About Tron Legacy

[scavgraphics]

You know how revisions, reboots, and revisits are often said on geek forums to have raped their childhood? Tron Legacy doesn't do that. It's more like slightly uncomfortable, but ultimately satisfying one night stand with an ex for old time's sake

Comments

[foomf]

I keep seeing people whiz on Avatar as if their remarks somehow made it less. But the louts and the snobs have always done this; they used to taunt the actors from the crowds and throw turnips when Juliet's voice broke.

Yes, it's apparently the old Hero's Journey, told cleverly in a completely new format and with a very familiar dialect; when something is truly new, it's best to present it in its own right wrapped in the familiar and comprehensible. When you want to get an important message through to people who are self-centered, trivial, ignorant and blind, it's best to wrap it in something new enough to get it past the closed minds. But some people, self-righteous, don't seem to GET that this is what it takes.

Not saying that this is necessarily you, but I saw Avatar repeatedly, the second time with my nephew, and then again to see what I couldn't see because I was too busy being overwhelmed. I know it has weaknesses, and that the characters are, while forcibly three-dimensional, not necessarily as detailed and nuanced as they might be.

Riff-Trax is the cheater's short-cut to the blase "seen it all" -- they do the work of watching over and over and over until every wart and blemish stands out in their bitter, miserable, tortured brains, and then they defend their sanity by mockery.

But I don't seek them out to cure me of enjoying a movie that makes me applaud at the ending.
It was YEARS since I had seen people stand up and applaud at the end of a film, and that was opening night of Avatar.
I haven't seen it with any movie since.

Tron Legacy ... I haven't seen it yet, but I plan to see it tomorrow; I hope it's as good as you've described, and as "pretty" as others have. I don't think I'll love it forever, but it apparently isn't WORSE than the original.
And it's a very amusing thing to me that you bring up the comparison, because Tron-the-original was even more blatantly a Hero's Journey, and not nearly so well written or acted as Avatar.

[scavgraphics]

Well, wow.

Sorry. I didn't like Avatar. I'm not the first to compare the two films, I didn't even bring it up with the folks I saw it with. Avatar is a very pretty movie, but that's it. If was the exact same script with people in makeup, filmed on the backlot, it wouldn't have had any of the acclaim heaped upon it. I saw it before reading any reviews. When I left I thought "wow, wasn't that just Dances with Wolves with aliens?" I hadn't realized that that was a meme already at the time, and I still haven't actually seen Dances with Wolves. It was all spectacle. I've now seen the spectacle. I'm sure I'll see Avatar 2 Electric Boogaloo when it comes out, but I don't need to see the first one again.

On "seeing the RiffTrax version" - I wasn't aware that it was a cheater or snob thing. I enjoy RiffTrax as I enjoyed MST3K before it, and I enjoy hearing RiffTrax for movie's I've seen before. They did Avatar, so I watched it. I'll watch it when they do Tron. Hopefully they'll even do Tron 1.