Sunday, December 19, 2010

Movie Review: Tron Legacy

Personally I liked the new Tron movie better than the original. I will grant you that part of that is because after 28 years the special effects have come a long way. However the new Tron movie doesn't have the Red "Dictorial" Communist vs Blue "Free" America theme to it that the 1982 movie had which in my opinion tended to date the original movie to the 1980s.

There were a couple things which I didn't like about the new movie though. I believe these could have been improved on and perhaps will be utilized if a third movie is made. The first of these is the existence of a character early in the movie who is introduced as the son of Ed Dillinger (the human world villain of the original Tron movie). He is portrayed as having more influence than he should have in the set of scene he is actually in than he should have for such a minor character to the rest of the film. I expected that he would play a larger role in the film but after his introduction he is completely dropped from the storyline never to be seen or heard from again. In my opinion it was pointless to even bring this character into the movie and anyone could have played that role without having to have any relation to Ed Dillinger.

The second thing is regarding the character Tron. Near the end of the movie, he turns against CLU and when he falls into the water you see his color change from red-orange to blue but then he disappears from the storyline as well and is never seen or heard from again. He never after that meets up or interacts with the protagonists of the story. He could have died and it would have made no difference to the plot. There was no reason to show him change back to blue in that scene as that scene advanced the plot of the story in no way whatsoever.

Those are the two main things I didn't like about it and thought could have been better written and handled. I suspect they may be remnants of earlier versions of the script that were changed by the director in rewrites or editing and thus the scenes that would have made them relevant were subsequently dropped from the movie but the set up scenes creating the problems that I mentioned were overlooked and left in the movie rather than being edited out as well. I would be curious to see the original script and see if these problems existed in the original version of the Tron Legacy story.

A third thing that kinda bothered me on a personal note is that at one point in the movie, Quorra mentions how she would like to see a sunrise, but then at the end of the movie the only experience she has at seeing it is while riding on a bike through the city and never gets a clear view of one. Granted I'm sure she got to see a full sunrise from a good location on her second day in our world but I would have thought the sunrise she saw would have been handled differently.

Some things I did like about the movie is that the protagonist and antagonist of the story were fairly equally matched. Something that doesn't occur in a lot of movies as of late. That I thought was refreshing. The villian CLU was also honest in his intentions and true to his purpose. He literally was just doing what he was created to do which gave him a good guy quality.

Something else I liked was that although Kevin and Sam Flynn were both users in the grid, only Kevin actually used the power of the user to influence the grid world. Sam relied upon his natural abilities rather than resorting to "superhero" type powers. This made sense since Sam wasn't a programmer like his father. It also kept the movie balanced between protagonist and antagonist without it becoming too one sided which would have ruined the movie.