TRON Legacy
Dec. 18th, 2010 01:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishJoseph Kosinski (dir.), TRON Legacy
Okay, I can be slightly more objective about Legacy than about the original, but ony slightly.
The plot: twenty-five years ago, bright young software engineer Kevin Flynn vanished, leaving behind his young son Sam. Last night Alan, one of Flynn's partners, got a page from Flynn's old arcade. Sam goes to the arcade and ends up in computerland to save Flynn.
The script's a muddle. The pacing's a little slow. The story suffers from trying to be too many things all at once, and gives nearly all of them short shrift: the Flynn/Clu/Tron triumvirate, the isos, the game grid, what was going on during Flynn's exile, all that. It follows the TRON tradition of introducing story elements (gridbugs, anyone?) and then dropping them with no explanation. The framing story of Sam growing up and growing into the company... meh.
Kevin Flynn in Tron had, I thought, a lot of personality. There's a great bit in his apartment ("Does she still leave her clothes all over the floor?" et seq) that, in like six lines, gives you a solid feel for the characters of Flynn, Alan, and Lora. I don't know if it's that Sam is an Action Hero For The Next Decade (gritty rather than cocky) or if he really just doesn't have as much going for him, but I never really connected with Sam.
The minor characters desperately wanted more development, which could have involved trimming them down to a more reasonable number as well. It's, unsurprisingly, a Bechdel fail: the two female characters never talk to each other. Michael Sheen tries hard but makes a very poor David Bowie.
I liked it pretty well.
I loved the new look for the Recognizers, I loved the lightcycle sequence. The whole aesthetic felt like Tron with a visual refresh, running at a higher resolution. I loved the little tips to the old movie, "Now that is a big door" and the Identity Disc speech and so on. I liked that Quorra turned up to save Sam's bacon, I liked Zen Jeff Bridges and Evil Computer Jeff Bridges. I very much liked the Flynn/Sam dynamic. (It reminded me of Merlin finally meeting Corwin at the end of Prince of Chaos.) The music was its own thing and not the Wendy Carlos score but it got along well with me all the same. It carried me along and wowed me and occasionally surprised me.
I'm not sure what to think about the 3D. I don't know that it really added anything and it made things in the background fuzzy at times. On the other hand, it was kinda neat. Eh.
I don't know that it's all that good, but I'd see it again.
Okay, I can be slightly more objective about Legacy than about the original, but ony slightly.
The plot: twenty-five years ago, bright young software engineer Kevin Flynn vanished, leaving behind his young son Sam. Last night Alan, one of Flynn's partners, got a page from Flynn's old arcade. Sam goes to the arcade and ends up in computerland to save Flynn.
The script's a muddle. The pacing's a little slow. The story suffers from trying to be too many things all at once, and gives nearly all of them short shrift: the Flynn/Clu/Tron triumvirate, the isos, the game grid, what was going on during Flynn's exile, all that. It follows the TRON tradition of introducing story elements (gridbugs, anyone?) and then dropping them with no explanation. The framing story of Sam growing up and growing into the company... meh.
Kevin Flynn in Tron had, I thought, a lot of personality. There's a great bit in his apartment ("Does she still leave her clothes all over the floor?" et seq) that, in like six lines, gives you a solid feel for the characters of Flynn, Alan, and Lora. I don't know if it's that Sam is an Action Hero For The Next Decade (gritty rather than cocky) or if he really just doesn't have as much going for him, but I never really connected with Sam.
The minor characters desperately wanted more development, which could have involved trimming them down to a more reasonable number as well. It's, unsurprisingly, a Bechdel fail: the two female characters never talk to each other. Michael Sheen tries hard but makes a very poor David Bowie.
I liked it pretty well.
I loved the new look for the Recognizers, I loved the lightcycle sequence. The whole aesthetic felt like Tron with a visual refresh, running at a higher resolution. I loved the little tips to the old movie, "Now that is a big door" and the Identity Disc speech and so on. I liked that Quorra turned up to save Sam's bacon, I liked Zen Jeff Bridges and Evil Computer Jeff Bridges. I very much liked the Flynn/Sam dynamic. (It reminded me of Merlin finally meeting Corwin at the end of Prince of Chaos.) The music was its own thing and not the Wendy Carlos score but it got along well with me all the same. It carried me along and wowed me and occasionally surprised me.
I'm not sure what to think about the 3D. I don't know that it really added anything and it made things in the background fuzzy at times. On the other hand, it was kinda neat. Eh.
I don't know that it's all that good, but I'd see it again.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-18 07:40 am (UTC)I liked it a lot. There were things that didn't work, like Zeus, but there were a lot of things going on there that worked really well, like Sam's relationship with his father, and CLU's relationship with his creator. I connected with Sam. Plus, the times when Flynn decided to be a badass, he was my favorite kind of badass: the Fraa Jad kind.
I knew I was gonna like it when Dillinger was trying to fix the presentation in the beginning: they had every excuse for making up some technobabble; it would even be canon, since the elder Dillinger just talked to his desk. What did they throw up on the screen?
kill -9 `ps -a | grep os12`, baby. What's Sam's first reaction on seeing the grid console?whoami.Actually, I think I knew I was gonna like it as soon as I heard the soundtrack a couple weeks ago.
(Also: did you notice the Bit sculptures on the mantelpiece?)
no subject
Date: 2010-12-19 02:09 pm (UTC)I seem to be having the opposite reaction I did with Inception: I'm liking it more the further away from it I get. Absolutely agree about Flynn's Fraa Jad-ness.
Use of real Unix was a pleasant change from I HAVE PRIORITY SIX ACCESS, yeah. (incidentally, did you recognise Cillian Murphy as Baby Dillinger? I didn't, not until one of the guys I was with pointed it out.)
And, yeah. That soundtrack. Wow.