Tron

Rarely does a movie suck so bad I want to write specifically about it.
In the original Tron film, I think the general public consciousness was futurist, meaning people were prepared to be involved in a lot of imaginative stuff about technology, and you could take a lot of license. Today, the opposite is true, technology has arrived where people have stopped listening, technobabble doesn’t matter anymore, the public consciousness is way behind the actual state of technology, and we have no understanding of how the technology we use works, and we don’t care, and are not charmed by it. That’s one unavoidable problem about making a Tron film now. Similarly, there is no amount or quality of computer generated imagery that will impress a moviegoer, these days, another handicap for Tron. So, both things the original Tron had going for it had dissipated before they made this new one.
But then, they went ahead and made sure Tron’s disaster would be a self-made one, not just victim of circumstances.
I must refer to one of Robert McKee’s principles of screenwriting, from “Story”, in relation the set-up and the pay-off. I could say “spoiler warning”, but Tron is spoiled before it starts. In one of the first scenes, Flynn is kissing his son good night, he promises something about playing in the arcade with him, the son asks whether they can play on together on the same team, Flynn says “We’re always on the same team.” or anything to that effect. An awkward dialogue to start with, but it also has huge sirens and alarms that say this is a set-up, and some time later in the movie the son is going to call the father on that promise, and you’re gonna be really pissed off at how long it takes for that prank to play out. Seriously, the person that gets an emotional reaction from that has the emotional depth of a Boston Terrier.
The set-up and the pay-off are great, according to Robert McKee’s book, because when the pay-off comes, it sends the viewer’s mind back to the earlier part of the movie, and you sort of experience it again, and in any case something special happens, which makes the whole experience of fiction a good one. But, for that to happen, the set-up needs to be stealthy. In the case of Tron, the set-up sends your mind to later in the movie, as you can see the pay-off coming so so clearly, and then your mind is closer to the exit door, and you’re thinking about what you’re gonna do after you leave the theatre. Again, the movie didn’t provide you with a spoiler warning here, even though it told you blatantly what was going to happen, at least in the movie’s emotional track, so to speak. Unless you’re one to be amused watching someone else play Mortal Kombat or something, the movie was pretty done in the first five minutes. Terrible thing. But wait, this particular pay-off comes really late into the movie and Jeff Bridges’ character says “I was afraid you’d say that..”, the one line where the viewer can truly empathize. Perhaps this is the screenwriter’s idea of a joke.
The sad thing is, we’re all victims here. Disney took a piece of intellectual property that had somehow had some charm, it was like a famous old crop that they let age and then created something they could project onto a screen and have some suckers pay to watch it. And to make sure it wouldn’t melt anybody’s brains, they got music that sounded just like the new Batman movies, and included the Batmobile, just in case you still didn’t get it, then they threw in some gratuitous Kung Fu… The actor that plays Sam Flynn, Jeff Bridges’ son, plays Bruce Wayne for the first part of the movie, including an Alfred stand-in, and then later when he meets his father in the Grid, he morphs into the young Anakin Skywalker and starts using the Force. Sometimes it feels like you’re watching the Matrix, sometimes Star Wars, sometimes G.I. Joe, sometimes The Dark Knight, but never Tron: Legacy, whatever that was supposed to be.
Before the movie started, the cinema played the trailer for “Tangled”, another Disney animation, this one complete with cultural references and a subversive Rapunzel, no Shrek though, as that property belongs to another company… I wonder if they got Eddie Murphy to voice a donkey. They would. Once that trailer was finished, one woman got so aroused, she blurted out “Oh I have to see that!” in a shocking break of cinema protocol. I should have ended it then.

“The Social Network”, on the other hand, was really awesome. Great music, great acting, great story… Absolutely not banking on the significance of Facebook in our recent human history and culture, the movie is really about the character Mark Zuckerberg and his conflicts with himself, and so good at that, if it was a true story or not, I very soon stopped thinking about it. It is so well written and acted that I seem to find the fictional Zuckerberg more real than the real one. I even want to watch it again. The music is really special, too, particularly in the first few scenes, when Zuckerberg is doing the Facemash.com thing. The people that made “The Social Network” deserve a lot of credit for making a real film out of some intellectual property that could easily have been turned into garbage in the hands of most anyone else, like these Disney pricks, for example.