I don't consider myself any kind of big TRON fan. Sure I have DVDs of the original and TRON: Legacy, and I've seen all of TRON: Uprising, and I recently played the Legacy prequel game TRON: Evolution, which in turn led me around to finally playing TRON 2.0, which I had heard so much about for so long, and I've found where you can play the original TRON and Discs of TRON arcade games online, and I've considered a TRON Halloween costume several times, but I wouldn't consider myself, y'know, a real die hard devotee of the franchise. I appreciate them for what they are, and a disingenuous 30-year-after-the-fact sequel certainly helped me to appreciate what the original film was doing even more. It sluggishly plods along its story, but as an early attempt to develop a Sci-Fi concept about these magical new boxes called "computers" and those crazy "video games" that kids these days are playing, TRON does a pretty good job. Add in religious overtones and about 12 minutes of genuine 1982 vintage CGI, and you have the ingredients of a pretty important film if not an overwhelmingly good one.
Developing a sequel several decades after the original film is a daunting prospect. It only ever achieved cult status to begin with, and the heat had long since gone off of it. Not to mention that someone already made about the best conceptual sequel to TRON that anyone could hope for: The Matrix. Between the two attempts, TRON 2.0 comes off as more legitimate. One gets the sense of the team at Monolith Productions looking for a new concept and turning with high fidelity to a favourite childhood film. TRON: Legacy, on the other hand, comes off like executives at Team Disney sitting around a boardroom and deciding what IP they can dust off for the young male 9 to 34 demographic groups. This really comes out when considering Legacy's weaknesses.
