TRON:Legacy

TRON:Legacy (2010)

49% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 192 reviews)

Runtime: 127 minutes

Directed by: Joseph Kosinski

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, Bruce Boxleitner

From: Walt Disney

Here’s a review that goes along with what I talked about late Friday night. TRON is a movie I’ve only seen twice, including my viewing online last week. I didn’t spend too much time thinking about the sequel until recently. I enjoyed what I saw of the new digital world in the trailers, and I also enjoyed what I heard out of Daft Punk’s score from the film, where like with the original movie and Wendy Carlos, electronica gets blended with a more traditional orchestral thing. I was hoping I’d enjoy it more for those reasons rather than the story, which is like how me (and many others) dig the first film. In the past few days, I had heard some savage reviews for it from various critics and even hardcore film fans (the type that usually mark out for movies like the original TRON and you’d figure would love a sequel almost 30 years in the making to their beloved cult flick), but I was hoping I’d enjoy it.

Well… sad to say, those negative criticisms were correct.

In short, Kevin Flynn (Bridges) becomes the head of ENCOM in the 80’s and runs it, but suddenly in ’89 he disappears and leaves behind a young son, Sam (Hedlund). We flash forward to 2010 and Sam is an adult, a “rebel” type (why, he rides a motorcycle!) who technically owns ENCOM but instead of running it he wants to be moody and other people run it instead. It’s a copy of Microsoft, in rather blatant terms. He enjoys messing around with ENCOM, because he’s a jerk, I guess. What a likeable protagonist! Believe it or not, the debate over “open sourced software” vs. “closed source software” is brought up. Basically, companies like Microsoft want it closed, so that only their people know the code and work on it, while others want it open code, so that anyone can work on the code. In the movie, Sam wants ENCOM software to be open, so as revenge he puts out their new operating system online, as if in that world “torrents” and “peer to peer” sites don’t exist. It’s that kind of dumb movie, folks.

Stuff happens and Sam gets blasted into the digital world, which now is more advanced than it was in the first movie, although not as colorful and it’s basically a futuristic world a la Blade Runner, strangely enough. So I don’t know if it’s “better” or not. Not to spoil too much, but CLU is there and he’s Kevin Flynn, but not aged since ’89, as he was an entity created by Kevin way back when. The effect to make Bridges look young… it mostly looks fake and something out of a PS2 game. CLU is evil, though, and he runs the digital world, as he ran off Kevin, who now lives in hiding. Kevin, Sam, and a lady named Quorra (Wilde; I usually don’t think she’s as hot as most people do. But, in this movie she looked very nice) try to escape the evil world and go to the real world.

This movie… sigh. The visuals are pretty and all, and the Daft Punk soundtrack is pretty sweet. The script and story, though… simply awful. I’ll give one example. Early on in the digital world, CLU tries to kill Sam, and that was even after discovering who he was. Yet, later you find out that CLU was involved in getting Sam beamed into his world, as he needs Sam in his nefarious plot. It makes no sense! It’s as if they made up the script as they went along, ignoring what they had written beforehand. Many instances like that take place. There’s a time window for something to happen, and yet there’s no sense of urgency to it. Even the action scenes are mainly just there and don’t really wow you. What a major disappointment.

The movie at least looks and sounds nice. I saw it at the Downtown Disney AMC Theatres. They have their ETX screen, which is their version of a legit IMAX screen. It’s great. The picture looks neat and the sound is tremendous. The bass moments, you can actually feel. Now if only the movie would have been good...

I also have to bring up Michael Sheen's role, as Castor, an albino-looking fey-acting weirdo who acts like a totally unrestrained David Bowie. My Lord, what overacting there. It was still better than Garrett Hedlund's attempts at acting, though.

I'll be back Thursday night with a wacky Christmas film to watch.