Tron: Legacy

(Movie Review)

            Before I get into the sequel, I should probably first write my thoughts on the original movie:

My History with Tron

          The first Tron movie came out in 1982, when I had just turned 4, but, not yet being cognizant of cultural trends, the movie passed me by unnoticed.

            Of course other movies like Star Wars were also slightly before my time, but Star Wars was impossible to avoid in the 1980s.  Tron, by contrast, disappeared.  In the pre-Internet age, if something wasn’t being re-run on TV, it might as well not exist.

            I don’t remember how I first heard about Tron.  I think it may have been in connection with the Tron video game which was still in the arcades several years after the movie had disappeared but regardless I somehow picked up tidbits of information here and there and gradually, I somehow learned that the Tron video game had been connected to a movie, that the movie was about a man trapped in the world of video games, that it had been produced by Disney, and that it had been Disney’s attempt to capture the Star Wars market.

            The whole thing sounded awesome to me.  I loved Star Wars, I loved video games, I had been brought up on Disney, and I was a huge science fiction geek as a young lad.

            In the late 1980s, video rental stores became popular, but even though I searched for a copy of Tron, it never seemed to pop up.

            When the Internet was in its infancy, I searched Prodigy (W) for any information about Tron, and actually found a few detailed reviews on-line.  Unfortunately, all the reviews were negative.

           

            The negative reviews, however, did little to dampen my enthusiasm.  What did the critical snobs know?  I was at an age when my critical faculties had not yet fully developed, and like many 13 years olds before me and after me, I actually liked all sorts of terrible movies.  Most of the movies I loved got horrible reviews from the professional adult critics.

            Eventually, I was finally able to track down a VHS copy of Tron. 

            (Sidenote: time passes slower when you’re a kid,  so I’m not sure how much time I actually spent obsessing over this movie before I finally got to see it.  It may only have been a couple of years, but it sure felt like an eternity.)

            To my immense disappointment, the critical snobs had actually been right.  Even to a 13 year old’s undevelopment sensibilities, the movie was awful. 

            For starters, it was poorly edited.  Plot points would be introduced, and then would be abruptly dropped with no explanation.  A cute helpful little ball of light would show up to help guide Jeff Bridges’ character, and then suddenly be absent from the next scene with no explanation.  Much was made of the dreaded “grid bugs”, but no confrontation with them actually occurs.

            None of the characters were at all interesting, although that didn’t really matter much because in the video game world they were all dressed alike in the same ridiculous suit and helmet, so it was difficult to tell who was who anyway.

            The special effects, although no doubt impressive for their time, failed to create a world you wanted to get immersed in.  Instead it was just bland shapes moving across a bland digital background.

            And even to the extent the digital world might have been impressive, the movie showed its hand way too early.  Everything that might have been impressive about the digital world was shown to the audience within the first five minutes. So, instead of discovering these wonders with the main character, throughout the rest of the movie the main character is constantly being amazed at the new things he sees in “the grid”, but the audience is just bored because they’ve seen everything already.

            And on top of that, the action scenes are just not all that great.

           

            It’s no wonder this movie underperformed at the box office.

            All that being said, I admit to still having some nostalgia for Tron, in that illogical way in which we have nostalgia for everything for our childhood whether it’s deserving or not.  Given my history with this movie, I probably have more nostalgia for the idea of Tron than for the actual movie, but nostalgia nonetheless.

Thoughts on the idea of a Tron Sequel

          I was surprised when I found out that Disney was making a sequel to Tron.

            It’s well known that studios are increasingly dependent on movie franchises these days, but to the best of my knowledge this is a first: a big budget sequel, over 25 years later, to a movie that is largely forgotten and was never that good in the first place.  (If anyone can think of a similar case, let me know in the comments, but I think this is a cultural first.)

            It’s a gamble, but on the face of it at least it’s an intriguing gamble.  Just because the first installment of the story was disappointing, it doesn’t necessarily follow that all future stories using the same characters and setting have to be bad. 

