Tron: Legacy
I saw "Tron Legacy" last night. We (Ian and I) saw it in plain ol' non-IMAX 2D, which proved to be a plus because the theatre was less than full and we got decent seats with nobody sitting in front of us. I also think the film might be too dark (in terms of lighting) to enjoy with 3D glasses, which makes tings even murkier.
My overall review is "Meh".
The first movie, Tron, came out in 1982 and was chock-full of computer jokes that maybe a handful of people in the audience might understand (for example, the hero's name, Tron, comes from the security command "tron", short for "trace on", used to trace a command's progress and thus allow debugging. There's a "troff" command, too). With today's audience being much, much more computer savvy, the new movie had exactly zero computer references. The fact that they were inside a computer mattered not one whit; the movie could have taken place on Pandora with the inhabitants being N'avi, for all that it mattered. The movie took place in a strange world, where people rode funky motorcycles and combatted one another by throwing discs. That's it.
The Tron world has a large populace of "programs", but they all act just like people. They go to clubs, they carry umbrellas when it rains. No one acts any different because they are this program or that; we are, in fact, never told what kind of program anyone is. I was expecting things like "This guy is good with numbers, because he's an Accounting Program" (In the original, Tron was good at combat because he was a security program that sort of thing), but that never happened. They all had names that gave no clue as to what kind of program they might be ("Hi, my name's Gem", "Hi, my name's Cora"). They were just people. From time to time our hero is told things like "Go see this program, he is powerful and important" but we're never told why this program might be powerful or important.
There is a thing which is Important, and we are told that this thing "will change everything!" No more diseases for mankind, everything will be awesome! But we are never told how that might happen, or how this thing would do that. We just have to accept on faith that this thing would be awesome.
The effects are, of course, very nice. CGI people still look like they are CGI, but they're getting better at it. From time to time a CGI face would pull me out of the movie ("Wow, is he ever CGI'd"), but I could live with that. It was ths story itself which was kind of meh.
So: not a bad movie, but not great, either. I had high hopes for it, which may have been part of the problem. But it was built-up as some incredible sci-fi action, and it wasn't. It had its moments, but the movie really could have used less character development (yes, yes, Flynn and his son have missed each other, I get it) and more things exploding in dazzling special effects.
We got to see some good trailers, though. Thor, Pirates of the Caribbean: Jump That Shark, and the Green Hornet. I found it vaguely disturbing that the movies were all billed as "in 3D (and in select theatres in 2D)", but hey, I'm old.
My overall review is "Meh".
The first movie, Tron, came out in 1982 and was chock-full of computer jokes that maybe a handful of people in the audience might understand (for example, the hero's name, Tron, comes from the security command "tron", short for "trace on", used to trace a command's progress and thus allow debugging. There's a "troff" command, too). With today's audience being much, much more computer savvy, the new movie had exactly zero computer references. The fact that they were inside a computer mattered not one whit; the movie could have taken place on Pandora with the inhabitants being N'avi, for all that it mattered. The movie took place in a strange world, where people rode funky motorcycles and combatted one another by throwing discs. That's it.
The Tron world has a large populace of "programs", but they all act just like people. They go to clubs, they carry umbrellas when it rains. No one acts any different because they are this program or that; we are, in fact, never told what kind of program anyone is. I was expecting things like "This guy is good with numbers, because he's an Accounting Program" (In the original, Tron was good at combat because he was a security program that sort of thing), but that never happened. They all had names that gave no clue as to what kind of program they might be ("Hi, my name's Gem", "Hi, my name's Cora"). They were just people. From time to time our hero is told things like "Go see this program, he is powerful and important" but we're never told why this program might be powerful or important.
There is a thing which is Important, and we are told that this thing "will change everything!" No more diseases for mankind, everything will be awesome! But we are never told how that might happen, or how this thing would do that. We just have to accept on faith that this thing would be awesome.
The effects are, of course, very nice. CGI people still look like they are CGI, but they're getting better at it. From time to time a CGI face would pull me out of the movie ("Wow, is he ever CGI'd"), but I could live with that. It was ths story itself which was kind of meh.
So: not a bad movie, but not great, either. I had high hopes for it, which may have been part of the problem. But it was built-up as some incredible sci-fi action, and it wasn't. It had its moments, but the movie really could have used less character development (yes, yes, Flynn and his son have missed each other, I get it) and more things exploding in dazzling special effects.
We got to see some good trailers, though. Thor, Pirates of the Caribbean: Jump That Shark, and the Green Hornet. I found it vaguely disturbing that the movies were all billed as "in 3D (and in select theatres in 2D)", but hey, I'm old.