TRON: Legacy
It has become difficult for our contemporaries to imagine a fantasy world inside a mundane, utilitarian chunk of plastic, without openable screws, with apps you are not allowed to modify. To them, TRON: Legacy might feel like the adventures of dust particles in a Bissell Cleanview Helix® Bagless Upright Vacuum Cleaner, $79.99 at Target after rebate. The juxtaposition of the familiar and the otherworldly makes some reviewers uncomfortable.
Wardrobes are a well-understood technology. We know their molecular proportion of wood-vs-Narnia with scientific precision. But a wardrobe can be very, very old, and made from very, very old trees-- old enough to have been around when the world, perhaps, worked by different rules. Your daughter would not find Narnia in her plywood-and-brushed-steel Hanna Montana wardrobe.
TRON: Legacy might easily leave you cold, if you never watched the original... during the eighties. Watching the original now for the first time might only put you off more. I watched it for the first time years ago, but was saved from my overwhelming disgust by having played the game in the eighties. That movie serves to tarnish its own legacy as if it were its own Star Wars Prequels.
Those who are nostalgic for the original can remember what it felt like at the time. It felt like the first one minute and twenty-three seconds of this streaming soundtrack. Of course, even then I never thought TRON was remotely plausible-- rather, the art design and music expressed how the idea of information systems felt.
The strength of TRON was a holy trinity of Syd Mead (Blade Runner, Alien), the French comic book artist Moebius (warning: possibly NSFW), and Wendy Carlos, the legendary synth composer. It should have been an art film resembling Walt Disney's Fantasia, but instead, it attempted to add a script and acting, both of which were terrible.
(The art film approach would have also benefited Osmosis Jones-- Wait. What... What am I doing? Let us never speak of that film again.)
Because a sequel has to carry on all the premises of the original, whether they worked or not, I would have preferred a remake, preferably helmed by Tarsem Singh. He directed The Cell (excerpt) and The Fall (trailer), both of which reminded me of Destino (short film) a Disney animation inspired by Salvador Dali.
The bottom line is that I greatly enjoyed TRON: Legacy. It put the problems it inherited into the background, and did well with its advantages. I rarely go to first-run movie theaters, so I saved specifically to see this alone from the current season. I was not disappointed. I plan to watch it again, and would recommend it to anyone prepared to accept it on its intended terms.
Comments
tlatoani on Jan. 5, 2011 11:41 PM
Huh. Seeing you write that makes me more likely to see it.
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