Tron Legacy review: imagine Steve Jobs as a Nazi

Tron: Legacy is the geekiest film of 2010. That’s no disparagement. It’s brilliant with it. The original Tron infected culture so thoroughly that hints of it can be spotted everywhere from clothes to gadgets and music like Daft Punk (who, appropriately, provide the Tron: Legacy OST). Tron: Legacy is an excellent successor to its iconic predecessor, read our full review to find out why…

Just like Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows which lays on the ethnic cleansing analogies pretty thick (Death Eaters as Nazis, muggles as an amalgam of all those massacred in the holocaust), Tron: Legacy is a big chunky morality tale about technology and its capacity to both empower and destroy us. Basically, Tron: Legacy asks you to do this: imagine Steve Jobs as a Nazi.

In the flashbacks that begin Tron: Legacy, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is established as a Steve Jobs-style figure heading up Encom, a powerful business shaped in his image. Like Jobs he is removed from the company but rather than a boardroom battle he is trapped in The Grid, the virtual world he created, and forced into conflict with CLU 2, the program he created in his own image to develop the perfect system.

CLU 2 is the Nazi Steve Jobs. He is obsessed with perfection and beauty to the exclusion of human emotion. If CLU created iTunes he would massacre musicians who refused to have their music featured there. In the film, he commits acts of virtual genocide and plans to escape from The Grid to enslave humanity. Stood at a podium before his willing followers, he is Steve Jobs at Macworld crossed with Hitler at Nuremberg.

The script and plotting of Tron: Legacy are its weakest elements in some ways but it moves at such a pace and with such visual brilliance that you are dragged along like a gridracer behind a Light Cycle. The design language of Tron: Legacy has the potential to be as influential as the film that spawned it and the 3D effects are perfectly done. Shooting the real world scenes in 2D and switching to 3D for The Grid is the modern equivalent of The Wizard of Oz moving from black and white to colour.

There is no film this year that will be as exciting or as enjoyable for gadget fans as Tron: Legacy. You’ll leave the cinema wishing you could fight a disc battle and ride a Light Cycle to work. More than that you’ll desperately wish you were as bloody cool as Jeff “The Dude” Bridges. Highly recommended.

Out December 17 | £varies | Tron

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