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We rarely buy a movie if we haven't already seen it*, but there was almost no chance I wasn't going to want to see TRON:Legacy when it came out on disc**, and as soon as Disney elected to release a special edition collection with the original movie, we preordered it.
Teh_boy has not seen the original TRON, so we queued that up this weekend and will get to the new one in the next couple of weeks, probably.
I'm going to assume the rest of y'all have seen the original TRON, however, and not worry too much about spoilers. Or the plot synopsis that could potentially lead to spoilers, for that matter.
The Blu-Ray transfer is very nice (Our collection has the original movie on BD, and the new movie on DVD, BD, BD-3D and "Digital Copy" for play on your computerish device); they appear (to my inexpert eye) to have gone back to the original film stock, rather than upscaling from the VHS or DVD versions. The computer graphics are clean and crisp, which is good, and the live-action portions are clear and finely detailed, which is a mixed blessing, because the costuming choices forced by the technology of the day are terrible, particularly Sark's headpiece, which was always an obvious piece of cardboard, but is shown as especially wibbly at 1080p.
Because of the technological limitations, the computer-world portion of the film was shown as very dark, with the obvious idea that the blocked-up shadows would hide the worst of the film's failings. The BD transfer is still dark and weirdly-lit, but all the shadow details you could ever want are there for the seeing, and it feels more like there just isn't that much light, rather than that they're trying to hide things. This is not an effective way to describe what I'm trying to get at, so I hope you're receiving better than I think I'm sending.
My folks didn't take us to many movies in the theater, so I missed out on TRON until we could rent it from The Wherehouse. But being who I was, there was no way I could miss out on the story, so I read the novelization, which I was convinced until just now was adapted by Alan Dean Foster, but it turns out it was actually Brian Daley (who also did the pretty-good-for-the-time Han Solo trilogy before the Star Wars Expanded Universe turned into Big Business). As a result, I had a mental image of the computer world which was only marginally aligned with the cinematography (the novelization had a few color production stills--selected very carefully, I must add--inserted in the middle of the book), and when I finally did see the movie, the "reality" fell far short of my expectations. Far short, because it was only when they were in motion that you could see how poorly the costuming integrated with the background.
In the intervening years, my standards for that sort of thing have only grown, so you'd think, between the increased fidelity of the pictures and the greater sophistication of the viewer, that I'd've found watching particularly painful. But in fact, I was able to overlook things, I think because at this distance, I can accept that the tech of the time was the tech of the time, and that they did the best they could with what they had. Also, the live-action bits did a great job of pounding the time period into your brain. When the alien archaeologists unearth an old print of TRON while trying to piece together what caused our civilization to collapse and consume itself, they will look at Bruce Boxleitner's nerd glasses and Cindy Morgan's fuzzy pink sweater, and the number "1981" (or the base-twelve equivalent) will spring fully-formed from their thinking apparatus.
The plot remains weak; though the idea of an AI growing beyond its programmer's intentions is a rich one, Lisberger's conception of how that would look lacks both depth and detail. Only three years after TRON, James Cameron would give us SkyNet and the nuclear obliteration of humanity. Master Control Program's only desire seems to have been to become a more efficient administrator of more and larger systems, and its chosen tactics of restricting user access that did not go through it, and condemning programs to death in cheesy video games seemed even at the time short-sighted and inefficient. Even the fascist allegory falls flat in the face of the fact that once the programs were "free" of the MCP, they went back to performing their allotted user-defined tasks. Gladiatorial servitude==bad; actuarial servitude==good?
The acting is wooden at best; Jeff Bridges plays the proto-Dude without much enthusiasm, Cindy Morgan seems to only exist to fail to insert romantic tension to either the real or the computer worlds (+1 point for the "teach me more of this human thing called 'kissing' trope, but -5 points for executing it with all the excitement of buying a gallon of milk), and most of the other human roles are only there for the exposition.
And oh, the dialogue!
[Flynn and TRON meet in the holding cells]
Kevin Flynn: Alan?
Tron: Where did you hear that name?
Kevin Flynn: Well that's your name, isn't it?
