The Grid

There’s this moment early on where you step into the blue and everything is geometry and light—neon cutting through black, surfaces catching reflection. It feels deliberate. Someone spent real time making sure this digital world looks a certain way.

Sam’s tracking down his father Kevin Flynn, who disappeared into the Grid and never got out. Now it’s run by someone called Clu, and survival is simple: you compete or you die. There are light cycle races where the vehicles burn trails of light and try to force each other off the arena. Watching them, you stop thinking about the plot. They’re hypnotic.

The whole thing is rendered that way. Immaculate geometry. Neon suits glowing. Arenas that are basically sculpture. The original Tron had this sense of discovery—you’re walking into something strange and wondering what happens next. This one feels like a museum exhibit. Beautiful, sealed, untouchable.

The actors don’t help. Jeff Bridges, Olivia Wilde, Garrett Hedlund—they’re all fine in other things, but here they seem to be somewhere else. Their dialogue is flat. They move like they’re uncomfortable in the space. The whole time I was watching, I felt this rift between how much the filmmakers care about the world and how little the cast seems to. It drains something.

The Daft Punk soundtrack is the thing that actually reaches. It’s orchestral and electronic at once, dense and immersive, and it’s the only element that matches what the visuals are trying to do. I bought the album. It’s better than the film by itself—when you’re not distracted by the images, you hear what they were actually building.

Tron Legacy is perfect and completely hollow. You’re paying to sit in that blue world for two hours with people who don’t seem to want to be there. If you go in knowing that, knowing you’re really there for the design and the sound, it’s fine. Let those two things carry you and don’t expect anything else.