What I couldn’t figure out was, how does that make them different from every other program on the Grid? I mean, yeah, someone deliberately wrote TurboTax, but no one ever expected it to become sentient and start hanging out at night clubs.
The visuals were cool and very kinetic, and I wish I’d paid a little more attention to the soundtrack because I got a good feeling from it, but this was a really dumb movie. I didn’t hate it, but it was flat-out dumb. I suppose Tron was The Matrix before The Matrix, but this version felt like it owed a lot to Star Wars, too. And yes, that bit with the planes felt like a straight steal from Iron Man. More importantly the story really made no sense at all, nor did the characterization of the digital world. I thought it was interesting to see Jeff Bridges play sort of a Dude-Obi Wan Kenobi hybrid, but I wish they’d given him more stuff to do. As it was, he spouted some awful exposition and some of my favorite moments in the movie were the two lines where he got to act: “Dogs are cool” and “You’re messin’ with my Zen thing here.” I laughed pretty hard at those. Almost as hard as someone else in the audience laughed at “digital jazz” and “Tron, what have you become?” I think it was calculated to make you give up on even hoping it was going to make sense so you’d just focus on the effects.
The more interesting point of comparison to The Matrix, to me, was the theology. The Matrix sequels got bogged down in a lot of unintelligible nonsense Eastern religion hodgepodge crap. This movie went for a much more straightforward Christian trinity thing. (Clu’s world is imperfect because he was created by an imperfect God, who apologizes and acknowledges he screwed up - although he didn’t write “We Apologize for the Inconvenience” in giant letters of fire.) So I suppose Tron was equally ludicrous, and the parental theme was heavy handed, but it didn’t feel as pompous. I guess that’s good.
Again, the computer world looked great. I wish they’d done more with the color palette, though. There was no reason for that world to be so murky and dark, and I don’t think it made sense for Flynn or Clu to make it all stormy. It got kind of monotonous, although from what I’ve seen, that was just as much a problem in the original Tron. So the movie was entertaining even if it was slick and totally inane. It didn’t have as much imagination as Avatar, but it also was not as self-important and it wasn’t way, way too long, or sorta racist, and the acting was better. I’m looking forward to seeing Jeff Bridges in True Grit next week.
Oh, and while this is a minor quibble in comparison, the de-aged Jeff Bridges just didn’t look right. Maybe it’s because I’m used to seeing Bridges as an older man, but something just looked off about the cheeks of Clu and Flynn in the first scene. He wound up looking a little like Odo from Deep Space Nine, and it felt like that first scene was edited to hide Bridges’ face so you wouldn’t notice that it looked weird.
i liked the movie, but for a smart guy, Flynn made a rookie mistake when he instructed his program to create perfection. Hadn’t he ever seen an episode of Star Trek? You NEVER tell a program to do that. It never ends well.
I get kind of a creepy Palin-voter vibe off the son’s characterization. The father was all keen to change the world and introduce sweeping changes that would improve all mankind and so forth, but the son is a motorocyle-riding, parachuting college dropout and is still the hero, as though the grandiose plans of the father were inaccessible and it was better to make the main character a dumbed-down version of limited ambition and intelligence who’d rather be stealing the efforts of nerds and having a good time on spring break then settling down to do the hard work of actually creating something worthwhile.
In other words, changing to world is, like, hard and stuff. Leave that to the Brainiacs, not normal everyday Americans like you and me!
I didn’t get that sense at all. To me, he seemed to be an intelligent person (there are hints at hacker cred) who had no ambition or self-discipline… until the end, when he has focus and drive.
Bridges’ character in the first film was similarly a bit of a less scholarly type, in contrast to Boxleitner’s more serious-minded character.
Meh, sneaking into the headquarters all spy-ish and escaping by parachute seems more like a grab at James Bond cred. Accomplishing the same feat from his home computer… THAT’D be hacker cred.
I mean hacker, not cracker. Again, it’s all cinematic shorthand.
The average person would have no idea what to type when confronted with a UNIX console, let alone some meathead jock.
I think the thing that bothered me the most about the film (aside from the cheesy dialogue) is that there were way too many deus ex machinas built into the system. I don’t know how many times the characters got into a tight situation and would just touch the ground and create a hole or something out of which to jump, or carve a weapon out of the wall or whatever. It seems like there’s all these little “cheats” built in which make suspenseful situations not that suspenseful.
It’s a video game. 
One that takes “God Mode” very literally. 
If there’s a “deus” in the film, it’s Kevin Flynn, but that’s one of the central themes of both films. CLU even refers to him as a “false deity”, IIRC. Flynn touches the ground twice in the film and repairs Quorra’s code once.
I don’t recall anyone “carv[ing] a weapon out of the wall” or anything similar. It all seemed to play fairly within its own rules, AFAICT.
Well, I can’t honestly remember the details (slept through quite a bit) but I do think they found solutions out of thin air a few times.
Also, I’m not sure what the “rules” are, having never seen the original version.
Saw it tonight with two of my sons, 14 and 11, and we enjoyed it… mostly. Very cool to look at, nice updating of the lightcycles, Quorra (what does that name mean, if anything?) was certainly yummy, and Jeff Bridges did pretty good as a Dude-like Messiah (anyone notice the woman in the End of Line Club genuflect when he walked by?). Given the tyranny of the MCP in the original film, though, wouldn’t Flynn have included some instructions for CLU in terms of the digital equivalents of freedom, democracy, rule of law, etc.? Might have led to an interesting take on net neutrality, Wiki, “data wants to be free,” and so on. Never quite understood why CLU went bad. The movie built on themes from the original pretty well, although the ending was muddled and unoriginal. I’d give it a B.