Tron: The name of my User. How did you know?
Kevin Flynn: I'm a program from a User that knows Alan.
[a Bit flies around Flynn's head in a Recognizer]
Kevin Flynn: Hey! Hold it right there!
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: What do you mean, "yes"?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Is that all you can say?
Bit: No.
Kevin Flynn: Know anything else?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Positive and negative, huh. You're a bit, aren't you?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Well, where's your program? Isn't he going to miss you?
Bit: No.
Kevin Flynn: I'M your program?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Another mouth to feed.
Bit: Yesyesyesyes!
All in all, TRON is nothing like a good movie. It is, however, a window to a place in my past when I was outrageously excited by the endless potential offered by the world of computers, utterly willing to suspend disbelief in pursuit of new ideas and concepts, and completely convinced of the eventual triumph of good over evil, even such a low-grade and cardboard evil as the Master Control Program. Also excessively enamored of hyperbolic adverbs. I enjoyed watching it again, and enjoyed even more watching my almost-nine-year-old son see it with fresh eyes. (He liked it.)
Here's hoping that re-watching TRON has set my expectations of Legacy low enough that I can enjoy it as well. :)
*The only exceptions I can think of were directed by guys named Tarantino or Kurosawa.
**I despise movie theaters***. We only go to movies that M. absolutely has to see on the big screen, and with our new home theater system, I'm doing my best to make inroads on that. :)
***Because:
1) Social anxiety
2) No volume control, on the movie or the other moviegoers
3) No filters--my brain gives equal priority to every input around me, so I can't ignore the conversation two rows away. My brain cannot multitask, either, so if there is a conversation two rows away which I cannot ignore, I comprehend neither it nor the movie dialog.
4) No pee breaks****
5) Cost
****One of my favorite teh_boy memories is the day he piped up while we were in the middle of watching a movie, telling me that I was an interlude. We had to pause the movie and go back-and-forth about four times: "What?" "You're an interlude!" "What?" before he gave up and ran off to the bathroom, and we figured out that he was parroting back to is a circumlocution we'd used previously, "urine interlude". Because even at six, he could've come up with a better put-down than calling me an interlude.
Teh_boy has not seen the original TRON, so we queued that up this weekend and will get to the new one in the next couple of weeks, probably.
I'm going to assume the rest of y'all have seen the original TRON, however, and not worry too much about spoilers. Or the plot synopsis that could potentially lead to spoilers, for that matter.
The Blu-Ray transfer is very nice (Our collection has the original movie on BD, and the new movie on DVD, BD, BD-3D and "Digital Copy" for play on your computerish device); they appear (to my inexpert eye) to have gone back to the original film stock, rather than upscaling from the VHS or DVD versions. The computer graphics are clean and crisp, which is good, and the live-action portions are clear and finely detailed, which is a mixed blessing, because the costuming choices forced by the technology of the day are terrible, particularly Sark's headpiece, which was always an obvious piece of cardboard, but is shown as especially wibbly at 1080p.
Because of the technological limitations, the computer-world portion of the film was shown as very dark, with the obvious idea that the blocked-up shadows would hide the worst of the film's failings. The BD transfer is still dark and weirdly-lit, but all the shadow details you could ever want are there for the seeing, and it feels more like there just isn't that much light, rather than that they're trying to hide things. This is not an effective way to describe what I'm trying to get at, so I hope you're receiving better than I think I'm sending.
My folks didn't take us to many movies in the theater, so I missed out on TRON until we could rent it from The Wherehouse. But being who I was, there was no way I could miss out on the story, so I read the novelization, which I was convinced until just now was adapted by Alan Dean Foster, but it turns out it was actually Brian Daley (who also did the pretty-good-for-the-time Han Solo trilogy before the Star Wars Expanded Universe turned into Big Business). As a result, I had a mental image of the computer world which was only marginally aligned with the cinematography (the novelization had a few color production stills--selected very carefully, I must add--inserted in the middle of the book), and when I finally did see the movie, the "reality" fell far short of my expectations. Far short, because it was only when they were in motion that you could see how poorly the costuming integrated with the background.
