BY BEN VERDI
Daily Arts Writer
Published January 10, 2011
Imagine if Lady Gaga wrote and directed “The Matrix.” Now imagine if video games were portals to a world where people who looked like Daft Punk had dreamed them into being. Throw in the most unconventional performance of Jeff Bridges’s career, and you begin to approximate what “TRON: Legacy,” directed by newcomer Joseph Kosinski, feels like.
“TRON: Legacy”
At the Michigan, Quality 16 and Rave
Walt Disney Pictures
More like this
This film doesn’t hide what makes it entertaining, valuable or expensive. It’s a fairly standard, and at times didactic, good-versus-evil plotline. It is essentially a reimagining of “The Chronicles of Narnia” set inside a video game instead of a wardrobe. Bridges is stuck inside his created virtual world until his son Sam, played by Garret Hedlund (“Friday Night Lights”) comes to save him, and brings him back to the real world. From there fights ensue, armies are assembled and the film’s special effects become the star of the show.
This description may make the film seem a little shallow, and there is some validity to that opinion. However, people don’t go to “Cirque du Soleil” and leave disappointed because the show lacked a challenging narrative. “TRON: Legacy” was created to be viewed in 3-D, screened in IMAX and immediately turned into a video game.
Actually, “TRON” already is a video game. So there’s no excuse for not knowing exactly what this film is going to feel like. And to form an opinion toward the film after only seeing it in 2-D would do the entire project a disservice. That would be like judging a university’s greatness solely on the quality of its dorm food, party scene or football team.
The virtual world itself, with its hauntingly beautiful mountain ranges slashed with constant lightning to mirror the turmoil of the peoples below, is breathtaking to behold. The ships they fly, the cars they drive and the things they wear make the characters (who are really computer programs … again, think Lady Gaga’s “Matrix”) look almost as outlandish and tragically mechanical as the world they inhabit.
The only reason for a true conflict to arise in this film is its villain: a program called Clu, also played by Bridges, who was created by the good Bridges to perfect the virtual world and remove everything that “held it back.” But, instead of improving it peacefully, Clu became a vicious dictator, creating an Orwellian dystopia from the virtual world Bridges thought would save humans from their own imperfections.
The message that sneaks its way into our minds as we’re bombarded with the killer soundtrack and images of “TRON” is that, in a way, the most evil thing for which we can strive is perfection. We have to be able to embrace the fact that things — even things programmed to be perfect, like Clu — will always have flaws, because we, their creators, and the world that every hero attempts to save, has flaws too.
So when we live only to perfect the things around us, through judgment, war and — as those who instigate it might argue — genocide, we are perhaps overlooking the place where we find more imperfection than anywhere else — ourselves.
A straightforward message indeed, but a valuable one extracted from an unlikely source. It's one we won’t encounter if we assume that a movie about a game can’t possibly be worth our time. One we won’t realize if we expect every story we hear, every book we read and every movie we see, to be perfect.
