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

On Wed, 29 Dec 2010, Lance McLain wrote:

>> Bah.  Twilight at least has the Mormon subtext to keep things 
>> interesting.
>
> You know, I had never realized the whole Mormon subtext until we were 
> evangelized by some Christian friends of ours on how evil we were for 
> allowing our girls to watch and read them.  Ha! And by the way, even 
> knowing that now and having read the anti-Twilight propaganda, I still 
> have difficulty find the whole Mormon subtext in any way meaningful (at 
> least in the movies, I didn't read the books).

Just for the record, I don't cite the Mormon subtext to *disparage* the 
books; there are plenty of other bases on which to do that!  :)  I 
actually find the subtextual Mormonism rather interesting, as a way of 
understanding how Stephenie Meyer is both reflecting her Mormon upbringing 
and critiquing it, whether consciously or unconsciously.

>> 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?
>
> How about the whole Buddhist/Koan thing.  The notion that sometimes 
> doing nothing is the best thing, the value of silence, the minimalism of 
> Flynn's accomodations, etc...

Well, suffice it to say that that is a complete departure from the 
original film.  I don't necessarily mind the difference in perspective, 
mind, but I *do* mind the fact that the transition from one to the other 
is never fleshed out.  And it's all complicated even more by the fact that 
the new film uses one of the theistic rallying cries from the original 
film ("I fight for the users!") at a crucial climactic point, despite the 
fact that the new film has almost nothing to say about the user-program 
relationship (whereas the user-program relationship was absolutely central 
to the original film, with its input-output towers and so forth).

>>> I can see why the critics and anyone who thinks too deeply panned 
>>> this.
>> 
>> But can you see why Tron fans are panning this?
>
> Yeah..they've grown up.

No, that's not it at all.  The problem here is that Tron Legacy was made 
by people who *don't like* the original Tron -- starting with Disney-Pixar 
chief John Lasseter, who was apparently the guy who convinced Disney to 
scrap the sequel that the original movie's director had been developing, 
in favour of a new script that would ignore all the social-technical ideas 
and focus instead on some half-baked father-son stuff.

>>> 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.)
>
> Fair enough.  But I don't think it was ever intended to be primarily a 
> morality tale.  Or are you talking about more technical virtues and not 
> thematic ones?

Yes, technical/aesthetic virtues rather than thematic ones.

>> 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.
>
> Yeah, that was so awful, I wondered why it was even done.  It was so 
> bad, that it must have been done for other reasons.

I do think they were trying to make a visual parallel between that scene 
and the bit near the end where everyone's standing on a narrow beam of 
some sort, but to what end, I don't know.

> But that whole break-in sequence was unrealistic to begin with so maybe 
> the director was just clumsily preparing the viewer for the absurdities 
> to come?

Well, one of the points of the break-in sequence was to introduce the 
Cillian Murphy character -- not because he has anything to do with this 
movie (he doesn't), but because they wanted to set up a sequel.

> Was this the directors first movie?

Yes.  And I think the best line I have seen on this guy recently is that 
he was originally promoted as the next James Cameron, but now that the 
movie is out there, he's looking more like the next Peter Hyams.

> Dude!  Those motorcycles were awesome, and the planes and Frisbee fights 
> and such.  That was freaking awesome!

The planes were an interesting twist on the lightcycles, admittedly.

>> 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.
>
> Ah...well I hadn't seen the original film in so long, I might as well 
> not have seen it.  So I had no problem with the film being inconsistent 
> with it's predecessor.

See, this is *exactly* why Disney refused to re-issue the film on DVD or 
Blu-Ray *before* the sequel's release.  They knew the two films had almost 
nothing in common (plus, of course, they were afraid that 21st-century 
movie buffs might find the original film too early-'80s).

> :)  No worries.  I don't mean to say that you should have enjoyed it, if 
> in fact you didn't.  I admit though, I enjoyed it much more before I 
> read all the critical reviews later that told me why I shouldn't have. 
> Killjoys.  ;-)

Speaking as a Tron fan, it has been somewhat irksome, if not painful, for 
me to see how a lot of the positive reviews are essentially positive 
because the people writing them never cared for the original movie in the 
first place, so they think the sequel doesn't have to try to be any good 
either.  *They're* the ones killing *my* joy, I say.  :)

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