Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Starring Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde. Written by Edward Kitsis and Edmund Horowitz.
The critics have been unkind to this movie. They have accused it of being too cold, with too little humanity and a weak, confusing plot. I neither agree nor disagree. It’s not a particularly human movie, true, and the plot is pretty thin and empty, but it’s some of the most mesmerizing eye candy I’ve ever seen on a screen, and I only wish that I’d waited the extra half-hour and seen it in 3D instead. Walk in with relatively low expectations, and I’ll bet you will be dazzled.
The music is also extraordinary – as involving as the visuals, in my view. Two big thumbs up to Daft Punk. The excellent sound design included a lot of old-school beeps and boops that delighted me, and the majority of the programs had filters on their voices, which I found a nice detail. The screenplay is reasonably good, with moments that actually made me go “huh, that’s actually…well-written.” The performances are pretty meh, especially our Shia LeBeouf impersonator main character, Hedlund, who did a pretty reasonable job crying but whom I just didn’t like. Good old Michael Sheen drops in to ham it up, and honestly I’m starting to wonder how we got along without him. Best part is easily the production design, because they very wisely did little more than expand on the original look and feel of TRON – which doesn’t look like any other movie that’s been made before or since – and that means This Shit Looks Awesome, Yo.
The plot is pretty dumb, though, and not really worth following. (“Confusing” is not the word I would have used.) I think they might have been trying to connect the former problem of the MCP trying to control all the programs to the modern problems of DRM, but they didn’t get very far with it. It’s a bit too long, but I have complained about that for virtually every blockbuster-style movie I’ve seen that was made after 2000. I could go on and tell you more about what was wrong with it. But all of TRON: Legacy‘s flaws pale in comparison to the look that was on my face when I saw the first Recognizer coming down out of the digital sky:
^ ^
o o
O
In that way, this is a thoroughly appropriate successor to the original TRON. That wasn’t much of a movie, either, but boy oh boy was it good to look at.
