SIMULACRA 2 ENDINGS FULL
The film prioritizes aesthetic pleasure - knowing full well there’s no Star Wars or Marvel or Fast and the Furious setup that could result in its excessive, digital grandeur - but there’s still insight to be found in the cinematic artifact, as so much of the last decade in studio moviemaking can be seen in and traced back to this point. It’s all paired with a soundtrack by Daft Punk that mixes in sumptuous, ethereal soundscapes with the pulse-pounding beats for which they’re known. In a fairly straightforward gotta-get-home adventure, Joseph Kosinski, a commercial director who made his feature debut with the film, updates and streamlines the original’s basic visual ideas with stunning monochromatic structures and vehicles illuminated by neon accents. Complicating matters is CLU, a tyrannical program created by Flynn in his own image circa 1989, now determined to capture his creator and use him to gain access to the outside world (and, of course, take it over).
Set 28 years after the events of the first film, Tron: Legacy follows Sam (Garrett Hedlund), who discovers his father, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, returning from Tron), in a parallel computer world known as the Grid. And based on Disney’s current plans for the future, the blockbuster industry has no sign of slowing down. Tron: Legacy is the peculiar and perhaps unwitting precursor to several practices that have come to define mainstream filmmaking up until now. But like the original 1982 Tron, a landmark of digital effects, it feels equally experimental in retrospect.
17, 2010, the big-budget Disney sequel was hypnotically watchable and maligned as a throwaway vehicle for a new Daft Punk record. What’s the legacy of Tron: Legacy? When it opened on Dec.