Tron Legacy (Review)

[davywavy]

Firstly, 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.}

Comments

[sherbetsaucers.livejournal.com]

Personally I thought it was ok. I liked the nods to the original, but they were clearly there to 'make fan-boy smile', which in itself does not make a good move. (Scott Pilgrim, I'm looking at you.)

I agree with a lot of what you said. It boiled down to the idea that the whole thing was supposed to be a journey for Flynn Sr. (I mean, it has to, right? If that's not the point why didn't he just do the big self explodey thing to start off with and save a lot of programs 'lives'?) Luckily I did already care about the character thanks to Tron. Unluckily they cast yet another awful 'son of'. What the hell is going on with this? Mummy 3, Indi 4, Tron 2... At least in Legacy I guess the Hero.2 makes a bit more sense as Flynn wasn't being the hands on guy we had seen in the original, instead he plays a kind of Obi-Wan, which I thought Bridges carried off rather well.

Loved the music. It's like Daft Punk had taken the old fashioned idea of a score and pulled it kicking and screaming slap bang into the 1980s.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

It does have some bangin' choonz, but I walked out of LOTR and Batman whilstling their themes. Tron...couldn't tell you what they sounded like now.

[rssefuirosu.livejournal.com]

The best description for the character was "Obi-Wan Lebowski" and, hey, it fits. I liked his character a lot, especially as I have a tendency to use "you're fucking with my zen, man" myself.

[twicedead.livejournal.com]

I can still hum the tunes... and they keep on sneaking into my dreams. They're just not as lyrical as some classic soundtracks.

Me, I blame the EU.

OK, so a lot of the filmmakers who create these sci-fi epics were Star Wars fans. You read an interview with them, it's almost always Star Wars that caught their interest in fantastic cinema. But as fanboys they have been steeped in Lucas's expanded universe for the last 33 years and to them that's what Star Wars means - a huge universe with a detailed 2000 year story where every minor character has a detailed backstory. They don't remember that the original film that caught them up was actually quite a sparse affair and the backstory was all implied.

So when they go to do a movie, they build these marvellous, detailed worlds with huge sekret backstories and write up 100 page histories for every minor character. Then they try and show that to you in the movie and have to have long monologues to squeeze in the cool ideas they have, and they leave things out that are important because everyone who is involved in the production knows the 1000 page backstory and therefore doesn't notice that the key emotional beats of the story are missing.

That was the big problem with TL for me. That and the fact that the final lightplane dogfight had no connection between the effects and the actors - I didn't know what was going on and I didn't feel that anything any character did had any effect on the final outcome.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

no connection between the effects and the actors

Yes, absolutely. So much of the film was shot in digital studios which meant that, like the Star Wars prequels, you had beautiful, huge, vistas, in which people walked and talked because there wasn't enough room for them in the greenscreen room to run about and fall over.

[(Anonymous)]

With Hollywood, the rule seems to be that, if the original story has got anything really thought-provoking in it (like the Aquinas "I have to obey my own rules" line in Dawn Treader) it ends up on the cutting room floor for fear of alienating the viewers. But on the other hand, if the commissioning studio executive has picked up any half-baked waffly mysticism du jour in his Kabbala encounter group that morning, then in it goes.

H

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I suspect it may be an older story even than that.

[colonel-maxim.livejournal.com]

On a purely wargamer geek complaint - so Clu is going to invade the Real World(tm) with a couple of thousand men armed with shiny sticks, a squadron or so of air support and a couple of troops of light armour. Heck, I reckon that the NYPD will have them on toast even before the National Guard and the real Armed forces get involved.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

And that assumes the laws of physics programmed into the alternative reality are the same as ours and his military units would even work here.

[vampyrefate.livejournal.com]

We thought it was kinda fun. I take the point about the tunes though. I've still got the tunes from the original stuck in my head; the new ones...?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can hum the original theme thirty years later. this one...?