Tron: Legacy 412
In preparation for this weekend's release of Legacy, I re-watched the original Tron. Yes, I own the DVD. I thought I would watch it ironically and sarcastically, but it turns out I just can't. I really like the original. As for the sequel, I'm not going to write a full review, but I'll say that the visuals were pretty amazing. The CG Jeff Bridges was pretty darn close, but just not quite there. And the light cycles were awesome. What are your thoughts?
Daft Punk (Score:4, Insightful)
Daft Punk is amazing. The soundtrack fits into a movie of this type so well, I just had to buy it right after watching the movie on IMAX. The Daft Punk music suits a movie like Tron so much more than the original's symphonic score, I think.
Also, watching Michael Sheen do this unholy cross between Ziggy Stardust and Frank-N-Furter is hilarious.
Re:Tron 1.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
FWIW, I hate modern cutting. I frequently can't tell what's happening or form an emotional response before it cuts again to something else. The epitome of this is a Michael Bay fight scene. Some body part hits someone. It doesn't look cool and exciting. It looks like 30 to 60 seconds of incomprehensible mess and then they show you the outcome.
I suppose they just don't want to pay money for decent fight choreography and think the cutting is good enough.
Then you get a movie like inception and the fight scene in the hotel corridor with longer cuts and it blows you away emotionally. I think they are getting away from the hyper cutting.
Agree on most of the rest. It was mostly "B" actors (who went on to be TV stars or secondary actors). And the plot/writing was average.
Re:Tron 1.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the hyper-cuts in most movies are distracting and jarring and you lose sense of who is fighting whom, especially in the Transformers movies. I can't wait for them to go away, along with the "shake the $200,000 camera attached to the $50,000 SteadiCam rig to simulate a handheld camcorder" effect used in almost every movie since Blair Witch. Or the "fiddle with the zoom as the actors are talking", a la BSG.
Directors, these things don't lend "immediacy" to the shot, they distract us and take us *out* of the moment, and it makes some of us slightly nauseated after a while! Probably not the intended effect.
Re:Saw it Sunday (Score:5, Insightful)
It captured the feelings I got from books like Snow Crash and (especially) Neuromancer of a virtual world. The towers of darkness and light.
Could this be because it was based on the look of the original Tron movie which was released no less than 2 years before Neuromancer and 10 years before snow crash? Tron had a very clear influence on all cyberpunk writers, and many others in the cybernet arena.
Lots of that made sense (Score:4, Insightful)
The first thing that happens to Sam when he enters the computer world is they cut off his clothes and re-clothe him in "computer clothes." Huh? Are they used to guys just showing up wearing Earth clothes now?
Why would they care? The programs job is to put on game armor. They would have cut off whatever they were wearing.
As for the clothes not being in the first movie remember this is a while different laser system in operation, if Flynn was going in there all the time why would he not want to keep whatever clothes he had on at the time?
omputer clothes look like clothes. Walls look like walls, floors look like floors, doors look like doors. You can actually slam the door, in a computer. If you drive a computer car on a computer racetrack, your tires leave computer rubber on the road (rubber?).
Again, this is a much improved system which could explain better visual fidelity, and honestly who wouldn't want to look at clouds? Although I have to admit the more realistic physics bothered me, because why even have them?
There's a major villain type character that's hunting our heroes throughout the movie -- that is, until he decides he's actually a hero type character, for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Dude, that was Tron, from the first movie. He was reprogrammed to be subservient to Clu, but in the end hunting users reverted control to his primary purpose.
Similarly, Sam is told to go see a character who is supposed to be able to help him out. Said character has been living a double..triple life
That made plenty of sense to me in the context of earlier events. He was helping the ISO's, and was caught be Clu. He was allowed to live on the condition that he reported everything back to Clu and kept in contact with the resistance. The flamboyant thing was just a disquise to keep too many people from pestering him and keep alive the mystery of Zeus.
That's all well and good, but just what was it that happened in the computer world that convinced him to do that?
The whole AI spontaneously forming from nothing?????!?!?!? That was not important at all?????
He's taking over the company to finish what his father started, to show the world there is artificial life with independent thought. That was also why they showed her thirst for reading and understanding, to show that she really was on par with humans and not just a program.
Well, it must work, because Olivia Wilde's elf character manages it at the end... but no, seriously, how does that work, exactly?
Ok, that certainly requires a bit of suspension, but given that we accept it can re-integrate a human from the dust that was left after a full laser scan, there's no reason it couldn't simply print out another being - part of the "magic" of the iSO's might well have been they had complex enough DNA to actually survive the transition.
I kind of thought during the thing that if Clu succeeded it would have just meant 4000 soldiers and Clu re-created in the same basement space - awkward. Not sure he thought that through really.
Isomorphic algorithms. They'll cure disease, end hunger, and generally save the world. Because they're isomorphic, I guess.
They'll change the world, because they are true artificial life. Curing disease would actually be more than possible if you could be taken apart by a laser and put back together without whatever ailed you, so from that standpoint just perfecting the transition technology could have been part of it too.
Mind you, I don't think the movie was perfect. I just don't think it had nearly as many plot issues as I was expecting.