[info]http://www.grrr.co.za/forum/MGalleryItem.php?id=36[/info]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/
So did you see Tron as a kid? Yip it came out in 1982 and the inner geek in us (I watched in on video a couple of years later) was born. The first movie was lauded as groundbreaking both for the visuals and for the idea behind the movie. Computers were still a bit of a mystery back then and so like other “fantasy” movies it captured the imagination and became a cult favorite.
So when the sequel Tron: Legacy was announced many people were licking their lips in anticipation, myself included. Would we be transported back to this fantastic world and enjoy the ride of a life time? No like the Star Wars “prequels” and many other cult sequels this movie just did not live up to the hype or anticipation. In fact I am sure many purists will forget this movie was ever made.
Firstly, you don’t need to have watched the first movie to watch this movie, they explain EVERYTHING in the beginning in a very boring and unimaginative way. It kind of feels like the director thought, ok audience, you need to know the following, so sit up, pay attention for 10 minutes while I lecture then we can start the movie.
Which would be fine if it was in fact a movie that you were about to watch. Instead it is a series of sequences put together to form some kind of a story. Tron is known for 3 things primarily, the striking futuristic visuals, light cycles and disc battles, as far as I can tell the director thought that this is all that was necessary to make a good movie. I can imagine the story board for this movie was the shortest ever and the conversation went along the lines of….
“So we start off with a disc battle”
“Yip, then we have a light cycle chase”
“Then we fill the rest with black, orange and white visuals?”
“Cool, but wait what about the story?”
“ Oh yes, son comes to rescue dad, meets a bunch of characters that are really actually irrelevant and if they weren’t there you wouldn’t even have noticed”
“Sounds good, who has $170 million dollars to blow?”
Actually the story is not bad, it is not ground breaking and very formulaic but that is not the problem, the problem is how it is executed, like I said, scenes and sequences strung together like a limp roll of bruckworst sausages, they were put in this movie because they are expected to be there and that is the only reason they exist. Most of these scenes add little to the storyline or to advance the plot in any meaningful fashion. The director didn’t take time to develop any of the characters and he relies too heavily on narration to explain it to the viewer. As a result you never connect with anyone and you don’t give a rats ass actually about what is going on. I watched this in 3D and this too was a disappointment, I might as well have watched the 2D version with clear glasses on, that is also a general theme of this movie, it has so much potential at every turn but never ever even tries to use it.
So was there anything good about this movie? Yes, the music, Daft Punk those European techno-funk DJ’s scored the movie and they did a decent job. The music did go with the visual style of the movie which was also (not surprising) very good. Maybe not as good as Avatar but some very cool effects, not enough to totally redeem the movie.
This movie had the perfect platform to create an epic adventure movie. A movie that could have been 2.5 hours of fun, building up the story and characters until the inevitable climax that leaves the viewer satisfied, instead it speeds through the intro and then ends. It is like eating a kingcone without the ice-cream.
Would I recommend this movie to someone? No! If you watched it would you feel like going postal because you wasted 2 hours of your life? Not likely, it is watchable but only if there is nothing else on.
On the Fuck-Yeah-o-meter this movie gets a 4/10
