Double Feature: Tron and Tron Legacy

I'm combining both of these movies into one post not only because I watched them back to back, but because I don't have too much to say about the original. Maybe I was too impatient to get to the much cooler looking sequel, but I was a little bored in parts. The story was nothing special and the characters felt flat except for Jeff Bridges' Flynn. The special effects, while outdated, do give the film its own unique look and were probably revolutionary at the time. Or maybe not, because the black and white characters with their superimposed coloured light suits reminded me of silent film director Georges Méliès' hand-painted frames back in the days before they had actual colour film. It wasn't a bad movie, but the danger of making something about technology - especially computer technology - is that it becomes easily outdated. I don't even think you'll be missing much if you skip it and go straight to the sequel.

One reason for that is because Tron Legacy has been put so far into hyperdrive that it bears very little resemblance to Tron. The entire digital world has been redesigned to look cool and sleek, and new vehicles and locations have been added that were not even hinted at in the original. I'm not complaining, I thought this was an improvement, though die-hard fans of the original might be appalled that the only connection between the two movies is pretty much the characters of Flynn and Tron (Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner, both reprising their roles, which is good because I hate seeing roles recast). However, Tron Legacy is definitely a blockbuster and not, say, an art film. Like the first one, the special effects and action take more precedence over story and character (though I did feel that characters were more fleshed out and sympathetic this time), but my biggest problem was that the main character had a bad case of "Action Hero Syndrome". What I mean is that at every opportunity, Sam (Garrett Hedlund) has a catchphrase or a one-liner or a cocky remark ready, and many of them were actually bland and generic. In a way, that may have made it more realistic because not everyone is that sharp and quick, and normally I praise accuracy, but I don't think it should apply to one-liners. If you're going to spam your audience with hero-isms, at least make them witty or funny. Also present in the sequel is a younger, computer-animated Jeff Bridges playing the villain, which fooled me at first (I thought they were simply using the wrinkle removal technique used in Benjamin Button, but maybe Evil Flynn was in too many shots for that to be practical) but then became more noticeably fake-looking later on. That is probably the only thing that might date the special effects of Tron Legacy in a few decades, when we have perfected the art of photo-realistic CG humans. We're getting close, but we're not there yet.

Recommendation
I think Tron should be seen at least once, if only for the look back at what used to be considered an amazing, technologically advanced work of art, and Tron Legacy is a nice follow-up because of the huge leap in special effects proficiency. Both movies have a pretty high nerdiness factor, but in spite of that they're only here to be fun and look good, and of course the sequel is much better at accomplishing that.