The movie struck me as being similar in some ways to Avatar. Great effects, story was shaky. It felt like a lot of “bad guy follows good guy around”. And Clu was kinda underwhelming as a villain. I missed Master Control’s badass voice. THAT was a program you did not mess with.
Am I reading this right?
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In pursuit of perfection, Clu is getting rid programs he can’t repurpose, and those he can are being shipped off in the tram to the reprogramming center.
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But his purge of the ISOs was really about a sort of jealousy over any other creature who stands in a filial relationship to Flynn (making Quorra metaphorically Sam’s sister, possibly why they never showed them kissing although there was a kiss in the original).
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Tron’s discs had a white inner ring because deep down he was still loyal to the users.
I woke up this morning suddenly wondering where the hell they got/stored all the mass/energy involved in generating people or sucking them into the next universe. Not that this wasn’t an issue in the original, but the blanket answer given in Legacy boils down to “From the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, maaaan.”
It’s still a problem for the planned massive invasion on earth, because although they avoid showing it here, we know from the first movie that the propagation time through the portal is about like waiting for your color prints from your inkjet. That’s a hell of a bottleneck to try and get their entire army through.
Wow, a lot of blah blah about a movie where a dude gets sucked into a computer… :rolleyes: You’re not supposed to intellectualize it, you’re supposed to just sit back and watch it happen, like Transformers.
My 40 year old self really enjoyed the movie. My 11 year old self thought it was awesome.
Out of curiosity, is there any such thing as a bad movie or just failure on the part of the watcher to sufficiently dumb down to the movie’s level? (That is, cinema as faith healing; if it doesn’t work for you, you weren’t trying hard enough.)
I think that if you know going in that the main conceit of the movie is that anthropomorphized computer programs in neon tracksuits and bike helmets are forced to compete in video game combat to the death by an evil authoritarian Master Control Program, then (unless you are ten years old,) then you ought to know that a certain amount of willing suspension of disbelief is required in order to enjoy the story.
Your objections are puzzling. Yes, gladiatorial combat is retained because it wouldn’t be Tron without it. If it were otherwise, every single other person who viewed it would cry “foul!” If you absolutely need to lampshade it, just use the uncontroversial postulate “Programs may exhibit behaviour that is not intended by their programmers.”
Are you really straining at the gnat of magically-created matter? This part of your brain ought to have quietly turned off when they worked the trick with the orange in 1982. They gave us the hows and wherefores, then: A laser did it. “The molecules themselves are suspended in the laser beam, and the computer maps out a holographic model.” That’s how it works.
Jeez, I can’t imagine how unsatisfying it must be to watch a fantasy movie inteded for children of all ages and be chafed every time the laws of physics are violated. A Tron movie ain’t going to appeal to the part of me that’s a forty year old IT professional, it’s meant for the vestigial eleven-year-old who thinks Sinistar is great fun.
Oddly, I think Tron appeals precisely to the kind of people who are going to worry about the conservation of mass/energy. But that’s okay.
It appeals to the same type of audience as Star Wars, IMHO. It doesn’t need to be plausible, just cool. See also: lighsabers, Force powers, etc.
Anyway, these types of films are myths for the 20th/21st century, not hard SF.
The thing is, the whole dealio about the conservation of mass/energy really shouldn’t come into play at all. It bugged me at first, too, until I realized that there’s no way in hell all the energy converted from Flynn’s mass could’ve been stored in the first movie, so clearly there’s Something Else Going On. Obviously, there’s no way they could’ve stored *that *energy, so worrying about where the energy required to bring CLU et al over into our world is a non-starter.
No, what bothered me was that when Sam was digitized, he appeared with his street clothes (which were then cut off and disposed of). But when he and Quorra were brought back over, they weren’t in their Grid clothes- somehow, Quorra’s clothing had been translated over into something which wouldn’t stand out too much here. That kind of implies that CLU and his mean, nasty carrier wouldn’t have come over unchanged, either.
I think there’s an undisclosed amount of time between them jumping through the gate in Tronworld, and Sam meeting Alan at the abandoned arcade. The final scene in the arcade is probably meant to be a day or two after they escaped the Grid. Sam’s come back to collect some of his dad’s technology, and meet with Alan. First thing we see is him futzing around with the data storage thing he had clipped to his iPhone in the beginning of the movie. When he goes upstairs, Alan’s standing around in the lobby, and he mentions getting another page, this one from Sam. Quorra is already outside - if they’d just translated back, she would have had to pass Alan in the arcade to get out to Sam’s bike, and I think Alan would have asked about her. Sam tells Alan he’s taking over Encom, then turns on the marquee, symbolizing that he intends his run at Encom to be a continuation of his father’s policies.
Why he couldn’t just tell Alan that in an email is a separate question. Possibly, he can no longer bring himself to send email, for fear that the recipient might delete it, and unknowingly kill some innocent inhabitant of the Grid.
You didn’t answer my question. Is it possible for a movie to be bad in a way that it can’t be defended by simply saying “well, if you’re aren’t willing to dumb yourself down to its level then that is your problem”?
That said, I love plenty of stupid movies. The entertaining ones that give me reason to overlook the dumb. This movie did not do that.
I wouldn’t want a Tron movie without them. I just want a story good enough to explain it.
