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Review: Tron Legacy
At its core, Tron Legacy is about Open Source. End program.
Tron Legacy is “geek porn” in every sene of the word – from the sexy visuals to the thin plot about a guy on a motorcycle – but the music is waaaay better.
There are movies and games that are beyond review, especially to the preordained. Iron Man, Star Wars, and now Tron Legacy fall into this special filter for fanboy, geeks and pop culture aficionados.
So after seeing the movie we’ve been waiting for 2 years for this weekend, we pondered doing a full review for what is our #2 most anticipated movie of 2010 (read the other 9 here and scoff – we fell into the hype for most of them and will do a follow-up next week.) So here is the long and short of it – its gorgeous, stylish and a spectacle to look at, but that’s about it.
We’ll cough up to the fact that we’ve been seduced by this movie since our first post about it back in July 2009 here – so much so that we dedicated the look of this site to imagery from the film. Which no matter how you look at the story is still the main reason to go and see Tron Legacy – it looks amazing!
If you haven’t seen the original Tron don’t worry about it – you will be able to jump in faster but it won’t help you any more to understand the story since it revolves around basically a new character – Sam Flynn.
Everything we’ve shown you here and that you’ve seen in the media is really what this movie is all about – the Tron style. The harsh blacks with the blue and red neon really look amazing and the lightcycle design is incredible and especially how the bikes come into being. Same goes for the lightjets and the lightdisc battles – all amazing and all incredible technological achievements in design and computer graphics.
But without trying to sound too cliched; the story is as souless and cold as a computer – but hey that’s maybe what they were going for – if so: mission accomplished!
The closest we can compare this movie to is the first Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace – think about it – 3 decades after the original they go back to the well and try and make magic happen again, only this time they are remaking a movie that wasn’t as beloved as A New Hope – and with a first time director.
Other comparisons to The Phantom Menace includes the stone-like acting, the fight scenes you wish were way longer, the lack of characterization, characters who do nothing but look cool or push the dialogue forward etc. al.
We didn’t really have high hopes for this movie in terms of story after revisiting the original Tron a few months ago, and looking at the history of Disney’s grown-up movies, but we thought maybe with Disney buying both Pixar and Marvel Comics that they could have used some of that brain power to make the story more exciting.
It was 2 hours of eye-candy, without a satisfying ending, also like The Phantom Menace and The Matrix sequels – and we blame some of the hype for it. Its like having the weight of 3 powerful Star Wars films and then having to live up to a 4th one – we must say that director Joseph Kosinski has some balls for stepping up to the plate for this one.
As we type this we are listening to the melodies of the Daft Punk soundtrack which is great.
Garrett Hedlund as the lead character was great in the 2D real world scenes but as soon as he enters The Grid his personality disappears with the color.
Michael Sheen is as usual great! But stands out being very weird to be a computer program.
Jeff Bridges is great but for some reason lapses q few times as The Dude.
Olivia Wilde is as hot as she is in the trailers but with 50% less things to actually do.
Beau Garrett as Gem can change our clothes anytime.
What might pull you out of the movie is The Polar Express version of Bridges as CLU – a CGI version of himself when he was 35. This technology is still not there yet? They spent $150 million on this film and had the special effects guy that won the Oscar for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button working on it and it still looked fake? Another ballsie movie from the director for putting the real Bridges and the CG Bridges together to demand scrutiny.
Not sure if these are spoilers or not so don’t read them if you want to go in fresh: Cillian Murphy - the Scarecrow in Christoper Nolan’s Batman movies makes a cameo as an Encom computer programmer that has developed OS12 – a shot at Microsoft and Apple. And in a few shots you can see the actual namesake of the movie appear – in another CGI version of a 30 year old Bruce Boxleitner that is now some kind of Sith Lord of The Grid. He has cool duo-colored discs but they pretty much waste him in what could have been a very cool character.
So should you go and see TRON LEGACY: Hell Yes! Should you see it in IMAX: Hell Yes again! Should you go in thinking this is going to be the movie of the year: Hell NO!
Bask in the graphics, stay for the action sequences, reach for your iPhone when characters start talking.
Tron Legacy opens in Hong Kong on December 23
End program.
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Good concise review. I agree with everything you said about the characters being the coolest looking statues. It should also be noted that the dialogue/script was AWFUL. I’m slightly irritated that my buddies enjoyed it immensely….. PHILLISTINES!!
I think expectations have a lot to do with it. I expected dog crap and didn’t quite get that so I was a bit more pleased. It was visually interesting to watch at first, but the dialogue did get a bit loopy at times. I also asked questions like ‘why do programs need to eat vegetables’ and ‘why is there a bar?’ (our answer–because there was a bar in the Matrix II).
But I think I have a soft spot for dystopian and dystopian-like films showing alternative universes and whatnot. Still, I left the theater saying ‘they were so close–they had the groundwork (visuals) and if they just would have spent a few bucks on a script they really could have knocked this one out of the ballpark”.