In a better film we’d see Morbius evolve into Morpheus and leave the Grid for the Matrix.
When I was 10, the original Tron was one of the last films I saw at the Westlake Drive-In before it closed a month later. I remember being bored, my typical response to a lot of Disney live-action, and got more fun out of the 4-in-1 arcade game even though some malls charged double to play it (i.e., fifty whole cents, a ripoff at the time). My son was a teenager when we saw Tron: Legacy and quickly forgot most of it, though the action sequences were impressive enough that I noted fledgling director Joseph Kosinski’s name before he went on to bigger, better works. In between those wobbly goalposts, Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine was in heavy rotation in my various high school cassette players, so a young Trent Reznor’s industrial synth-metal assaults hold a certain place in my pop-culture heart even though I haven’t kept up with his later, lesser albums. (Fun trivia: Reznor and I share a birthday!)
Nostalgia isn’t an automatic drug of choice for me, but sometimes I’ll play along with its corporate pushers just to see what they think might get me high by injecting my own liquefied childhood into my eyeballs. Fifteen years later Disney has turned Tron‘s CPU off and back on again to install its latest IP expansion pack Tron: Ares, whose marketing tries awfully hard to target Gen-X as if anyone my age yearned for this to be a trilogy to save on our DVD shelves until we die and our beneficiaries give all our boxed sets to Goodwill. The thin dimensional boundaries between video games and the real world have been breached quite a bit since 1982 (Wreck-It Ralph! Pixels! Ready Player One!), to say nothing of invasions from their kid cousin Virtual Reality (from The Lawnmower Man on up), so really, what’s Tron have to offer besides grasping for an extended warranty on its own obsolescence?
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 