            From an artistic point of view, there’s something more interesting about making sequels to bad movies than to good movies.  A good movie has already told its story successfully, and doesn’t need a sequel.  Whereas a bad movie needs a chance to redeem itself.  “Okay,” the film makers might say, “You didn’t like the first movie. We understand.  Not all of our ideas and dramatic possibilities came through as well as we had hoped.  Give us another chance.  Here’s what we were trying to do.  We hope you’ll enjoy this next film more”

            I know, of course, that nothing in Hollywood is ever done for artistic reasons.  Someone in Disney studios must have decided that Tron still had enough name recognition to be profitable, and it was as simple as that.

            And yet, they weren’t just looking for a quick buck.  Disney had ambitions of launching a whole franchise off of this movie, which means that in order to breath new life into a dead franchise, they wanted this film to really be good.

            The challenge of making a good sequel to a bad movie intrigued me.

Why I watched this Movie

          I was travelling around Malaysia and after a day of sight seeing, I was zoned out in the hotel just watching free cable TV.

            The 1982 Tron movie came on, and I re-watched the whole thing just for nostalgia’s sake.

            Then immediately following, Tron: Legacy was showing, and I thought: “Oh, why not?” and I just stayed glued to the TV for both movies.

            The next day I was out and about sight-seeing again, and I didn’t get a chance to sit down and write my review.  And in fact it was about 3 weeks before I got back home again and had access to my regular word processor. And so the review for this movie never got written up at the time.

            But I put it on my “Movie Review To Do List”, and a year and a half later I eventually got around to it.

            To re-fresh my memory, I got the DVD and re-watched it before this review.

The Review

          Having watched this movie twice, once right after viewing the original, and once just on it’s own, the first point to make is: don’t watch this movie right after the original Tron, because you’re essentially just watching the same movie twice, and that’s as boring as it sounds.

            There are, it must be admitted, a couple neat nods to continuity that I was able to catch by watching both movies in succession.  The big door opening up to ENCOM for example, is the same in both movies.  Minor characters like Alan Bradley reprise their role, and there’s also a nod to the Ed Dillinger, the villain of the original movie, in the character of his son Edward Dillinger Jr.

            But, unfortunately the new movie doesn’t have many new tricks that weren’t in the original movie.  The bike races and disc games are a little bit amped up, but essentially the same concept.  (And the airplane scene is just essentially the bike race in the sky).

            I enjoyed Tron: Legacy slightly more the second time when I watched it in isolation. It still wasn’t a great movie, but it was at least watchable.

            Tron: Legacy does represent a slight improvement on the original Tron, but they didn’t do near the amount of work they needed to do in order to fulfill their ambition of changing a mediocre old film into a new hit franchise.

            As in the original Tron, none of the concepts in the film are really thought-out or make much sense.  But who cares about that?  All would be forgivable if we just had some really exciting action scenes, but alas we don’t. 

            The middle of the film is especially guilty in this regard, when the action stops for a long period of time for a lot of explanation and exposition.

The Grid

          Computers and video games have changed a lot since 1982.

            Back in 1982, it still seemed like a cool idea to make a movie about a man trapped in a video game.  Nowadays, the lines between video games and movies have blurred so much anyway that there wouldn’t be any point.  (I mean, you could make a movie about someone trapped in Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, but it wouldn’t be any different than a normal Hollywood action movie.)

           

            This is perhaps why it’s so hard to update Tron.  And perhaps why the filmmakers just stay with the same ideas they had back in 1982.

            The logic behind the film is explained in the DVD extras.  The Tron world was cut off from the rest of cyberspace back in the 1980s, and evolved independently of the Internet as a sort of “digital Galapagos” (to borrow the words of the filmmakers).  Everything about this world is the evolved from the concepts of the original film, so you have all the same machinery and games, just more evolved.  It’s supposed to look futuristic, but to my eye it still looks very primitive, and only slightly improved from the 1980s technology that originated it.

           

            Imitating the monotone colors of the original film, the filmmakers have made this film almost entirely with bright white lights against a dark background.

            It’s alright, kind of, at first, but the director vastly overestimated the amount of time I would want to spend in this world. 

            This is not the kind of fantasy world you want to get absorbed in.  This is a fantasy world that has very little to offer visually, and it creates a very claustrophobic feel to it.

