Thinking about Tron Legacy after having saw it last night. I saw it in l’il IMAX 3D, not regular-size IMAX 3D. My takeaway was that, for a movie that was supposed to be mindless fun, they sure managed to cram in two or three long, expository scenes in which characters literally talked each other through concepts during lulls in the battle. It reminded me of the scene from Back to the Future 2 when, with no other way to describe the multiple timelines to Marty and the audience, Doc Brown is forced to explain it on a chalkboard. The movie had to take us to school.
But Back to the Future 2 had a big payoff. I still don’t know why isomorphic algorithms are important — or rather, Tron Legacy didn’t make me understand why they were so crucial. Again, I got lost in the whole symbolism/metaphor/allegory thing: were they new life forms? I guess Flynn says as much, but no one got excited over the prospect of a 63KB security program being able to talk and having emotions back in 1982. So the Grid is writing its own programs? Or is it that these programs are just appearing from out of the unallocated chaos of unused sectors? At any rate, I think this is a place where the Tron/real-world analogy actually hurt the plot — I can’t tell if the ISOs were as alive as other programs, more alive, or what.
I thought Kevin Flynn’s zen thing was actually really cool and a smart way to deal with that character. He suffered a little from too much faux-dated dialogue (did he even say “radical, man” in the first movie?). I wish they had made a bigger deal out of the time dilation effects in Tron, though! One of my favorite scenes from Aliens is when they show the awakened-from-hibernation Ripley a picture of her daughter, now an ancient old woman far older than her mother. I just wanted to hear Flynn say “son, I know it’s been 20 years on the outside, but in here it’s been 300.”
I hated the Diet Clockwork Orange nightclub owner Castor/Zuse. My brother drew the parallel to The Matrix’s Merovingian, and he’s right — for some reason we always need an androgynous hedonist pervert presiding over the spectacle.
Did anyone else figure out that Rinzler was Tron the instant he appeared on screen?! He was the only character with Tron’s little tetrad-T on his chest.
The best parts of the movie were the fights and the games. I was hoping the lightjets would have walls trailing behind them, and they did it. All in all I liked it okay, and it gained a lot for having been in 3D.
