Postby shooraijin » Thu Dec 30, 2010 11:18 pm
So I finally got around to seeing it myself. The 3D was worth it, and the plot was holey and mumbo-jumbo, but serviceable, and I really liked the acting of Quorra and Zuse. The anti-aging CGI on Jeff Bridges also was pretty good.
But it is nowhere near the original, and here is why: the original showed you a world you had never seen before. You had characters in stark environments where the only "real" things were edges. People were grainy and monochrome, only their suits showing colour. The environment and the landscape were utterly imaginary, only vaguely reminiscent of the real world, such as Robert Abel's rendering of the descent into Tron after Flynn is digitized. It was completely unreal.
Tron: Legacy, otoh, has normal looking people, just with glowing clothes. The world and landscape look real, just fantastic and huge and a lot of neon. People wear fabric. People drive things that really are motorbikes and live in cliff houses with material that looks like stone, doors with doorknobs and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.
It seems to me with the length and breadth of modern CGI that any fantastic mental image, no matter how ludicrous, unreal or unnatural, could be seriously entertained. Even with Legacy's plot weaknesses, if they had consciously tried to achieve a new visual benchmark and render a world that was even more complete and alive yet even more unlike the real world, it would have been mindbending. It certainly had the chops. Rather than limiting it to "buildings" and "machines" it could have been pathways, actors exceeding physical limitations with or transforming upon or even creating fabulous planes of existence, shapes or images reminiscent of people rather than people themselves.
Instead, while Tron may have held some influence on the Matrix, the Matrix has been the visual imagery for just about every sci-fi movie that followed, and I expected a lot more from Steven Lisbarger. We didn't get a new Tron, we got the Matrix Lite. That doesn't make it bad, and I still think it was a good movie, but it could have been so much greater.
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