Echoes of The Tempest in Tron: Legacy

Abstract

Three decades after the success of the ground-breaking science fiction movie Tron (1982), Disney released a sequel, Tron: Legacy (2010). A box office success both in the United States and worldwide, criticism of the movie went from mixed to negative. The general consensus on the film review website Rotten Tomatoes was that ‘Tron: Legacy boasts dazzling visuals, but its human characters and story get lost amidst its state-of-the-art production design’.¹ Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert felt the plot of Tron: Legacy was ‘a catastrophe’, and that the film was ‘a 3-D sound-and light show that plays to the eyes and ears more than the mind’.² Indeed, the dismal script of Tron: Legacy was thoroughly resented not only by critics, but by many fans of the original movie.