Re: Cory Doctorow's impresessions of Tron:Legacy

> http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/05/tron-reloaded-come-f.html
>
> Tron: Reloaded, come for the action, stay for the aesthetics

But whatever you do, don't go expecting anything resembling a decent 
story!!  That's the word from some critics, at least, e.g. Drew McWeeny 
(formerly known as "Moriarty" when he wrote for Ain't It Cool News):

- - -

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/motion-captured/posts/review-tron-legacy-dazzles-visually-but-ultimately-disappoints

[ snip ]

At the age of 12, I did fall for "TRON," head over heels.  Part of it was 
the game that they also released to arcades, part of it was the 
cutting-edge nature of the film, and part of it was the heady mix of ideas 
in the film.  But over time, revisiting the movie, much of what I liked 
initially faded, and my opinion of the film changed quite a bit.  I still 
think the film is significant for how it looks and for some of the ideas 
in the movie, but I think the movie itself has some fatal dramatic flaws. 
Steven Lisberger is a smart guy, and even a visionary in some ways.  His 
film predates Internet culture, but in a way, it is the first major piece 
of film fiction about Internet culture.  The idea of avatars based on 
users and an entire universe that only exists inside a computer is 
something that seems positively commonplace these days.  If you're reading 
these words, then you at least partially live online yourself.  I also 
think the lightcycles are one of the coolest SF film ideas since the 
lightsaber, and iconic.  Brilliant, even.

But as a film?  "TRON" really doesn't work.  It's poorly staged, poorly 
paced, and never quite brings all its ideas together.  It is a visual 
marvel, but inert.

In almost every way, "TRON: Legacy" is a perfect sequel to that first 
film.  It also is a visual marvel, with many good ideas in it, and yet 
somehow almost completely inert as a film.  It is a truly terrible, 
sloppy, half-assed script by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, and no 
amount of spectacle can distract me from just how much the film 
disappoints as drama.

Joseph Kosinski has been the biggest question mark on this film since he 
was first hired for the job, and based on this first film, he strikes me 
as a guy who would make a stupendous production designer and/or FX 
supervisor.  As a director?  Mmmmm. not so much.  Like Lisberger before 
him, Kosinski appears to have a tin ear for performance and tone and how 
to build a scene for any sort of dramatic impact.  Image after image in 
this film, Kosinski knows how to dazzle, and it helps that Daft Punk 
appear to have been genetically engineered for the sole purpose of writing 
the score for this film.  But by about halfway into the film, I found 
myself completely disconnected from what I was watching, and utterly 
discouraged.

The largest failing of "TRON: Legacy" is that, unlike the original film, 
this movie does not look forward in any way, and it does not seem 
interested in any larger ideas.  Instead, it is yet another tiresome 
"chase the doodad" action movie with a curiously small amount of action in 
it.  I am so tired of watching films in which people chase around some 
magical item that will "destroy the world" while other people chase them 
around.  I think the stakes in these movies are just horseshit.

In this case, the magical doodad in question is the identity disc on the 
back of Flynn (Jeff Bridges), the returning character from the first film. 
At the end of the original, Flynn had defeated the MCP and Sark, the 
alter-ego of his corporate opponent, Dillinger (both played by David 
Warner) and taken control of the company he started, ENCOM.  The new film 
begins several years later, after Flynn has built ENCOM into a sort of 
proto-Microsoft.  He tells his young son Sam a story about the world of 
Tron and how he's on the verge of a major breakthrough, a miracle of 
sorts.  Flynn vanishes that night, never finishing his story to his son, 
and Sam grows into a surly adult, played by Garrett Hedlund, who spends 
his time avoiding responsibility and pranking the company that his father 
left behind.

Flynn, of course, vanished back into the computer world, and the film has 
to get through a lot of shoe leather before it manages to throw Sam Flynn 
into the computer world as well.  Sam, disoriented and confused, is picked 
up by a Recognizer and sentenced to the Games.  He is taken to a facility 
where they dress him in one of the light-up Tron outfits, slap an identity 
disc on his back, and then throw him out into the Disc Wars for the film's 
first big action sequence.

The first act of the film worried me as I was sitting in the theater.  I 
thought all of the plot acrobatics and "character" was wasted energy. 
The character work is facile, surface-only, and almost entirely 
expository.  And the plot mechanics were so uninteresting, so labored, 
that I found myself wishing I had a fast-forward button just to get Sam 
into the computer.  The most interesting move Kosinski makes in the whole 
film is just a lift from "Wizard Of Oz," with the film playing in 2D up to 
the moment Sam arrives inside the computer and the whole thing suddenly 
opens up to full gorgeous 3D.  Neat feeling while you're watching, but 
it's a tech trick.  That's all.  Thematically, that doesn't add anything 
to the movie, and that seems to be the problem with all of the cool tricks 
Kosinski throws at the thing. thematically, there's nothing going on. 
It's all just eye candy, pure sugar, and no substance.

