TRON: legacy

Jeff Bridges entered the ranks of movie gods in 2011. A year after winning his first Best Oscar Oscar, for Crazy Heart, he earned his sixth nomination, for the remake of True Grit, and he made a sequel of his 1982 cult hit for Disney, TRON: Legacy.

The financial incentive from the latter must have been an unrefusable offer. The original movie was an understandable box-office failure with a plot that defied logic, narrative sense and any sense of story-boarding. Most crucially, it was difficult to imagine why Tron was the titular hero who died but was actually a side-kick. Why not name it after Clu, or his creator, Flynn?

Flynn's son, Sam, is the irresponsible major stockholder in his lost father's omnipotent company. Its R&D director is the son of the first movie's villain, and appears in one boardroom scene, played by an uncredited Gillian Murphy, perhaps to confuse even further all previous viewers of Inception. He never appears again, so that is one less red herring to think about while zooming, splatting and whizzing through the imaginary Grid in which Flynn was trapped in 1982.

Sam lands up there, of course, having received a message from his dad's old pal, re-played by Bruce Boxleitner, who spawned the original Tron who, lo and behold if you can work out who's who in which plastic wraparound suit, also reappears. As does Flynn, assisted by Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a voluptuous and virginal fighter, Go-player and last survivor of a tribe of extraterrestrials exploited and destroyed by Flynn's clone, Clu, who has a villainous sidekick. Quorra leads Sam to the all-knowing minister of entertainments and sooths, an embarrassingly camp OTT spectacle from Michael Sheen (who must have also had a huge financial inducement to accept a role already performed with suitable flair and classier, funnier OTTness by Chris Tucker as Ruby Rhod in Besson's The Fifth Element).

The debut director, Joseph Kosinski, was clearly entrusted with the technical tasks of splicing old and new film stock, making the new "light cycle" fighting machines even more thrilling as CGI SFX and natural 3-D features. This is a film that deserves big-screen viewing, though 3-D may not be essential if it is watched in the style that suited the original movie: sat in the front of the cinema, stoned on a substance or three, wowing when the lights and lines flash overhead.