And nobody has yet really answered my question. Was it really Clu’s intent to materialize an army of tens of thousands of people into the basement of a video arcade or did I misunderstand something?
Yes, if I’d been entertained by the movie I wouldn’t much care about that. But I really don’t see it as my responsibility to dumb myself down to a movie in order to enjoy it, it has to meet me at least halfway. I loved Tangled, a childhood fantasy in which the laws of physics are repeatedly broken and didn’t even care that her hair changes length in every scene. Because it entertained me.
And I’m sorry if it personally offends you that I didn’t like a movie you liked. I’m not trying to convince you that you have to not like it too, I’m simply trying to explain why I didn’t like it. For me, Tron was not “fun stupid” it was just “stupid stupid.”
When the planes shot straight up, stalled and started to fall backward, I muttered “I guess you didn’t solve the icing problem, huh?”
I really wanted to like this movie, but just… didn’t. Any random episode of ReBoot had more geek-cred - this was a cookie-cutter action movie with a cookie-cutter main character and cookie-cutter “evil twin” bad guy, whose motivation makes no sense in the way cookie-cutter bad guy motivation never does - having gone to the trouble of bringing the kid onto the grid, let’s just throw him into a deadly game of laser-frisbee and a deadly game of light-cycle… just for laughs, y’know? I’d’a thought the plan was to use the kid to find his father, but… oh, well…
For that matter, when the kid enters the grid he materializes on what superficially looks like office of his dad’s arcade, located in a simulation of the real-world neighborhood of his dad’s arcade. Why does getting back to the portal require a restaging of Planes, Trains and Automobiles?
I also don’t get where the ~50kgs of mass needed to give the babe a body in the real world came from (let alone how the entire “army” was going to manifest). I’d sorta figured the movie would end with hero-guy carrying program-babe around on a USB key, maybe plug her into a laptop at the beach with her integrated webcam pointed at the sunrise.
Computer speaker: Wow, it’s so beautiful, it… AAGH! TOO BRIGHT! CAMERA IMAGE WASHED OUT! CCD OVERLOAD!
Alternately, I’d like characters in movies like this who make the jump from their relatively sterile universes to the real world to immediately gag because they get overwhelmed by the smell.
Anyway, where were all the cute computer in-jokes? Heck, the original had a Tinkerbelle-like sidekick that could only say “yes” or “no”. He was a bit. There was nothing like that in this film, nothing computer-specific about the environment itself, no in-jokes for nerds (and only one or two offhand references to the first film, i.e. “it’s all in the wrist”). The hero could just as easily have been transported to Wonderland or Narnia or the San Francisco Pride Parade or really anyplace full of latex-clad bikers.
It was kinda nice to see a young Bruce Boxleitner again. And the old one seems to be holding up pretty well.
And it’s just as well the bad guys wore yellow stripes and the good guys wore white stripes, because the fights were sufficiently confusing and underlit that I couldn’t follow them half the time, anyway.
As an afterthought, there one one mildly amusing throwaway bit - the news report about Flynn sr.'s disappearance showed some magazine covers he’d been on, including a Time issue showing him balancing a 5.25" floppy disk on his finger, an adaptation of the April 16, 1984 cover that featured Bill Gates.
Or what about games like EVE and WoW and CoH … all our poor little avatars sob
I may never delete a character again!
LOL … as we walked out of the theater my 13-year-old son was ranting about “Chekhov’s gun” over that.
I didn’t really dislike it, but it was overwrought and cliche. The original was alternately geeky and cheesy but it also vibrated with a passion for the brave new digital world its creators could see on the horizon. This new one seemed bizarrely disconnected from modern digital culture. It didn’t even feel like it was up on current technology, let alone showing any sense of the amazing things that still lie ahead as the computer revolution continues.
Isn’t that the light cycle he left Flynn’s haven in? I was wondering how he could use it out there if the others couldn’t leave the grid.
I was under the impression the light cycle he used to get back was his father’s vintage bike - the one Quorra told him was the first and fastest. (And yet he gave it to a bum. Right.)
Having never seen the original, I don’t understand why the ISOs were special. How are they supposed to change the human’s understand of the world?
The Iso’s weren’t in the first movie.
Hah, okay then, I guess I missed it being explained in Legacy then. I don’t understand why their spontaneous generation could be a revolution in human thinking.
That’s what I thought as well.
I suspect all these loose ends are the result of the same rewrite. The spare light cycle from the arena was probably originally given to the bum. His father’s super-special light cycle was probably originally used in a chase where its commented-upon extra speed was really important. But at some point late in production something got dropped or rearranged and there wasn’t time to fix all the little bits of supporting business.
It wasn’t. We were told that they were amazingly special, but we were never told why, other than possibly the fact that they spontaneously appeared in the grid without having to be deliberately created.
In some of the trailers, we were told that Flynn had been talking very excitedly about something amazing, a miracle that would revolutionize medicine and religion and change the human condition. I though he was talking about the digitization laser. The ability to arbitrarily digitize humans into a computer world, and re-materialize them later, potentially elsewhere, would be by itself an utterly astonishing, world-changing invention. Instead, they ignore the implications of that technology entirely, and then invented a new macguffin whose actual importance was told, not shown. I was quite disappointed. I enjoyed Tron Legacy for the visuals, but the plot was a great failure of imagination.