Back in 1982, at the age of 10, Tron,
was a film for me which changed my life. Not only was I at an impressionable age, although I can still be
impressed at 38, but a fascination with computers and a love of the look of the film just made me want to jump
into the cinema screen.
This was so much so, that when there was a competition held throughout the schools in the country to win a prize
by summarising the movie in 100 sentences I got to work. For the life of me, though, to this day I can't remember
or work out why I never actually entered the final draft into the competition, although the fact the prize was
for the school and I'd get nothing personally was probably the main reason. Also, when time came to make that year's
Xmas want list of things which I didn't have a hope in hell of getting, I wrote on it, "One of those computers that
made Tron". Well, it's the only time of the year you get to make such a list...
Talking of not having a hope in hell of getting something, there clearly wasn't much of a chance of getting a decent
sequel given that they'd waited so long to make it and it would've been nice to get a plot that made sense.
As we begin, in 1989, we see a clean-shaven Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, right) talking to his young son, Sam,
about how they're going to go over to the arcade in the morning, only... we learn later, in the present day, that
he completely disappeared. At that point we're introduced to the current Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund, below-right),
hacking into the servers of Encom - the company of which his father was once the head - so he can give away their
latest software for free instead of making them pay for it, and doing so just at the precise moment they're about
to give a live, worldwide press conference about it. Clearly, this particular scene was a dig at multi-national
companies like Apple and Microsoft when they lable their new operating systems with a number as, when asked what's
different about the latest one being called "OS 12", he simply replies, "It's got a '12' on the box".
Something that particularly irked me about what followed is that a fat security guard chases Sam all the way up
to the roof and along a steel girder sticking out, pointlessly, out and high above the street below. It only serves
the purpose for Sam to base-jump off it after their conversation, but since when would a minimum-wage security guard
give a damn to the point where he'd risk his life to chase someone that far?
Anyway, for reasons that will become apparently, Sam gets the key to open up his Dad's old arcade and has a go
on the old Tron arcade game, but soon becomes more fascinated about what lies behind it - a doorway leading up
to the computer that sucked his father into the 'Grid' all those years ago. And here's one thing which also
annoyed me - he goes in without any fancy pixel-by-pixel fanfare like Jeff Bridges did in the first one, which
does make for one of the film's many disappointments.
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