TRON:
Legacy might be the most ballsy
picture of the entire year. I’ll type that again, just so
you can absorb it: TRON: Legacy is as bold a move
made by any major studio in years. For a film to cost well
over 100 million dollars these days, it has to be squeezed
in to a safe mold where the higher ups know that those 100
million dollars can be made back repeated times. Certain
tropes need to be played out, certain actors have to be a
certain type of attractive, nothing original or challenging
can truly be brought to the screen. And, quite honestly,
TRON: Legacy wallows in the unoriginality of many of
those tropes, but does so in the framework of such a strange
and beautifully realized universe that these generic
big-budget requirements weaken it but never bring it down.
Review - Tron:
Legacy
Sam Flynn
(Garrett Hedlund) is the son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges),
the world famous video game designer who discovered the
world of The Grid and then disappeared 20 years ago. He’s
the primary stockholder in ENCOM, his father’s massively
successful, loosely-veiled amalgam of Apple and Microsoft,
but has no interest in taking power. To make things simple,
in a film that never strives to do so, Sam Flynn ends up
sucked back in to the now massively upgraded grid, realizes
his father is still alive, living under the shocking
dictatorship of his single-minded avatar Clu. Light-cycles
are raced, programs (or citizens of the grid) or derezzed
(killed), and light-discs are hurled. It’s a big, dumb,
confusing movie, and you know what, I absolutely adored it.
The fact that Disney allowed such a big budget picture to be
so fully realized in a world entirely unlike our own is
amazing. The world of The Grid 2010 is a truly logical
progression of the pixelated computer graphics of the
original TRON. Everything looks spiffed up by the huge
advances in modern computer graphics, but everything (the
people, the vehicles, the games) seem to have progressed
from something. Thus Sam Flynn’s adventure in Gridland isn’t
a soiree marked by enormous visual leaps, but instead by an
extremely canny take on a world already created. Director
Joseph Kosinski creates so visually askew from our own, that
I’m shocked Disney let him get away with it. Everything’s
black and outlined with light. The characters are mixes of
60s glam and David Bowie via Aladdin Sane and the action
scenes are Atari video games brought in to the modern world.
It is absolutely breath-taking to watch, and with Daft
Punk’s monotone dirges blaring in the background, I felt
myself pulled entirely in to the film.
Sure, Kosinski’s film is tacked together with technological
jibber-jabber and a few enormous allusions to Star Wars.
Sure, Jeff Bridges plays his Buddha like Kevin Flynn with a
sort of stony Dudeness and Garrett Hedlund’s brash youth
character is completely hamstrung by clichéd action lines.
Sure, the film never really explains itself and the story
itself is near nonsensical. All these things are true, but
none overwhelm just how amazing the film is to experience.
It’s big budget filmmaking at its most daring. This isn’t
just Denzel Washington and a train versus a missile, this is
a world unlike any we’ve truly seen before. This is a major
studio throwing wads of money at an unknown director who
took a vision and ran with it.
If every studio film had this much chutzpah in final
project, I would look forward to each and every screening.
Here’s hoping TRON: Legacy defies expectations this
weekend and makes a billion dollars. Might leave some stuffy
suits somewhere scratching their noggins, wondering just
what this "originality" thing is.
Noah Sanders is the blog/news editor at Light In The
Attic and a contributor at Sound On The Sound and
the KEXP blog. He also has his own
Criterion-based film site, Criterion Quest.
If you'd like to contact Noah in regards to his
writings here at Side One: Track One then please do
so
here.
- Noah Sanders
-
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