Other Observations:

*  There’s an interesting article in I found in Salon.com’s archives [LINK HERE].

            Apparently in the months leading up to the release of Tron: Legacy, Disney made it impossible to track down the original Tron.

        You’d think, then, that with the long-awaited release of “Tron: Legacy” now imminent, Disney would be flogging the original within an inch of its virtual life, cashing in on a few generations’ worth of golden geek nostalgia. But it’s not. You can get the out-of-print, 8-year-old 20th anniversary edition on Amazon for about $140 now. And you can wait till sometime next year for original “Tron” director Steven Lisberger ‘s remastered Blu-ray edition, which has no release date yet. And you can’t get it on Netflix.

Why, in the midst of a marketing push so aggressive it includes track suits  and a revamping of theme parks to make them more Trontrastic, would the mouse be holding out so

The writer goes onto posit:  Could it be because … the original movie itself isn’t that great?

            Yes, probably, but also as I said above: Tron: Legacy doesn’t work after viewing the original Tron, because it’s essentially the same film twice.  My guess is someone at Disney realized this, and that’s why during the theatrical release of Tron: Legacy, they restricted access accordingly.

* The character of Castor/Zuse reminds me an awful lot of Merovingian (W) from The Matrix II.  Both are portrayed as flamboyant and eccentric, and both characters are rogue computer programs that form a 3rd faction in addition to the already established conflict between the human protagonist and the evil computer program.

            In fact, the more I think about it, Tron: Legacy actually has a lot of similarities to The Matrix II.

            Earlier in this review, I questioned: Why a Tron sequel now?  But, upon reflection, maybe that question is easily answered.  How much do you want to bet that the success of The Matrix movies had some bearing on Disney’s decision to finally dust off this old property?

            For all its many problems and plot holes, The Matrix II at least had some really awesome action sequences, and those make it a fun movie to watch.  Tron: Legacy, on the other hand, does not have very impressive action sequences.  So if you’re in the video store, and you’re trying to decide between The Matrix II and Tron: Legacy, go with The Matrix II every time.

* As I’ve already complained about, with the disc games and bike races recycled from the original Tron, this movie offered very little that was new.

            So, what could they have done to improve the second movie?

            Well, here’s one thought.  In the first Tron, we got cheated out of a scene with the grid bugs.  (We saw the grid bugs moving across the screen, but they never actually reached our heroes.)  Why not have put a fight with the grid bugs into the sequel?  I think that could have been really cool.

            And while I’m thinking back to under-used concepts from the original that could have been brought back for the sequel: what about that yes-no ball of light?  They should have worked a cameo in for it somewhere.

* In this film, Jeff Bridges plays a dual role as both himself, and a younger 1980s version of himself.

            It’s impressive groundbreaking special effects and yet…the technology is not quite 100% there yet.  The computer animated younger Jeff Bridges was almost perfect, but something about him looked just a little bit off. 

            Worse yet, there were all sorts of shots were you could tell the camera was deliberately shooting younger Jeff Bridges from the back of the head, or avoiding a close up.  It distracted me from the story and focused me on the mechanics of the film production instead.

            The same thing was true of the character Tron.  Whenever he appeared on screen, I could never think about his character arc.  Instead, I just couldn’t help notice about was the lengths the filmmakers were going to avoid having to show his face.

* Clichéd dialogue alert:

Sam: Oh, and…you were right.

Alan: About what?

Sam: About everything.

* From the DVD extras: Olivia Wilde was talking about her character Quorra: “ [Director] Joe [Kosinski] was wonderful in wanting to create something new, something that didn’t necessarily have to be the typical female lead vixen warrior character we have seen quite a few times.”

            Well, cliched female vixen warrior character successfully avoided.

            In its place, however, we have something equally clichéd in science fiction films: the sexy female character with the body of a full grown woman, but the mind of a naïve child, who relies on the male protagonist to educate her about the world.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky: America is accelerating the apocalypse: Global warming and nuclear arms conflicts threaten the planet, thanks in no small part to U.S. policy failures
and New antiwar plan emerges for Syria: Leader details urgent crusade: Barbara Lee tells Salon why military intervention is unnecessary and details her alternative approach to Syria mess