Finishing TRON: Betrayal #2 left me with a real sense of dread. I’ve been looking forward to the upcoming TRON sequel, TRON: Legacy, for almost two years now. I was even excited by the first issue of TRON: Betrayal, but issue two is such a colossal mess; such a confusing, convoluted, boring collection of pages that I’m starting to fear the movie might not be what I hoped. The original TRON was a great, straightforward, good guys and bad guys sci-fi movie. From the looks of TRON: Betrayal, the world of TRON is getting unnecessarily twisted.
First I’d like to address a plot point that had bothered me from issue one, a point I had overlooked in my first review (read the review of TRON: Betrayal #1). In the original Tron film, Flynn (the hero, played by Jeff Bridges) was just a computer programmer zapped into the computer world by a laser that broke material down and turned it into information.
In the computer world Flynn was known as a “creator”, essentially what the humanoid versions of computer programs called their programmers. All the computer programmers around the world who had ever written a program created the computer world. In TRON: Betrayal, Flynn is the creator, the man who created the entire computer world. Huh? When did that happen?
Building off that weird twist, TRON: Betrayal buries itself under a political struggle for control of the computer world between Flynn and a new Central Computer he created who looks just like him. There’s a muddled attempt to humanize the story by lumping in Flynn’s real-world problems trying to run a huge company and help raise his son after his wife dies. The writing in that section is so slapped together it feels like little more than an afterthought. I was also annoyed at how the program Tron, the character the entire movie is written around, plays backup, like some glorified bodyguard.
I’m going to assume that writer Jai Nitz and plot developer Starlight Runner Entertainment were trying to expand the TRON universe so as to make a more interesting film. What they’ve actually done is humanize the computer world to the point that it ceases to be a computer world.
Political intrigue? Terrorist activities? Hurt feelings? Anger? This is a world of computer programs, let’s try and stay on the same page. TRON: Betrayal #2 is so weighed down with melodrama that in some sections it becomes downright hard to read. Instead of jazzing me for the movie, TRON: Betrayal #2 leaves me afraid that the movie will walk the same dark path as the most recent Star Wars trilogy.
The art is like most movie adaptation art, just passable enough to look at. There are a couple of nice battles and a few real moments of action, but for the most part the art was a tepid experiment in cranking out visuals. I was particularly astonished at how he new big bad Central Computer was dressed like Keanu Reeves from The Matrix films. It’s funny, because while the content of TRON: Betrayal was too emotional and “human” to make sense, the art was cold, distant and boring enough to actually be the inside of a computer. I suppose all that’s left to do is hope TRON: Legacy delivers were TRON: Betrayal failed to.