For a film with very little narrative thrust, "TRON: Legacy" still ends up 
being needlessly convoluted, and part of that seems to be the naked, 
almost grotesque attempts at setting up a franchise at the expense of 
coherence or any sense of satisfaction.  A good example of what I mean 
takes place very near the start of the film, in what feels like a reshoot 
even if it's not one.  There's an ENCOM board meeting that Sam Flynn 
interrupts with an Internet prank, and during that meeting, there's a 
casual introduction to the son of Dillinger, David Warner's character in 
the first movie.  When they cut to Dillinger 2.0, or whatever his name is, 
it's Cillian Murphy.  I was shocked since I haven't seen his name attached 
to any publicity for the film, and I thought, "Oh, wow, they managed to 
keep the film's villain so completely under wraps that I didn't even know 
he was in the film!"  Nope.  Those three or four lines of dialogue 
represent the sum total of Murphy's work in the film.  There's no further 
reference to him, no effort to incorporate him into the story. nothing. 
He's just introduced and then abandoned, and it feels like this big giant 
obvious blinking red light.  "WE ARE GOING TO MAKE THIS INTO A FRANCHISE 
AND THIS IS THE BAD GUY NEXT TIME AND WE JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW AND 
ISN'T THAT COOL?"  Well. no, actually, it's not.  When you cast someone 
like Cillian Murphy and you introduce him as a major character with a key 
connection to the first film, that casting indicates that this isn't a bit 
part.  And when you never return to him in the entire movie, it fells like 
naked franchise building.  How about you tell me one complete good story 
first, and then we can talk about sequels?

The more egregious example, and this is a spoiler, so consider yourself 
warned, is the way they handle Tron himself.  After all, this film isn't 
called "FLYNN: Legacy," is it?  And Bruce Boxleitner, who played both Alan 
and Tron in the original, is back reprising his role as Alan, so it's 
obvious you have the right cast to bring Tron back.  Without saying 
exactly how they handle the character, I'll just say that he is indeed 
represented in the film, but again. as soon as the movie introduces him in 
this new context, that's it He's gone.  Out of the movie.  And in such a 
way that they might as well throw up the subtitle "THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT. 
NEXT TIME."  Again, screw you and your next time.  Unless my ticket stub 
for "TRON: Legacy" is going to get me in to see the next film, you've 
failed in the basic task of telling me a story.  This entire thing just 
feels like act one and a big chunk of act two, with nothing to bring the 
various story threads together.

The real bad guy in the film, as the ad campaign has promised, is Clu, 
also played by Jeff Bridges.  The thing is, Clu is the digital avatar that 
Flynn created when he was still in his 30s, and Clu still looks exactly 
like the young Flynn.  There are several scenes in the film where Clu and 
Flynn play opposite each other, and many scenes in which other actors 
interact with the youthful Clu.  As long as the character isn't speaking, 
the illusion is so good it's creepy.  But the moment he talks, the mouth 
ruins the trick.  Ultimately, if I loved the movie in every other way, Clu 
wouldn't bother me, but it feels like Clu represents the film as a whole. 
He looks right for the most part, but there's something key about him that 
doesn't work.

In fact, if I had to describe the film in the most concise way, I would 
call it a Fleshlight.  If you don't know what that is, go look it up (as 
long as you're not at the office.)  It is, in my opinion, the perfect way 
to sum the film up.  It looks like the real thing, and it might get you 
off, but it is plastic, phony, and utterly soulless.

I apologize for the scattered way I'm organizing my thoughts here. I 
wasn't planning on publishing this review until December 5th, but the 
timetable got shifted, and so I'm scrambling here to try and give voice to 
all my conflicted thoughts on this one.  Like I said, it was the Disc Wars 
scene where I really started to worry, because as cool as the ideas are in 
the scene, and as compelling as the Disc Wars are in theory, it's almost 
an inaction scene.  It's so cool, so focused on how it all looks, that 
there's no threat to the scene.  The same is true of the big lightcycle 
scene, and that bums me out more than almost anything else about the film. 
They are such an iconic, amazing creation, and the game grid that they 
battle on has been redesigned by Kosnisnki, just as the Disc Wars stadium 
was, and like that earlier scene, the action looks and sounds furious, but 
it's uninvolving.  There's really only one other big action scene in the 
film, much later, and as soon as someone said "Lightjets," I was hooked. 
Taking the notion of the battle from the lightcycles and adding in the 
ability to fly sounds like an opportunity for something we've never seen 
before.

