As a fan of the first Tron movie, I obviously just had to watch Tron Legacy. I had very low expectations for everything except the visual effects and soundtrack.

Unsurprisingly, I was basically right. It’s a visually stunning movie, especially if you watch it in 3D. The sound design and soundtrack are really something (Daft Punk really nailed this one), but the story…

Well, you can’t really say the story of the first movie was a masterpiece, but the whole thing with programs and users was described in a way that made sense. I always remember the accounting program that was taken out of his usual function and thrown into the games arena. In the prison scene, he mentions long term savings plans and their advantages. In other words, he acts like a program written for a set objective, like all normal computer programs. You could almost imagine how Excel or Powerpoint would look like if they were in the same situation. As absurd is this may seem, this made the whole “program as a character” thing believable, and made Flynn stand out as something different - a user, free to decide his destiny.

This sort of distinction simply doesn’t happen in Tron Legacy. The programs are just regular characters with free will. They are able to change their minds and do however they please, which would mean - if Legacy followed the metaphor drawn out in the original movie - that they are able to rewrite themselves.

The grid is not a representation of what regular, day-to-day software would look like from inside, but something purposefully built to be an artificial world. Whoever wrote this decided to ignore the possibility of showing what a computer connected to the internet would be. Imagine malwares, social networks, 4chan… that would be fun!

This is even more baffling if you played the Tron 2.0 game. Guess what? The game goes there! In it you’re battling file corruption caused by a computer virus. The programs can move from one device to another (desktop computers, mainframes etc.) and at a certain point you’re inside an old Palm PDA activating as many features as possible to drain the device’s battery - just brilliant. Why didn’t they put this in the movie?

Anyway it’s a fun action movie with amazing fight scenes (that helps selling toys and videogames, right?), cool visuals and an incredible soundtrack. Just don’t expect it to achieve the same cult classic status as the original.