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| Re: Nothing At Stake: How Bad Storytellers Managed To Ruin Dumb 80s FX Movies by Ice Cream Jonsey 12/28/2010, 5:56pm PST | ||||
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| I can only come at this from my perspective, of course, but I loved Tron Legacy. It is a far better sequel than I thought Tron could get. What colors my perspective is owning a roomful of arcade games. I can't pretend this didn't affect my opinion of the movie, so I won't. Tron Legacy isn't an easy movie to defend. Flynn's CGI head, Christ - well look, they need another 20 or 30 years to get out of the uncanny valley and pull that off, but Jeff Bridges would be dead by then. Of course, it was perfect for Clu. What else could they have done? But yes, that detracts every moment it's on the screen.
That being said, I guess I really started getting charmed during the arcade scene. When you say, FoK, that nobody checked Flynn's office for where Flynn might have gone off to - well, first you had to put a quarter in the TRON machine. The most realistic thing that happened in this flick was that nobody dropped a quarter into TRON: A thread about an arcade, on KLOV wrote: It was endearing that Sam was the only person to try to play a game. I don't have any kids, but a few of my friends have home arcades and do. Their kids mostly don't care. It's understandable. I didn't care about the 57 Chevy my old man restored. But for as much of a cypher as Sam was, at least he coined up. There is a song playing during the arcade scene. It is "Separate Ways" by Journey. It wasn't picked because of the lyrics of the song, it was picked because there was a Journey arcade game, and it contained a cassette that would play "Separate Ways." I can't communicate how unexpected this was. Look, screenwriters - they aren't exactly our nation's best and brightest. They're, by and large, the dumbest fucks we managed to squeeze out as a nation, and they ruin everything they fucking touch. But somebody who worked on Tron Legacy knew that there was a single rock song that needs to be playing in the arcade scene. And I bet he had to fight to keep it included. But that scene! Every trip I had to an arcade, growing up, was a trip into another world. You could never know what new games might be there to explore, or what game you loved was suddenly gone. No movie had ever bothered with that experience, literal or metaphor before. After Sam gets shunted into the computer world, he finds himself playing a game of Discs of Tron. And he doesn't win! He survives because his opponent figures out that he's a user. There's an environmental Discs of Tron cabinet a few towns over, available to the public. Everyone I have ever tried to get inside the thing has found the experience unpleasant, maddening, difficult. I have been given advice, good advice, that I need to stop encouraging my loved ones to enter the thing. Look, people win the light cycle game in regular TRON the first time they give it a shot. Nobody awkwardly stumbles out of Discs of Tron without having their ass handed to them. It was a nice detail, because a lazier screenwriter would have had Sam be the master of the disc game and "surrounded" or whatever to get him into custody. I thought Tron (the character's) fate was a little sad. I liked that he turned blue at the end, saying that he fought for the users. I have read, elsewhere, that it made no sense for him to suddenly turn, but it was the first time in (x) years that Tron encountered any users! I guess what I saw as the plot's tension towards the end wasn't so much as Clu getting into the real world - I mean, who gives a shit about that, but Flynn not getting home. I'm not disagreeing that the ISOs were a pointless gesture, but I don't know how they otherwise differentiate Olivia's character as special. Oh, and every scene with Boxleitner in it was pretty great. I guess I would only say this - arcade games are a frustrating hobby. You get a few hours every year when your friends come over and you're the goddamn man. Otherwise, it's a lot of soldering, repair and troubleshooting while trying to not get electrocuted. The only other movie that even attempts to talk about the hobby is the wretched King of Kong, which makes everyone involved look like an asshole through a cadre of slime and lies. Tron Legacy, in spite of its faults, loves the hobby instead of fucking it over, and I can forgive it anything for that. the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey! |
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Nothing At Stake: How Bad Storytellers Managed To Ruin Dumb 80s FX Movies by 12/21/2010, 10:41am PST  Re: Nothing At Stake: How Bad Storytellers Managed To Ruin Dumb 80s FX Movies by 12/21/2010, 11:41am PST Re: Nothing At Stake: How Bad Storytellers Managed To Ruin Dumb 80s FX Movies by 12/28/2010, 5:56pm PST |
