Monday, October 10, 2011

Tron Legacy Movie Review

I saw this a while ago but I wanted to write a review on it.
Overall, I did not like this remake.
I haven't seen the old one.  But this one was a very poor remake.  Its only redeeming characteristics is a few highly entertaining scenes.
The movie had a complicated storyline and it was thin in several points.  Characters were underdeveloped and extremely weird.
Sam (the main character) after his dad gets sucked into his own video game Tron leads a kind of depressed life. Sam's big achievement each year is playing a prank on his dads multimillion dollar company.  So from the start he isn't that likeable.  After he himself gets sucked into Tron he gets put into a disc fight.  Which is cleverly done.  Its entertaining to watch the fight.  He ends up having to fight for his life in the 'Lightcycle' ring.  Sam gets defeated and just before dying he is saved by a female warrior (classic cliche).  Sam is taken to his father who is hiding somewhere out some dark rocky mountains.  After that the story evolves into Sam trying to get his dad back to reality.   This is were it gets weird.  Sam with Quorra (the female warrior) go to Zeus, a guy with long hair who looks more like a girl and supposedly is a enemy of Clu (the villain who is trying to make the world perfect).  He seems to want to help but he actually is a traitor.  What is weird is supposedly he is extremely powerful but he doesn't use his power hardly at all and when he does your saying, 'that's it?'
The movie ends with Sam's dad sacraficing himself to get his son back into the real world and destroying Clu.
What really destroys this movie is the messages and underlying theme's.  One of the biggest contradictions is this: When Sam's dad and Clu (who used to rule Tron together) first came to Tron they built stuff to create a perfect world.  As they were doing this a entire race of perfect 'programs' (which is what they call humanoid forms) and these programs are ENTIRELY PERFECT.  Quorra is the last surviving perfect program yet she hast to be taught and she losses her arm so her fight moves aren't perfect.  The underlying message though is an example of evolution.  That out of nothing comes perfection.  That we are slowly getting their and these, 'perfect programs' are the end result.  So an evolutionary stance was taken early in the movie.
But then we see that Clu tries to achieve perfection and destroys hundreds of programs and is obviously a tyrant.  It almost seemed like in some ways they were comparing to Hitler.  So then their is another stance that seems contradictory to the one I talked about above.
Another big thing was that Sam's dad was all into New Age Meditation.  Several lines through out the movie really annoyed me.  But it was portrayed as a very beneficial thing through out the movie.
The last thing that bugged me was this.  In the movie, when programs are killed they shatter in millions of little pieces.  They call it Derezzing. Now since Quorra is a program we see how her body is made up of millions of little pieces.  So she is only compatible with Tron world which is made up of that stuff.  Then she goes into the real world and she becomes human.  It was a lame way to end the movie.
Overall its story was passable, but with the agenda it pushed forward and its flat ending...  I only give it two stars.
That's my two cents on Tron Legacy. 
EDIT: Thank you Ethan for pointing out to me that this was the wrong trailer.  Here is the correct one.




Oh whoops here's the real one. ;)



 

4 comments:

  1. Hey John, I just wanted to point out a few things you left out of your review. The Utopian evolutionary stance WAS obvious in the movie, but at the end of the film Sam's father finally acknowledges his imperfect nature and realizes that he can never accomplish perfection. This refutes the earlier stances taken in the film. Also, the New Age scenes in the film were very brief and hardly had any bearing on the movie. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the film.
    Thanks for the review,
    Ethan

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  2. Also, I don't recall anything about Quorra "becoming human" at the end. Completely agree with your assessment of the "perfect programs" and Zuse, (who was fairly bizarre to say the least.) I was very impressed with the film's well-developed storyline and the actors all did an excellent job. Not to mention the incredible visual effects and amazing music. 4.3 stars.

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  3. Ethan,
    That was the point though the movie contradicted itself and their was no clear statement about perfection. Even though he admits it, that doesn't negate the fact that the perfect programs(who weren't really perfect) still existed.
    And at the end of the film it implied that Quorra became human.
    Go write you own review. :)

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  4. " Alright girls, you're both pretty".
    Though I've never seen the movie, I can only think that a video-game nerd would make up such a storyline. :)

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