The Grid looks expensive. That is the first thing anyone notices about Tron: Legacy, and for long stretches it is the only thing worth noticing. Joseph Kosinski’s sequel to Tron runs 126 minutes and spends most of them proving that a Light Cycle can be rendered beautifully and a story can still stall.
Disney spent years getting here. Interest in a sequel grew after Tron picked up a cult following, and the studio began a real effort in 2005, hiring Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal to write. Kosinski came aboard two years later. He was not sold on Disney’s Matrix-style plan for the film, so he shot a concept trailer to show the studio what the universe should look like and get it greenlit. That trailer worked. The film that followed did not.
Trailer, via Disney UK.
Sam Flynn Releases the Operating System
The plot picks up in 1989, when ENCOM CEO Kevin Flynn vanishes. Twenty years later his son Sam, now the company’s primary shareholder, pranks the corporation by putting its signature operating system online for free. Executive Alan Bradley, Kevin’s old friend, approves — he thinks it fits Flynn’s ideals of free software. Sam is arrested for trespassing. Alan posts bail and tells him about a pager message from Kevin’s shuttered video arcade, dark since the disappearance.
Sam goes to the arcade, finds a hidden basement, and a particle laser digitizes him onto the Grid. He is captured and sent to the Games, where he fights a masked program named Rinzler. Sam bleeds. Rinzler sees it, understands he is a User, and takes him to Clu.
Clu Sends a Message to Alan Bradley
Clu runs the Grid and looks like a young Kevin Flynn — Jeff Bridges plays both, with digital de-aging and voiceover, and John Reardon plays Clu physically. Clu nearly kills Sam in a Light Cycle match. Quorra, a warrior and Kevin’s “apprentice,” pulls him out and takes him to Kevin’s hideout beyond Clu’s territory.
Kevin explains the rest. He had been building a “perfect” computer system and appointed Clu and security program Tron as co-creators. The three found naturally occurring “isomorphic algorithms,” or ISOs, with the potential to resolve natural mysteries. Clu judged them an abnormality, betrayed Kevin, killed Tron, and destroyed the ISOs. The Portal between the worlds closed and Kevin was trapped. Clu sent the message to Alan hoping to lure him in and reopen the Portal for a limited time. Sam works just as well.
Daft Punk Scores the Grid
Daft Punk composed the music, and it is the one element of Tron: Legacy that operates at full power. The French duo’s score is the reason the film’s best sequences hold together at all. Where the visuals are cold and the script is thinner than the light ribbons trailing the cycles, the music supplies the pulse the movie cannot generate on its own.
Kosinski shot most sequences in 3D. Principal photography ran 67 days in Vancouver, in and around the city’s central business district. Ten companies worked on the visual effects, with chroma keying and other techniques used to allow more freedom in building the Grid. The craft is real. The problem is what the craft is carrying.
Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde in the Cast
Garrett Hedlund won a “Darwinian casting process” that tested hundreds of actors. Producers wanted a “unique combination of intelligence, wit, humor, look and physicality.” Hedlund trained hard for his own stunts, jumping over cars and doing heavy wire and harness work. Owen Best plays young Sam.
Olivia Wilde plays Quorra, an isomorphic algorithm who has absorbed volumes about the world outside the Grid and longs to see it. She loves human literature, especially Jules Verne, and plays Go with Flynn. Wilde compared Quorra to Joan of Arc and said her hairstyle drew on singer Karen O. Wilde argued the part “could have just been another slinky, vampy temptress,” and that she wanted Quorra to appeal to both men and women by keeping a childlike innocence suited to an “evolving and learning organism.”
That intent is better than the result. Quorra is the most interesting figure on the Grid and the film keeps handing her the wheel only to take it back.
Michael Sheen as Castor
Michael Sheen joins as Castor, also called Zuse, and he is the only performer visibly enjoying the room. Beau Garrett plays Gem, James Frain plays Jarvis, and Bruce Boxleitner returns as Alan Bradley and Tron. Anis Cheurfa plays Rinzler. Serinda Swan, Yaya DaCosta and Elizabeth Mathis play Sirens, and Kis Yurij plays the Half Faced Man.
Bridges signed on in July 2008. Wilde and Garrett were cast that December, when Boxleitner’s return was confirmed. Hedlund came aboard in January 2009. Sheen joined in May 2009.
Tron: Legacy Production Timeline
| Year | Milestone | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| 1982 | Tron released | Original film |
| 1989 | Kevin Flynn disappears | Story event |
| 2005 | Sequel effort begins | Klugman and Sternthal hired |
| 2007 | Kosinski recruited | Director signs on |
| July 2008 | Bridges signs | Reprises Kevin Flynn |
| December 2008 | Wilde, Garrett cast | Boxleitner return confirmed |
| January 2009 | Hedlund cast as Sam | Hundreds tested |
| May 2009 | Sheen joins | Plays Castor |
| 2010 | Tron: Legacy released | Sequel to Tron |
The tagline is “The game has changed.” The game has not changed enough. Tron: Legacy treats its own premise as a mood board — a virtual reality called the Grid, a dictator program, a Portal, a Users-versus-programs war — and then declines to build a movie out of it. Clu’s plan to cross into the real world should be the engine. It sits in the back half like a chore.
The film’s defenders point to the design, and they are not wrong about the design. But the Grid is a place, not a story, and Kosinski films it like an architecture reel. Sam’s search for his father should carry the emotional weight. Bridges plays Kevin as a hermit who has given up, which is a choice, and the reunion lands softly because the script never gives father and son a real argument.
The ISOs are the most promising idea in the whole picture. A species of naturally occurring programs with the potential to resolve natural mysteries is a genuine science fiction premise, and Clu’s decision to wipe them out as an abnormality is a genuine conflict. Tron: Legacy mentions this and moves on. It is the clearest sign that the writers had a better film in hand than the one they made.
What works: Daft Punk, the Light Cycle sequence, Sheen’s few minutes, and the production design. What does not: the pacing, the dialogue, and a lead character whose arc is mostly running. Hedlund is game and does his own stunts, but Sam never becomes a person. Wilde gets closer, and the film does not reward her for it.
The sequel problem here is narrower than the usual complaint about effects over story. Tron: Legacy fails at the one job a sequel has: it does not deepen the original. The 1982 Tron put a man inside a machine and made the machine a workplace. This one puts a son inside his father’s machine and makes it a monument. Kevin built the Grid, abandoned it, and the film treats that abandonment as scenery rather than as the wound Sam came to find.
That is the missing movie. Not more Light Cycles — a conversation between Bridges and Hedlund that lasts longer than a walk-and-talk through a hideout. The concept trailer sold a world. What the film never sold was why anyone in it was still fighting.
Tron: Legacy scores 4.9 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
