Re: Forget TRON: Legacy - give me the sequel to Buckaroo Banzai!

On Wed, 29 Dec 2010, Lance McLain wrote:
> If Twilight is a fantasy for narcissistic teen American princesses who 
> must be center of attention (and I think it is)...then Tron: Legacy is a 
> similar nostaligic fantasy for the geeky guy still reveling in his 
> 1980's teen years.

Bah.  Twilight at least has the Mormon subtext to keep things interesting. 
And the original Tron had the suppression-of-religion-under-Communism- 
defeated-by-Christ-figures thing going for it.

What, by way of comparison, does Tron Legacy have in that department?

> I can see why the critics and anyone who thinks too deeply panned this.

But can you see why Tron fans are panning this?

> If you watch this film with the primary intent of looking for flaws you
> will find them in spades.

How about looking for virtues and not finding any?  (Or all that many.)

> And yes, on a critical level, I should expect more of film.  But at a 
> visceral level, this film had me reliving my glory days, when I thought 
> I could program the world.

Can't say the film worked for *me* on a visceral level.  That might be 
because it was pretty stupid from the get-go.  I mean, the movie pretty 
much lost me right around the point where the minimum-wage security guard 
risks life and limb to pursue that guy on top of the skyscraper.  And not 
just any minimum-wage security guard, but an overweight klutz (remember 
how he spills his coffee?) for whom balance presumably does not come easy. 
As lovely as it was to see the Vancouver skyline on the big screen like 
that, the scene was still pretty stupid, and nothing that happened in the 
hour-and-a-half after that made up for it, and indeed there were quite a 
few other travesties as well (like the extremely perfunctory yet contrived 
way they tried to shoehorn the character of Tron himself into the story).

> And while it satiated my need for teen coolness, it also critiqued 
> itself as well (unlike Twilight).  It acknowledged the limits of mans 
> ability to create, that there exists creative powers outside of man 
> (with the iso), that the human need for family bonds is more important 
> than getting lost in the technology and we must be on guard against it. 
> Other than that, I don't think you should think too much.

See, already I think you're thinking too much simply by virtue of lending 
any weight to the fact that the film included these very, very basic 
concepts (concepts it did not know what to do with, I might add).

> And Paul, the concerns you expressed about the need for digital world 
> relating to the real world didn't bother me so much.  Rather, I saw the 
> digital world being more related to the mind of Flynn (as it was his 
> creation) than the outside world.

But that's part of the problem right there.  The digital world that we saw 
in the original film was not *Flynn's* creation, it was *everyone's* 
creation.  And Tron's most important relationship was not with Flynn, but 
with his actual user, i.e. Alan Bradley.

Hmmm.  This post may sound rather negative.  I certainly don't mean to say 
that you shouldn't have enjoyed it, if in fact you did enjoy it.  I just 
don't see any way that I myself can be argued into liking it.  :)

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