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Tron Legacy (Review)
Jan. 24th, 2011 11:49 amFirstly, allow me to outline the emotions I experienced whilst watching Tron Legacy:
I saw the original Tron quite recently on TV whilst I was stuck in a hotel in a godforsaken hellhole in the middle of nowhere (Birmingham City Centre), and was surprised by how well it still stands up. The early CGI is very dated, but the film itself has a sense of fun about it - an awareness of it's own ridiculousness which makes it an enjoyably silly way to spend a couple of hours. Tron Legacy, on the other hand, has no sense of fun about it at all. Instead it has the po-faced seriousness of a film with a message, which in a slam-bang action adventure is the kiss of death. This might sound cruel but the film it reminded me most of was Matrix Revolutions: all spectacle and cod philosophy and pretty visuals, but not one ounce of heart or fun.
It is really quite spectacularly pretty; the virtual world of the Tron universe is stylistically impressive with a distinctive and beautiful design aesthetic, and added to this is a funky dance soundtrack which several times had my feet start tapping appreciatively*. But everything else...the plot, the story, the acting. Oh.
Ten years after the events of the original Tron movie, the hero of that film, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) vanishes without trace, leaving his young son Sam (Garrett Hedlund, who appears to have gone to the Hayden Christensen acting school of emotion) to grow up with Hollywood daddy-issues and to inherit the lions share of his father's technology company. After a certain amount of character development to demonstrate Sam is a wild member of the billionaire anarchist and base-jumping crowd, a plot device happens and he finds himself transported into the digital world of the first film, where his father has spent twenty years trapped.
By 'trapped', I mean 'living with an astonishingly hot chick in the sort of hotel I stay at when I've given myself a bonus'. Despite this, he still wants to leave and return to the real world but is prevented from doing so by his evil digital duplicate, Clu, who Kevin programmed to act like Hitler and then acted all surprised when he started acting like Hitler.
It's here that the cod-philosophy starts getting irritating. To summarise the plot, Kevin ("The Creator", as he is referred to a lot) created a new (digital) world and a bunch of programmes to help him in his work. One day, a new form of virtual life with free will starts appearing in this digital world and the programmes, led by Kevin's former right-hand-man (Clu), rebel against this new development. The result of this is that Kevin retires to live apart from the world he created and the rebellious programmes get free rein until, one day, Kevin's son, Sam, appears to 'save' the new life forms from the evil programmes.
Oh. You're way ahead of me, I can tell.
With a setup like that, Tron Legacy was always going to struggle - the juxtaposition of the essential absurdity of a fast-paced action movie in a virtual world with a Jesus allegory means that the tone is just wrong and the whole thing just feels like watching someone playing a very pretty, but very serious and boring, video game.
Oh, and Michael Sheen skitting David Bowie in his scene? Not worth your money. He's just irritating.
*That said, I couldn't have whistled you any of the tunes twenty minutes after I walked out, so it can't have been that memorable.
I saw the original Tron quite recently on TV whilst I was stuck in a hotel in a godforsaken hellhole in the middle of nowhere (Birmingham City Centre), and was surprised by how well it still stands up. The early CGI is very dated, but the film itself has a sense of fun about it - an awareness of it's own ridiculousness which makes it an enjoyably silly way to spend a couple of hours. Tron Legacy, on the other hand, has no sense of fun about it at all. Instead it has the po-faced seriousness of a film with a message, which in a slam-bang action adventure is the kiss of death. This might sound cruel but the film it reminded me most of was Matrix Revolutions: all spectacle and cod philosophy and pretty visuals, but not one ounce of heart or fun.
It is really quite spectacularly pretty; the virtual world of the Tron universe is stylistically impressive with a distinctive and beautiful design aesthetic, and added to this is a funky dance soundtrack which several times had my feet start tapping appreciatively*. But everything else...the plot, the story, the acting. Oh.
Ten years after the events of the original Tron movie, the hero of that film, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) vanishes without trace, leaving his young son Sam (Garrett Hedlund, who appears to have gone to the Hayden Christensen acting school of emotion) to grow up with Hollywood daddy-issues and to inherit the lions share of his father's technology company. After a certain amount of character development to demonstrate Sam is a wild member of the billionaire anarchist and base-jumping crowd, a plot device happens and he finds himself transported into the digital world of the first film, where his father has spent twenty years trapped.
By 'trapped', I mean 'living with an astonishingly hot chick in the sort of hotel I stay at when I've given myself a bonus'. Despite this, he still wants to leave and return to the real world but is prevented from doing so by his evil digital duplicate, Clu, who Kevin programmed to act like Hitler and then acted all surprised when he started acting like Hitler.
It's here that the cod-philosophy starts getting irritating. To summarise the plot, Kevin ("The Creator", as he is referred to a lot) created a new (digital) world and a bunch of programmes to help him in his work. One day, a new form of virtual life with free will starts appearing in this digital world and the programmes, led by Kevin's former right-hand-man (Clu), rebel against this new development. The result of this is that Kevin retires to live apart from the world he created and the rebellious programmes get free rein until, one day, Kevin's son, Sam, appears to 'save' the new life forms from the evil programmes.
Oh. You're way ahead of me, I can tell.
With a setup like that, Tron Legacy was always going to struggle - the juxtaposition of the essential absurdity of a fast-paced action movie in a virtual world with a Jesus allegory means that the tone is just wrong and the whole thing just feels like watching someone playing a very pretty, but very serious and boring, video game.
Oh, and Michael Sheen skitting David Bowie in his scene? Not worth your money. He's just irritating.
*That said, I couldn't have whistled you any of the tunes twenty minutes after I walked out, so it can't have been that memorable.
