TRON: LEGACY

This digital souvenir of the movie contains a fair amount of bells and whistles but provides little actual satisfaction. Predictably, there is a slide show of scenes from the recent movie and a cut from the soundtrack (plus the option to buy the entire album on iTunes). A manual-advance 150-“page” storybook version features painted-over or otherwise altered stills. It is captioned with brief blocks of eye-glazing prose that will make any young action-movie fan feel justifiably cheated: “Suddenly, Sam’s opponent threw his disc! Sam barely dodged in time as the razor-sharp disc whizzed past him.” The feature that perhaps best utilizes the technology is a five-minute animated “Motion Comic” (part one of a fuller story, evidently; "episodes 2-6 coming soon"). Even this, though, disappoints. Abbreviated to the point of incoherence and cut off at an arbitrary point, the story is presented in panels of unsophisticated, melodramatic original art. These drift and shift in sync with an audio track that is not always audible over the background music. Indeed, the unvarnished comic is the weakest link here. The entire app is purely ephemeral, of interest only to completist collectors of Tron-abilia. (iPad movie spinoff. 10-12, adult)