I shoulda loved it - this film was targeted like a Predator drone strike at an audience just like me, nerdy Gen-Xers who saw the first one and fell madly a-tizzy, desperately wishing for light-cycles and skin-tight outfits with neon piping and helmets, imagining a created universe where our pale and chubby selves suddenly deserved skin-tight outfits and maybe didn't need helmets anymore but wore them just because they made us look cool. To give you a sense of how bad it was, I pored over the encyclopedia - Worldbook, not Britannica (we're not made of money, son!) - looking for a "tron" entry, not realizing that it was a fragment of a portmanteau ("electron", duh), but searching for more of that glowy universe with disc battles. And although Tron: Legacy was entertaining and stylish enough, it just wasn't as satisfying.
Forget the number of licks, I can get to the tootsie-roll filled pith of the problem in just one bite: the internet is already here.
I mean, that was why we nerds geeked out so hard over the original Tron - unless you were reading William Gibson at the time, or even if you were, no one had ever conceived of an entire world generated inside a computer, Neal Stephenson hadn't yet used the term "avatar" (and forget about James Cameron smurfing it up), and the interwebs hadn't even had a glimmer of Second Life fizzling in a storm of penis-shaped avatars. Sure, Tron: Legacy was stylish (what does it say about me now that what got me excited was, "wow, are those real Herman Miller chairs? That's a nice dining set. I love Kevin Flynn's apartment!"), but unlike the first one it wasn't style-defining.
What they did get right were the light-cycles, and I guess this is where the running part comes in. Unlike the first movie, where the characters just sort of leaned over and grabbed little rods of light around which their conveyances digitally accreted, Tron: Legacy had a much cooler transformation - the characters run for several steps before leaping into the air hunched over in the stance that they take as they become the cycles themselves. It's perfect running form, beautifully captured in slow-motion and skin-tight outfits, falling forward and catching themselves with the ideal midfoot strike. If the movie did nothing else, it serves as a terrific instructional video for good running form.
A brief aside about 3D: since Tron: Legacy was actually filmed in a 3D format I felt I should watch it that way. I noticed that filmmakers, or at least this one, seem to be resorting to old 3D gimmicks like having something jump out of the screen to provoke a startle. Another criticism is that adding depth to the screen seems oddly to diminish it; adding the third dimension seems to draw attention to the fact that it's stuck in this 1.44:1 aspect ratio, that it's stuck in this box. It may be because I'm not a creative type, but I just can't imagine a way that adding 3D would enhance a story's dramatic narrative - Precious wouldn't have been made any better had I been able to see Gabourey Sidibe's baby-bump in the third dimension.
Much of the rest of the film is a jumbled cacophony, fun, but a mess. Jeff Bridges basically plays The Dude from The Big Lebowski inside a computer. This more weathered Bridges' face is terrifically suited for that expression that says I have just been destroyed, as if Kali had just appeared as a plot-point (c.f. him in True Grit). By the way, for all that talk about the CG young Jeff Bridges being so uncannily true-to-life, the only accuracy is that it was uncanny - the CG young Bridges just looks weird, I'm talking Polar Express levels of weird. Wesley Snipes' character was campy and great, but 28 years ago his character would have been played by David Bowie himself rather than just a really good evocation of him. The philosophical themes were right on the mark for a fan base stuck at the age of 12; the writers couldn't seem to figure out if Flynn senior was right or not in his cyber-Buddhism - perhaps they were saying that you have to embrace your past and let go of your future, but I kinda think that's both glibly wrong-headed and giving the film too much credit. If anything, perhaps you could say that Tron: Legacy, with its musings about the Promethean error of human-borne attempts at perfection, forms a better bookend to Black Swan than does The Wrestler. Or maybe I'm giving myself too much credit.
At least they got the light-cycles right. Although, perhaps since this is supposed to be a blog about running/exercise and is colored greenly, we shoulda been asking for light-bicycles.
The movie was kinda more this guy:
A Very Hilly, Very Muddy Run, No Light-Cycles, No Light-Bicycles Either
6.55 mi. 1 hr:0 min:57 sec. 9:18 pace.
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