Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies





	[quote name="Fullofkittens"]*contains light spoilers for TRON: Legacy and Clash of The Titans* Let's talk about TRON: Legacy. The movie is a mess, deficient in numerous dimensions including: the cast (Olivia Wylde giggle), the score (Daft Punk's progressive house + strings formula works right up until the moment things start to heat up, and then it deflates), the really REALLY terrible face CGI, and the dim, Matrix-y gloom covering everything up, but what really kills it is the nonsensical story. In the movie, the interchangeable everyman from Transformers ("Sam") is the son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges); the senior Mr. Flynn disappeared at some point after the events of the original movie right after hinting about "a MIRACLE!" to Sam. Flynn was a millionaire CEO who apparently made his fortune by open sourcing an operating system (so... Linus Torvalds I guess). When software millionaire Kevin Flynn disappeared 20 years ago, there was a nationwide manhunt which apparently did not include checking his office, since that's where he was: Sam is able to discover what happened about 30 seconds after walking in the door. This precipitates several action sequences which are directly analogous to sequences in the original: American Gladiators Joust Above A Death Field, Lightcycles, Flee From Bad Guys On Lightcycles, etc. The action sequences are pretty well done. They weren't as good as they could be: as I mentioned before, Daft Punk's score doesn't really work in the action sequences. Also, I saw it in 3D and it seems like the 3D shit can't keep up with lots of tiny details moving really fast. I suspect that bad guys were obliterating into a bunch of shiny data fragments or something but in 3D it looks like a splash of digital blur. Aside from those complaints, though, the action sequences were okay. They are the good part. Before I get to the bad part, I want to make a quick detour and talk about the Clash Of The Titans remake. Much like TRON, the bar was not set very high by the original: it's a cheesy special FX movie made for adolescent boys, and the special FX haven't held up, leaving very little worth watching. However, also like TRON, the Clash Of The Titans remake still manages not to live up to the very, very low expectations I had for it. Both filmmakers seem to have managed to get a movie all the way from the initial conception to theaters without ever having asked themselves one important question: "What's this movie about?" The original CoTT had a very simple premise: "Perseus, your girlfriend is about to be eaten by a monster! Save your girlfriend!" By contrast, here's the plot of the remake: Perseus's family gets killed by Hades because Hades is a jerk and that's what jerk gods do. Then Perseus manages to end up in Argos where the princess gets compared to a goddess's loveliness bloo bloo etc, and the town will be destroyed unless the princess (who Perseus does not even know) is sacrificed. The princess agrees that this sucks, but she is a team player and will sacrifice her life to save Argos. Perseus, for some reason, decides this is unacceptable, and goes on an epic journey to save her which gets a dozen of his friends killed and ends with Argos being partially destroyed. I guess it would have worked out better if the princess had just been sacrificed, huh. OK, back to TRON. In the original, the "grid" we're talking about is presumably the Encom mainframe. Flynn gets sucked into it, and meets in person all the programs that Encom's programmers have been working on. At one point, a program mentions that he is supposed to be working on crunching numbers as an interest calculator and not playing games; you can kind of imagine a person in real life getting pissed off because his interest calculator stopped working. These programs all mirror the personalities of their creators: that's very significant in the original. Because they are like Flynn's real friends, they are worth saving from the life of oppression they're leading under the Master Control Program. So, the characters in TRON have a couple of simple goals: get Flynn the info he needs to free up the system, and get him back out of the computer. NOW, what's going on in TRON:Legacy? Who are we saving, and from what? The computer we're talking about is the one in Flynn's office. It's made clear by the characters that they do not have access to computers outside their little realm. Basically, Flynn and CLU have constructed this little pocket universe out of whole cloth, so the only people in there worth saving are... Flynn and CLU I guess? And CLU turned into a robot dictator, so screw him. The filmmakers apparently identified this problem and tried to fix it via the really, really lame "MIRACLE!!!" that Flynn mentioned to Sam, which consists of a new digital life form ("isos") that sprung into being inside Flynn's digital universe like sko neon lit Sea Monkey society. Did George Lucas get his hands on this script? I am reminded of finding out that the Force resides in MIDI Accordions in people's DNA. The only reason for these digi-people is to create some kind of motivation for Flynn. They have no characteristics of any kind that distinguish them from "programs". Sometime between the events of the original and the remake I MEAN SEQUEL, (sorry I keep doing that) CLU killed off all the isos except one. So these digital life forms, do they matter? Are we sure they're really anything? Nothing is explained, so to me, they don't matter. They could just be some expression of the pocket universe and not actually be alive, WHO KNOWS. They're all dead so it doesn't matter. What else do we have? The movie starts out with some talk about net neutrality (topical!) but this is abandoned immediately. The choices between freedom vs. security that are hinted at never go anywhere. So, ok, our only motivation is "Your father has been kidnapped by video games! Save your father!" Ok, a little lame, but ok. NO WAIT: forget that problem, the real problem is that CLU IS TRYING TO BREAK INTO THE REAL WORLD. We CANNOT ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN. Wait... what? If you break into the real world, you become a guy sitting in a chair. CLU breaking into the real world results in a mean logical man sitting in a chair. This is not a world shattering possibility and I think we can absorb the risk. But no, that becomes the movie's overriding concern. I think? So yeah: both these ultra-high budget blockbusters ended up boring because their stories make no goddamn sense. [/quote]