OMGTRONYAY December 18, 2010

SPOILER: Holy crap I LOVED TRON: LEGACY.

Having said that, the rest is spoiler-free.

I have... a hard time with suspending my disbelief when it comes to movies. There are countless people who have walked out of movies with me bathed in the radius of my seething hate for what was just shown on-screen – because if you can’t bother to patch over large cracks in your plot, then you’re basically telling me “Fuck you, I’m taking your money and I really don’t think you’re intelligent enough to catch my mistakes… and fuck it, I don’t care”. And science fiction is a medium of storytelling that demands a certain suspension of disbelief right out of the gate – so I can forgive some gaps in logic and plot if you at least tell me a good story. And if you’ve not got your story sorted, and you’re not really all the way there with explaining the logic, trying to dazzle me with super-shiny special effects, then basically you’re flashing tits at me to distract me from your hand in my wallet.

In that light, it’s understandable that there are a fair number of movies that left me feeling like this:

The original Tron movie was from a simpler time where the gap between what we understood about computing and what it promised for the future was a fertile plot of land that allowed our imagination to fill in the gaps with what is, essentially, magic for a magical world. As time has moved on, and computers have become commonplace things, the threads that Tron’s story were woven out of began to unravel and fray significantly. But the core of the story and the world created still resonate, because who doesn’t want to imagine a magical, hidden world beneath the world? Hidden doors that lead to a world of dungeons and dragons or programs and lightcycles, it’s the same story with a different coat of paint.

In a world where Michael Bay gets to hump out another Transformers movie from the sad slice of our childhood penned up like a veal calf, hiding his crime beneath layers and layers of stupidly shiny CGI-generated explosions, slathered on like Crisco… I assumed that another childhood joy was going to get the same treatment. That it was Disney, who had delivered an amazing movie adaptation of the Pirates ride (and then buggered it senseless with two atrocious sequels), led me to believe that it would be a more PG-rated unpleasantness. And looking at the main characters, who are so pretty, visions of teen angst crossed with “teach me about this thing you users call ‘love’” danced through my head. So, I adjusted my expectations accordingly, right around the eye-level shared with rats and other vermin.

But hey, Daft Punk was on board, and there’s a certain level of artistic integrity there – so I raised my expectations to approximately terrier height. Because even with a great soundtrack, we live in a world where we know there aren’t light-cycles zipping around right beneath our laptop keyboards (but a small part of me still is jumping up and down and shouting “BUT OH MAN THAT WOULD BE SO COOL!”). So, I figured that I’d get good music, beautiful visuals and artistry, and… well, it would be pretty.

And it’s true – it is very pretty. When you are immersed in the world, the visuals are jaw-dropping, underpinned with loving artistic direction. The aesthetic from the original movie is updated stylishly, and paints an amazing fantasy world that never comes across as slapdash or fake – so there’s never a moment where the environment takes you out of the movie. And considering that it’s the true star of the movie, anything less than perfect would have been calamitous.

I’m not going to regurgitate the plot points hashed out in every other review. If you’re reading this, you almost certainly know about Clu, the antagonist. But I will say that the story not only allows for the reality of Tron: Legacy, it also helps to explain how the original world of Tron could exist, allowing all of us who have become computer savvy by virtue of the world we live in to participate in believing that this world could exist, for the duration of the tale being told. And the low-hanging fruit of a romantic subplot is pleasantly avoided completely.

When I left the theater, I never felt, for a moment, cheated. I not only enjoyed the movie, but found myself carrying the visuals of the world around in my head, marveling at the aesthetic, still feeling the moments. For a movie that could be considered to have an anemic plot, it simply doesn’t matter – and I’ll happily watch it again and again.

Thank you Disney, for doing it right. You didn’t have to, but you did it up right.