I saw it last night. Better than I expected.
It’s too heavy on silly Hollywood tropes. (Most annoyingly: Father-son relationships are SUPER-IMPORTANT, women are relatively disposable.) It doesn’t really explain all of its terms that well. (Are we expected to all be Tron fans who know what “User” means there?) It’s a bit stuck in nostalgia.
Still, there are germs of nifty in this. Given that the programs really aren’t programs as we know them, the elder Flynn’s talk of changing philosophy & religion makes a certain Fridge Brilliance sense. There’s something “in there,” in this realm that we think we created, that itself thinks we created it, that’s much much bigger than what we put in. That’s trippy when you really look at it.
And the elder Flynn’s role is fascinating–a creator, a sort of god, who is very mortal.
So, neat themes mixed in there with some standard cultural baggage. I can accept that.
Visually, I liked that the real world was 2D & the strange world was 3D. Watching films in polarized glasses is still new enough to be strange, & this played with that strangeness.
Glad that Tron is actually a character in it after all, which I did not know going in. Thought Garrett Hedlund did quite well for the most part, contra most of the griping I have heard about his acting. A lot more emotion in one scene where he’s disagreeing with his father would have been perhaps more realistic–but that’s one scene.
Never saw the original “Tron” (although I’ve caught bits of the lightcycle chase from Youtube videos), so I can’t speak to whether the new film lives up to the original’s aims and ambitions. But I walked into “Tron: Legacy” with just about zero expectations, and I’m surprised to say that I really enjoyed it. The visual style was absolutely stunning - just beautiful use of color and space. Speaking as someone who generally prefers the grittier realism that visual effects have moved towards in the past decade (led by “The Lord of the Rings” and “Battlestar Galactica”), I was nonetheless greatly refreshed that “Tron: Legacy” made zero attempt to mimick reality and instead went balls-out on creating a fantastic visual world that was more metaphor (and metafiction) than a grounded “universe.” I loved the updated lightcycle sequence and the melting-slash-glass-splintering effect when programs de-rezzed. I loved the neon, the architecture of Zeus’s tower, and those cool vertical transport ships that descend down their own axes after landing. And I almost cheered when they took off in the lightjets. That was just pure eye candy.
I also adored the soundtrack. Daft Punk did an incredible job creating music that felt appropriate to the setting, but also managed to ground and even elevate the emotional resonance of each scene. The sometimes-inconsistent performances from the lead actor was, IMO, more than compensated for by the music, which made me feel exactly what I imagine the director was going for even if Sam Flynn himself wasn’t quite getting me there on his own. It’s sort of how “Duel of the Fates” turned the Darth Maul battle into something that felt epic, even though the writing and performances in that sequence were actually mediocre. It helps that the acting in “Tron: Legacy” is actually quite good all around - I thought Jeff Bridges and Olivia Wilde, in particular, did excellent work.
Sure, the plot doesn’t make much sense if you really delve into the details, but the sense I get from this thread is that the same could be said about the original. What I, as a newbie to the world and franchise, needed was character coherency and a narrative throughline that satisfied at the emotional level, and I feel like the film accomplished both quite well. The writing isn’t great from the standpoint of plot, but it is very good (at least, for a big-budget action blockbuster) from the standpoint of character development.
The short segment near the end where Sam updates Flynn on modern technology, in particular, worked really well - and IMO addresses some of the concern mentioned in this thread that the themes of “Tron: Legacy” seem a bit outdated given how far real technology has come since the original film. Of course it does, because Flynn’s vision of how his creations could revolutionize the world is based on an understanding of how the world was in the 80s. He’s never heard of genetic algorithms (or wifi, or probably even the Internet), so he isn’t aware that the ISOs aren’t quite as fantastically original an idea as he thought the first time he encountered them.
Anyway, all that is to say: I went into the theater expecting, at best, a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. You know, like “Transformers” or 90% of the stuff that comes out in the summer. But while the awesome visuals and sound design came through as expected, I found myself impressed at how solid the underlying story and acting (the “human elements”) were as well. End result, one of my favorite blockbuster scifi flicks in years.
My husband and I are both fans of the original Tron. We loved Tron:Legacy. I can’t understand why some people remember the original as some sort of classic that can’t be surpassed. It had as many implausibilities as this one, and neither its plot nor its characters were particularly great. It was a ride, and a good one. This one was, IMHO, a better ride because of the advances in CGI. And because of IMAX. Wow, IMAX’s rumbling bass reminds me of Sensurround.
Someone on another forum summed up this movie as “Eye and ear candy for geeks.” That’s all I expected it to be, and this geek thought it was mighty yummy candy.
I wish Zuse had been played by David Bowie, but Michael Sheen did a pretty fine David Bowie impersonation.
Well, it cuoldn’t be that much James Bond cred since apparently the entire building had just one security guard, even though the entire board of directors is on site for a huge presentation. Bond wouldn’t even get out of bad for such an easy caper.
I hate to think who all slipped into the building while that one guard was off chasing Sam.
Just saw it in 3D (my first 3D movie!), and I liked it quite a bit. I kept expecting Cillian Murphy’s character to appear on The Grid, and I was surprised when he didn’t. I thought somehow Rinzler would be him.
I would have liked to see Tron a bit more, and Zuse a bit less. In fact, I would probably cut him out of the film altogether and add some screen time for Tron. The ending was also pretty lame.
Overall though, good fun and awesome visuals.
For anyone who likes Jeff Bridges, he’ll be featured on American Masters on PBS on Weds. Jan. 12. Check your local listings: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/jeff-bridges-the-dude-abides/about-the-film/1727/