My head was spinning after studying Tort Law for close to five hours on Monday. As I was heading home, it started to rain very heavily. I then decided to catch a movie. "
Tron Legacy" was a film that I promised myself to see. After all, I was a huge fan of the original 1982 film. In fact, I was so much a fan of the original film that I borrowed my cousin's Disney storybook and copied the entire book into my school exercise book so that I could reread the novelisation of the film again and again and again.
I had a choice between the 2D and 3D versions of the film. Now I never had any good experiences with 3D - especially as I have to put on the stupid 3D glasses on top of my normal glasses. The combined effect always make me sleepy. The last time I did that, I fell asleep and missed three quarters of "
Toy Story 3"!!! So, 2D it is. I even got a discount on the ticket price courtesy of being a college student. In other words, everything was jolly.
About 20 minutes into the film, I realised that not everyone in the packed theatres were enjoying the film. In fact, some folks were getting impatient with the heavy sci-fi in the film. Director Joseph Kosinski could have gone for an all-action CGI no-brainer
ala' Michael Bay but thankfully he did not. That would please the crowd a lot more but it would do nothing for an old time
Tron fan like me. No, Kosinski instead was very faithful to the original film (some would even say slavishly faithful) and really tried his best to provide a worthy follow-up in terms of continuity, characterisation and concept. It wasn't
Tron reimagined for the post-Matrix, post-Internet, post-online gaming crowd. It was
Tron naturally evolved - where the original sense of wonder of visiting the digital world of video games was pushed to the Nth level. Now that is ironic because in this day and age, most folks already spend 90% of their time in the virtual world anyway - have you seen those blokes playing online games at the local cybercafe? Their avatars have become their real selves. What would such a film like
Tron Legacy have to say to this crowd? The answer is: Nothing. The film wasn't made for the Gen-Y internet generation. The film was made for us old farts who grew up in the glorious 1980s where high scores in
Donkey Kong,
Space Invaders,
Zaxxon,
Frogger and
Pac-Man were a matter of life-and-death. The film was made for us old farts who visited dark arcades that were lit up only by the dazzling colours of arcade machines with 1980s synthesizer pop-rock mixed up with the game sounds from the machines. The film was made for us old farts who still think that the light-sabers from the original
Star Wars films were the coolest things on earth - and we posed with flourescent light-tubes at home with our little brothers before our parents came home and spanked us. In time, our imagination was pushed even further than light-sabers when the 1982
Tron introduced us to the magic of light-cycles!
Read any other review of the film and you'll see references to how the technical wizardry allowed the film-makers to put in a 30-year old Jeff Bridges along a 60-year old present day Jeff Bridges. You may also get philosophical musings about dualism, Zoroastrianism (
Flynn as Ahura Mazda and CLU as Ahriman?), gnosticism, etc. that viewers picked up from the films not-too-subtle references. Some may even compare the film unfavourably to the
Matrix trilogy and say that it was all glam and little in the way of character development. But they are all missing the point. The primary enjoyment of the film is when Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) turned on the lights in his father's old arcade and Journey started blasting at full volume from the speakers - and then he visits the world (
"The Grid") that his dad, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) first introduced us to in 1982. Some of us (
like yours truly) never truly left that world behind.
Finally, there are the babes. I couldn't believe how much Olivia Wilde has evolved. I hated her in "The O.C." but here, she's a wide-eyed ISO (
that's isomorphic algorithms - i.e. uncreated programs that have self-existent souls) in tight leather named Quorra! I loved every scene that she was in. I think it's the leather. And her beautiful eyes. I know I'm gushing. But can you blame me? Beau Garrett was also painfully beautiful here in an unearthly way. She was great as Frankie Raye in
FF: Rise of the Silver Surfer but here, she's even more unearthly in her beauty. Forget the heavy sci-fi or references to the 1982 film. Just watch the film for these two babes! :)
