Thursday, October 6, 2011

Movie Review: Tron: Legacy

If you read my review of the original Tron [1], you know that my primary motive for watching it was to see if it overlapped significantly with a story idea I have. I had seen fragments of it before on TV and the special effects looked downright disastrous. (We've come a long way since then.) The first movie didn't really match the story idea I have, but there was still the possibility that this one did. And it looked like it had higher production value.

My verdict: This movie was just okay. It definitely had better special effects than the original and I kind of wish I'd seen it in 3D (though I've yet to see any general release feature in 3D—just an ocean documentary while on my honeymoon). The effects weren't flawless, though. The CG version of Jeff Bridges with a younger face was still completely unconvincing.[2] That made the character of CLU distracting for pretty much the entire movie. They avoided this with TRON [3] by having him wear a mask for the entire movie. The characters behaved pretty predictably—except Flynn, Sr., who was constantly stopping for Zen meditation for no apparent reason.

And: it was pretty close to the story idea I had. At least, close enough that I probably won't pursue it. That's a little bit of a bummer, but not too much because I have way more ideas than I have time to write them into coherent stories.


Notes:

[1] You can read that review here.

[2] It's primarily the mouth they always get wrong. The corners of the mouth don't move right. And the teeth never look quite right. I couldn't say how to fix those problems, but there's definitely something wrong there.

[3] In the first movie, TRON was a pivotal character. In this one he's arguably peripheral at best.

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