{"id":11256,"date":"2011-01-03T22:52:59","date_gmt":"2011-01-04T06:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=11256"},"modified":"2011-01-03T22:52:59","modified_gmt":"2011-01-04T06:52:59","slug":"tron-legacy-joseph-kosinski-2010-usa-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=11256","title":{"rendered":"TRON: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010): USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden<\/a>. \u00a0Viewed at West Wind Drive-In, Goleta.<\/p>\n

\"\"Fool me once, shame on you.\u00a0 Fool me twice… or so the saying goes. If ever there was a film that embodied that little pearl of wisdom, it\u2019d be TRON: Legacy<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Not only does it manage to build upon the flaws of the not-so-illustrious original TRON film, but it shares a lot in common with a certain CGI led epic that was doing the rounds at the start of last year.\u00a0 Once again, Hollywood has delivered an expensive slice of show without any substance.<\/p>\n

In the first TRON film, Jeff Bridges played Kevin Flynn, a computer genius and avid arcade game player, whose work was stolen by a colleague.\u00a0 As he attempted to recover evidence of the crime, he was \u2018digitized\u2019 by an artificial intelligence in the company mainframe.\u00a0 Trapped inside the computer, he came literally face-to-face with the programs that ran on the system.\u00a0 Flynn won through a series of gladiatorial games and eventually escaped back into the real world with the help of Tron, a program written by a friend, got the evidence and won the day.\u00a0 TRON: Legacy picks up the action a few years later.\u00a0 Flynn, now a father, vanishes one night.\u00a0 He leaves behind a son, Sam (Garratt Hedlund), and no trace of where he might have gone.\u00a0 Twenty years pass and the son is in danger of losing control of his father\u2019s company.\u00a0 A mysterious pager message leads Sam to his father\u2019s old Amusement Arcade (where, luckily, the power hasn\u2019t been disconnected though it\u2019s been abandoned for twenty years) and before you can say \u2018that was convenient\u2019, Sam is following his father\u2019s footsteps down the electronic rabbit hole.\u00a0 Then it\u2019s business as usual as Sam fights for his own survival, as well as that of a new form of electronic life that his father has discovered on \u2018the Grid\u2019.<\/p>\n

TRON: Legacy is an odd sort of sequel.\u00a0 On the one hand, it contains incredibly explanation of the ideas of the original.\u00a0 I can\u2019t imagine the new film makes a whole lot of sense if you haven\u2019t seen the first one.\u00a0 It completely glosses over the process by which Sam gets into the computer, and the idea that programs are anthropomorphic creatures with free will, barely warrants a moment\u2019s pause.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, it\u2019s currently impossible to get hold of the first film to fill in the blanks for yourself.\u00a0 Disney is obviously trying to appeal to fans of the original with a massive viral marketing campaign, yet the company seems to be going to great lengths to make sure people can\u2019t actually see the first TRON before they drop their dollars at the box office for this one.\u00a0 Courtesy of some rather devilish on-line competitions I\u2019m now the proud owner of a couple of rather fetching pins and a limited edition classic arcade-game poster, but I\u2019ll be damned if I can actually buy a copy of the original film.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t even on Netflix.\u00a0 It\u2019s rather ironic really, considering that the story of TRON:Legacy revolves around the idea that information should be free!<\/p>\n

It\u2019s almost as if Disney didn\u2019t want anyone remembering the problems that the original had.\u00a0 And boy, did it have problems.\u00a0 While its CGI world was certainly ahead of its time, the story was trite, its characters simplistic, and once you got past the \u2018oooh\u2019 factor, frankly it was dull.\u00a0 Watching it now (if you\u00a0can), with its technological sheen stripped by age, is a pretty boring exercise.\u00a0 Lessons haven\u2019t been learned, I\u2019m afraid to say.\u00a0 In TRON:L Legacy the computer graphics have been updated, giving us a fantastic world of neon skyscrapers and digital lightcycles, along with the creepiest CGI \u2018doll\u2019 this side of Polar Express, \u00a0\u00a0but the story is as flat as ever.\u00a0 Some sections (the light-cycle races for instance) have obviously been inserted solely to appeal to original\u2019s fans, but they don\u2019t serve the story, just the marketing and merchandising departments.\u00a0 Character development is, fittingly, a binary affair.\u00a0 One moment a character has one mind set, the next another.\u00a0 This is most apparent with one particular character who returns from the first film.\u00a0 I don\u2019t wish to spoil anything (though if you can\u2019t see the shift coming a mile off then honestly I worry about you!), but a change of allegiance that occurs in the last third of the film has to be the least motivated transformation I\u2019ve had the misfortune to watch.\u00a0 One moment the character is on \u2018side A\u2019 and the next, with for no apparent reason except that it had to happen, they\u2019re on \u2018side B\u2019.\u00a0 No mess, no fuss, no explanation. \u00a0No interest.<\/p>\n

The acting is a real mixed bag.\u00a0 Hedlund is passable, but suffers from a Hayden Christensen-esque lack of emotional depth, and Olivia Wilde, playing the digital love interest, isn\u2019t a whole lot better.\u00a0 Jeff Bridges seems to have forgotten who Flynn was in the original film.\u00a0 He\u2019s now a 60s hippy clich\u00e9, man, rather than an 80s computer wizz \u2013 perhaps Bridges couldn\u2019t get hold of a copy of the film either!\u00a0 The film\u2019s saving grace, at least for amusement\u2019s sake, is Michael Sheen<\/a>.\u00a0 The master impersonator (if you recall, he\u2019s played David Frost in Frost\/Nixon and Tony Blair in The Queen) has turned his eye to David Bowie.\u00a0 He is wildly over the top, camping and hamming it up for all that he\u2019s worth, and he brings a much need \u2018human\u2019 element to the proceedings.<\/p>\n

The sequel then really does live up to its forefather\u2019s legacy.\u00a0 It shares all the same flaws and tries to get by on the same strengths. Unfortunately for Tron: Legacy, it now can\u2019t get by on the \u2018wow\u2019 of the images the way that Tron could \u2013 we\u2019ve already seen superior effects in Avatar.\u00a0 CGI has come a long way since the first TRON film, and the sequel, while certainly a visual treat, is no longer on the cutting edge.\u00a0 Sure, TRON:Legacy is stunning to look at, but the beauty queen can\u2019t get by on looks alone any more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. \u00a0Viewed at West Wind Drive-In, Goleta. Fool me once, shame on you.\u00a0 Fool me twice… or so the saying goes. If ever there was a film that embodied that little pearl of wisdom, it\u2019d be TRON: Legacy.\u00a0 Not only does it manage to build upon the flaws of the not-so-illustrious original […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}