In the intervening years, my standards for that sort of thing have only grown, so you'd think, between the increased fidelity of the pictures and the greater sophistication of the viewer, that I'd've found watching particularly painful. But in fact, I was able to overlook things, I think because at this distance, I can accept that the tech of the time was the tech of the time, and that they did the best they could with what they had. Also, the live-action bits did a great job of pounding the time period into your brain. When the alien archaeologists unearth an old print of TRON while trying to piece together what caused our civilization to collapse and consume itself, they will look at Bruce Boxleitner's nerd glasses and Cindy Morgan's fuzzy pink sweater, and the number "1981" (or the base-twelve equivalent) will spring fully-formed from their thinking apparatus.
The plot remains weak; though the idea of an AI growing beyond its programmer's intentions is a rich one, Lisberger's conception of how that would look lacks both depth and detail. Only three years after TRON, James Cameron would give us SkyNet and the nuclear obliteration of humanity. Master Control Program's only desire seems to have been to become a more efficient administrator of more and larger systems, and its chosen tactics of restricting user access that did not go through it, and condemning programs to death in cheesy video games seemed even at the time short-sighted and inefficient. Even the fascist allegory falls flat in the face of the fact that once the programs were "free" of the MCP, they went back to performing their allotted user-defined tasks. Gladiatorial servitude==bad; actuarial servitude==good?
The acting is wooden at best; Jeff Bridges plays the proto-Dude without much enthusiasm, Cindy Morgan seems to only exist to fail to insert romantic tension to either the real or the computer worlds (+1 point for the "teach me more of this human thing called 'kissing' trope, but -5 points for executing it with all the excitement of buying a gallon of milk), and most of the other human roles are only there for the exposition.
And oh, the dialogue!
[Flynn and TRON meet in the holding cells]
Kevin Flynn: Alan?
Tron: Where did you hear that name?
Kevin Flynn: Well that's your name, isn't it?
Tron: The name of my User. How did you know?
Kevin Flynn: I'm a program from a User that knows Alan.
[a Bit flies around Flynn's head in a Recognizer]
Kevin Flynn: Hey! Hold it right there!
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: What do you mean, "yes"?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Is that all you can say?
Bit: No.
Kevin Flynn: Know anything else?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Positive and negative, huh. You're a bit, aren't you?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Well, where's your program? Isn't he going to miss you?
Bit: No.
Kevin Flynn: I'M your program?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Another mouth to feed.
Bit: Yesyesyesyes!
All in all, TRON is nothing like a good movie. It is, however, a window to a place in my past when I was outrageously excited by the endless potential offered by the world of computers, utterly willing to suspend disbelief in pursuit of new ideas and concepts, and completely convinced of the eventual triumph of good over evil, even such a low-grade and cardboard evil as the Master Control Program. Also excessively enamored of hyperbolic adverbs. I enjoyed watching it again, and enjoyed even more watching my almost-nine-year-old son see it with fresh eyes. (He liked it.)
Here's hoping that re-watching TRON has set my expectations of Legacy low enough that I can enjoy it as well. :)
*The only exceptions I can think of were directed by guys named Tarantino or Kurosawa.
**I despise movie theaters***. We only go to movies that M. absolutely has to see on the big screen, and with our new home theater system, I'm doing my best to make inroads on that. :)
***Because:
1) Social anxiety
2) No volume control, on the movie or the other moviegoers
3) No filters--my brain gives equal priority to every input around me, so I can't ignore the conversation two rows away. My brain cannot multitask, either, so if there is a conversation two rows away which I cannot ignore, I comprehend neither it nor the movie dialog.
4) No pee breaks****
5) Cost
****One of my favorite teh_boy memories is the day he piped up while we were in the middle of watching a movie, telling me that I was an interlude. We had to pause the movie and go back-and-forth about four times: "What?" "You're an interlude!" "What?" before he gave up and ran off to the bathroom, and we figured out that he was parroting back to is a circumlocution we'd used previously, "urine interlude". Because even at six, he could've come up with a better put-down than calling me an interlude.