Instead, what we get is a beat-for-beat, nearly line-for-line recreation 
for the scene in the original "Star Wars" where Luke and Han battle the 
TIE fighters.  And, no, I'm not exaggerating.  It is a stunning lift, and 
of all films to steal from so blatantly. "Star Wars"?  Really?  I don't 
buy it as "homage," either.  It's an entire sequence, not just a nodding 
reference.  And as soon as that scene ended, essentially wrapping up what 
little action the film features, I realized that I'd gone well past 
"disinterested" in what I was watching.  A sort of naked hostility set in, 
and I found myself angry about the missed opportunity unfolding in front 
of me.

How many times have you read the description now of Quorra, the character 
played by Olivia Wilde, as a "warrior"?  Well, that description is the 
only way you'd ever know she's a warrior, because there's no evidence of 
that in the film.  And, yes, it's fair to hold them to that description. 
In the interview I did with Wilde, she compares her character to Joan of 
Arc.  Uhhhh... I don't think so.  It's a shame, too, because Wilde gives 
the best performance in the movie.  She is an artificial being struggling 
to understand what it is to be alive and human, and Wilde invests Quorra 
with more life than anyone else onscreen.  She has one moment, in the 
film's final images, that was the one thing in the entire film that 
actually affected me, and in that moment, I got a glimpse of the movie 
that "TRON: Legacy" could have been, and leaving me with that glimpse is 
what finally broke me for good.  Nothing offends me more in a film than 
real potential squandered.  When I sit through something awful like "Alvin 
and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel" with the kids, it doesn't offend me 
because I have no expectations for a film like that.  If it ends up being 
awful, who is surprised?  Who expected anything else? With this movie, 
there is so much good work that's been thrown at this to no avail that 
it's just painful.

When you learn why everyone wants the magic doodad disc, it is a 
ridiculous notion, a premise that seems like a really bland and 
disappointing scheme by a generic bad guy.  There's a sort of cursory 
attempt to make Clu a tragic villain, made a monster by his creator, but 
introducing an idea by paying it mere lip service is not the same as 
actually exploring an idea in-depth, and that is a mistake that "TRON: 
Legacy" makes over and over.  Even the idea of a father-son connection as 
the emotional anchor for the film is, at best, a sort of half-hearted 
effort.  What's really strange is the way the structure of this film is 
very close to the structure of the original, right down to the use of a 
Solar Sailor at a specific point in the story.  It feels like they were 
afraid to try anything new here, and that's a weird idea, since the first 
film is practically experimental abstraction on a studio level.  It's a 
safe sequel, timid and tired on a story level even if it's bold and 
bombastic on the surface.

I'm also disappointed by the way they handle Flynn in the film.  Since 
they throw away Tron completely, everything falls on Flynn, and there are 
some great images in the film of the older Bridges in character.  The 
first time Sam sees him inside the computer world is striking, with 
Bridges as a sort of digital Buddha, and there's another moment a little 
later when Flynn shows up in the End of Line club, ready to kick some ass, 
where it feels like the film is about to get amazing.  And almost 
immediately, they back off.  It's confusing and sad.  It feels like they 
didn't bother writing any dialogue for Bridges.  His whole "Hey, man, 
like, wow, dude" act in the film is funny in fits and starts, but it 
doesn't feel like he's playing a character.  He's Obi-Wan Lebowski, mixing 
fake profundity with hippie-dippie language.  I love Bridges, but it's 
like they had no idea what to do with him here.  Michael Sheen shows up 
and chews more scenery than Nick Nolte in the final act of Ang Lee's 
"Hulk."  Most of the other performers in the film feel like furniture, 
like they've been given nothing to do.  There's no pulse to this world, 
and so it all just feels like travelogue filed with preposterous 
conversations about story points that just don't matter.

In the end, it is not a film that I find truly awful.  There are too many 
things in it that I enjoyed looking at or listening to, and I assume the 
soundtrack will end up in permanent rotation in my car.  I plan to see the 
film at least one more time in IMAX with some friends, just so I can look 
at the way Kosinski played with the aspect ratio in the IMAX version, and 
just so I can bask in the surface of the film one more time.  But the 
disappointments of the movie are real and profound and insurmountable, and 
the various elements of the film just don't add up.  This is, as I said, a 
major gamble for Disney, and I assume they may make some of their money 
back.  But I can't imagine this film will inspire any real passion in new 
viewers, and even those who love to wallow in nostalgia will find their 
goodwill tested by it.  "TRON: Legacy" exists as sad proof that this 
franchise's real legacy is pretty pictures and little else.  And that is 
no fun to report.  No fun at all.

End of line.

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