review: TRON: LEGACY

SPOILERS!!!!

I see it's been a while. When you get to see only one movie a year out in a theater, you have to choose wisely. The Husband and I, faced with a Morton's fork of HARRY POTTER or TRON, went with TRON, seeing as it was in 3D for three bucks. And frankly, no matter how stinky, you can't beat it for the price.

At lunch/dinner afterward, I had to rehash the plot of the first film to The Husband, because he didn't remember it. It seemed to me a lot of the new film contradicted that first movie. Also, the second movie made no sense. I'm not an idiot, but I don't expect to have to be Neil deGrasse Tyson to go see a three dollar movie. Seriously, isotropic whatchamacallsits? Midi-chlorians what? They had computer programs with DNA. How do computer programs get DNA? Apparently, they appear out of thin air with it. And THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING. How? Why? Hell if I know. Just go with it, okay?

Anyway, here's the deal: Kevin Flynn disappears as video game inventors/billion-dollar-company-running-CEOs/beach bums tend to do. He leaves behind a son from God only knows what groupie hanger-on...WHOOPS his wife. Son grows up a raging loner asshole despite being taken under the wing of the awesome Bruce Boxleitner. There's a page, and the son finds an underground secret office, and gets sucked into TRON WORLD, and there's awesome fighting and DAFT PUNK and lots of crazy Buddha talk and then "Here, give me a hug" and then bike ride and THE END.

And seriously, while watching it, it wasn't that bad. I mean, this movie...if you look up EYE CANDY in the dictionary, there's a picture of the Tron poster right there. It would have sucked so hard missing this one in the theater. Although, boy, was it dark. I've heard this complaint about a lot of 3D movies, and having only ever seen CORALINE and BEOWULF in 3D, both totally animated, I can't compare. But to give you an idea, The Husband and I arrived right after the movie itself started, and we had to use the flashlight feature on his phone to find a seat, it was that dark. The rest of it was BAD ASS, though. Lots of crazy MATRIX-y fighting with slow-motion kicks and guys flying through the air. There was one character who stays masked the whole film, and I thought for sure that it was going to be Ray Park under there, but no, it was some other guy, Anis Cheurfa. They need to get him into more movies kicking ass STAT.

The funny thing was, at one point in the movie, after Sam Flynn finds his dad, Kevin Flynn (and I'm sure this isn't spoiling anything for you), they're eating dinner in the matrix--this huge roast pig--and Sam says, "I have one question..." His dad says, "You want to know why I never came back." The Husband and I were like, uh, no, where the hell'd that pig come from? Did Flynn, who's some omnipotent god-like god guy, just conjure this pig out of thin air? Do they have replicator-type things?

And for that matter, there's a club in the matrix. Do programs go to bars? Do they drink? The Husband said they probably need to do something with their idle time, but this leads me to the problem I have with this whole thing in general:

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN THIS WORLD?

Am I to believe that the matrix is populated with copies of Windows 7 and Java and Firefox 3.6, and they go to work like we do, sitting in cubicles while I'm typing up this review, thinking, "Fucking users, calling me into work at 8pm on a Sunday when I could be illegally patching into a stream of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." And then when I'm done and I publish this post and then turn off my computer, they all go, whew, finally, and take the solar sailer home or to the club where they hook up with their mates Flash and Shockwave and make googlie eyes at the cute little script in the corner: "Did your user code you as non-interactive, because you've been running in my background all night long."

And also, Flynn has the power to make pupu platters appear out of thin air. Why didn't he just use the power of his mind to fuck some shit up once he realized he was stuck in the matrix? Seriously, everyone calls him THE CREATOR of everything: he walks into a bar and raises the ambient lighting with the power of his mind. Everyone bows as he walks past. Multiple times in the movie, he makes stuff happen by waving his hands around and willing it to be, and you tell me for TWENTY YEARS he sat on his hands? DURING A GENOCIDE, where all the DNA-infused programs are wiped out?!?!? And it seems like all this came to pass because he'd at some point adopted a pacifist attitude. And he felt guilty because he was able to come to some realization about himself that the program he'd modeled on himself would never know. So the whole movie becomes about Flynn's quest to apologize to "himself" for his overly naive and idealistic dreams of youth. Or whatever.

Which leads again back to my problem with the movie. According to the original movie (and please, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), the matrix already existed when Flynn was sucked into it. The whole reason he was in Encom was to break into the mainframe to locate his CLU program. But in this movie, they make it seem like Flynn went into the matrix and THEN created CLU. Or something. And they were going to make it all better. Or not. Make what better? And he's completely clueless about wifi and stuff. The matrix goes from like five programs to stadiums full of hundreds of thousands of programs. Wouldn't he have guessed what had occurred on the outside? Wouldn't someone have told him? Can't you just plug into an outlet somewhere and download some CNN?

Of course, I would be remiss if I failed to mention The Husband's biggest complaint, which was that Flynn kept saying, "Gnarly," and "Radical," and "Gag me with a spoon." Which was kind of annoying.

But the soundtrack was AMAZING. And the movie made me really want a Ducati motorcycle. So I guess as a marketing vehicle, the movie was five stars.