TRON:Legacy

TRON:Legacy

TRON:Legacy (2010)49% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 192 reviews)Runtime: 127 minutesDirected by: Joseph KosinskiStarring: Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, Bruce BoxleitnerFrom: Walt DisneyHere`s a survey that goes along with what I talked about late Friday night. TRON is a movie I`ve just seen twice, including my viewing online last week.

I didn`t spend too much time thinking around the sequel until recently. I enjoyed what I saw of the new digital world in the trailers, and I also enjoyed what I heard out of Daft Punk`s score from the film, where like with the pilot film and Wendy Carlos, electronica gets blended with a more traditional orchestral thing. I was hoping I`d love it more for those reasons rather than the story, which is like how me (and many others) dig the first film. In the preceding few days, I had heard some savage reviews for it from various critics and even hardcore film fans (the case that usually mark out for movies like the original TRON and you`d figure would enjoy a sequel almost 30 days in the qualification to their beloved cult flick), but I was hoping I`d love it.Well_ sad to say, those negative criticisms were correct.In short, Kevin Flynn (Bridges) becomes the mind of ENCOM in the 80`s and runs it, but dead in `89 he disappears and leaves behind a new son, Sam (Hedlund). We flash forward to 2010 and Sam is an adult, a "rebel" type (why, he rides a motorcycle! who technically owns ENCOM but rather of working it he wants to be dour and other people run it instead. It`s a transcript of Microsoft, in rather blatant terms. He enjoys messing about with ENCOM, because he`s a jerk, I guess. What a likable protagonist! Believe it or not, the argument over "open sourced software" vs. "closed source software" is brought up. Basically, companies like Microsoft want it closed, so that but their people love the cipher and turn on it, while others need it open code, so that anyone can play on the code. In the movie, Sam wants ENCOM software to be open, so as revenge he puts out their new operating system online, as if in that world "torrents" and "equal to peer" sites don`t exist. It`s that sort of dumb movie, folks.Stuff happens and Sam gets blasted into the digital world, which now is more sophisticated than it was in the first movie, although not as colored and it`s essentially a futuristic world a la Blade Runner, strangely enough. So I don`t know if it`s "better" or not. Not to cross too much, but CLU is there and he`s Kevin Flynn, but not aged since `89, as he was an entity created by Kevin way back when. The force to construct Bridges look young_ it mostly looks fake and something out of a PS2 game. CLU is evil, though, and he runs the digital world, as he ran off Kevin, who now lives in hiding. Kevin, Sam, and a noblewoman named Quorra (Wilde; I usually don`t suppose she`s as hot as most people do. But, in this picture she looked really nice) try to run the evil man and go to the material world.This movie_ sigh. The visuals are pretty and all, and the Daft Punk soundtrack is pretty sweet. The book and story, though_ simply awful. I`ll have one example. Early on in the digital world, CLU tries to kill Sam, and that was still after discovering who he was. Yet, later you get out that CLU was tangled in getting Sam beamed into his world, as he needs Sam in his nefarious plot. It makes no sense! It`s as if they made up the book as they went along, ignoring what they had written beforehand. Many instances like that take place. There`s a time window for something to happen, and yet there`s no sensation of urgency to it. Even the action scenes are mainly just there and don`t really wow you. What a major disappointment.The film at least looks and sounds nice. I saw it at the Downtown Disney AMC Theatres. They let their ETX screen, which is their edition of a legit IMAX screen. It`s great. The show looks great and the good is tremendous. The bass moments, you can really feel. Now if but the movie would have been good.I too get to take up Michael Sheen's role, as Castor, an albino-looking fey-acting weirdo who acts like a totally unrestrained David Bowie. My Lord, what overacting there. It was even better than Garrett Hedlund's attempts at acting, though.I'll be back Thursday night with a wacky Christmas film to watch.