the way he enunciates certain words, and says words like “dude” and “radical,” before he did True Grit (2010) or around the time he did and just started talking with a gruff old cowboy 🤠 voice where it sounds like he’s gargling a mouth full of marbles. This was most egregious in R.I.P.D., which came out in 2013, exactly three years after Tron: Legacy and True Grit (2010). 
 

And while C.L.U. isn’t as cool of a bad guy as Master Control in the previous movie, he still works for this film, even if the CGI on him (and young Kevin) looks wonky and doesn’t quite hold up as well as the other effects in this movie. He’s pretty Computer Hitler in this movie, his endless pursuit of perfection drives him to commit genocide and become a dictator inside the Grid, and he even holds a fascistic rally towards the end of the film that looks straight out of Nazi propaganda. Like, you could tell what the filmmakers were going for when they designed that shot of C.L.U. standing on a stage, giving a fiery and aggressive speech in front of a huge crowd of soldiers. He doesn’t talk with that weird computer/alien voice that Jeff Bridges used for him in the original movie. Probably because people associated that voice too much with Starman, and C.L.U. is supposed to be a more villainous character this time around, that Jeff Bridges didn’t think that voice worked anymore. 

Though, I wonder 🤔, how does Kevin Flynn come back in Tron: Ares when he dies at the end of this one? He sacrifices himself to save Sam and allow to go through the portal with Quorra, while he destroys C.L.U., something that would kill him as Quorra explained to Sam. So how is he seemingly still alive in Ares? We hear his voice in the trailer, Jeff Bridge is listed in the cast, and it seems they’re setting him up to be a mentor figure of sorts to this new character that they’re introducing, Ares, who is the one played by Jared Leto and is who the movie is named after. I know that Ares is supposed to be a reboot of sorts, but it’s a soft reboot, meaning it’s still in continuity with the other movies, the game, Tron: Evolution, and the TV series, Tron: Uprising, and will probably at the very least acknowledge the events of the previous movies. So, what will the in-universe explanation be for why Kevin Flynn is back after seeming dying at the end of Legacy along with C.L.U.? I guess we’ll just have to find out when that movie comes out. 

This movie is a bit longer than the first one. The first Tron movie was only 96 minutes long (1 hour and 36 minutes long), while this movie is 125 minutes long (2 hours and 5 minutes long), but it never really feels like it. It does move at a break neck pace and does enough to keep you interested so you don’t feel its length and get bored. A lot of movies nowadays should take notes since a lot of them are long and feel long. One thing I think should be acknowledged when talking about this film is that it didn’t actually bomb 💣. The movie is often remembered as a box office bomb 💣, but when you actually look at the numbers, it wasn’t. It made money 💵, it was profitable. It grossed $409.9 million 💵 against a budget of $170 million 💵. So, just like The Fifth Element or Brother Bear 🐻, it is a movie that wrongfully remembered as a box office bomb 💣 when it was actually a box office success 🤑. We’ll see if this Tron: Ares will be worth it, and how much money 💵 it will make, it’ll be profitable or not. I a lot of people predict that Ares won’t do too well at the box office, but given that Legacy did well at the box office, given how much of a cult following that movie has gained in the years since its release, and  given that the trailer got over 14 million views in just a matter of a few weeks, it might do well. They better not screw it up. Jared Leto is always bad omen, don’t let him be one for that movie. 

 

 

(This is the main theatrical poster for Tron: Legacy.)