Have you ever sat down to watch a movie and realized, within 5 minutes, that it was going to suck, but you’d walked to the theater and your knees were aching and you just need to sit and rest for a while before beginning the clumsy trek home again, so you decide that letting your brain suffer for two hours is better than wrecking your legs some more? No? Maybe I was too specific.
Anyway, I tortured my self with Tron: Ares last night. I’d seen the original Tron when it first came out in 1982, it sucked then, and I should have known better, but over 40 years have passed and the memory had faded. Now I remember. Remind me when the sequel comes out (yes, it sets up a sequel) that I shouldn’t waste my time.
The summary: it’s a movie about unexplainable magical phenomena gussied up with a lot of bad technobabble. I can enjoy a movie that has magic as a key premise, but the technobabble kept bringing me up short, with a jolt: whoever wrote this thing doesn’t understand physics or biology, and for a movie that is ostensibly built around programming computers, they don’t have the vaguest notion of how those machines and skills work. It’s simultaneously magic + coding. Hated it.
What the heck is a “particle laser”? It’s central to the story, but it makes no sense.
Also, Jared Leto.
I shoulda stayed home.
Someone commented on the irony of releasing the movie in 3D when Letos acting barely covers one dimension.
The original Tron was not a good film, but at least it had Jeff Bridges and David Warner and historically groundbreaking CGI, so it retains some nostalgic value to me. Tron: Legacy showed that you could get Jeff Bridges back, add Michael Sheen chewing scenery, throw a bucket of money at updating the special effects, and still end up blander than the original. I’m not planning to watch this mess.
“Particle Laser”
well, maybe it uses wave/particle duality to shoot a beam of photons as particles rather than waves?
or maybe it shoots a coherent Bose-Einstein condensate beam of spin 0 particles?
or maybe the movie sucks and i won’t go see it.
It at least had a great soundtrack. But it was a movie that just kept going for hand-wave magic that makes no sense, and empty characters doing things in flashy color suits. At some point I couldn’t escape my brain going “okay, this is just absurd” for what was happening.
I did quite like the CGI for the 80s era Grid, though. Shame it was clouded by Leto.
As goofy as the original one was, I still like it. Legacy was a bit bland. I liked the Uprising series the most, and even then it could have used a bit of ACAB applied to Commander Paige instead of hinting at potential redemption. As much as I like Tron as an idea getting attention, I think the whole “into the real world” angle kinda told me they really don’t know what they’re doing.
Also, what I’ve read about Jared Leto.
The first Tron was nothing more than an experiment in what moviemakers could do with the CGI/special-effects technology of that time. The central message was “Yo, look what we can do with CGI these days!” That’s pretty much all it’s remembered for, and IMO that’s okay.
As for sequels, IMO the CORRECT trilogy is as follows:
1) Tron
2) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
3) Ready Player One
fucking morbius