TRON: Legacy

I went to see the movie TRON:Legacy last month and it was absolutely awful! In fact it was so dire that it's taken me until now to calm down enough to articulate exactly why it was crap.

They clearly only made it to cash in on the legacy of the first movie, leaving a generation of fans feeling cheated. The disappointment started before the opening credits when a message was displayed saying that only certain scenes are actually 3D but you should keep the uncomfortable glasses on for the whole movie anyway. (And I didn't even notice the 3D scenes when they did occur!) It continued downhill from there with the blatant Nokia product placement, predictable plot that shamelessly ripped off movies like The Matrix and Hackers, mediocre CG (the young Jeff Bridge's looked about a natural as Data in Star Trek), 2 dimensional characters that were poorly acted, innane dialogue, and monotonous soundtrack.

Watching this movie reminded me of foreign films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because the character's motivations weren't clear and the plot wasn't always coherant; it was like something got lost in translation. The dialogue was also complete gibberish a lot of the time, like someone had flicked through a computing dictionary and put random terms together into a sentence. The movie threw around some grand concepts like isomorphic programs being created from nothing, but none of them were properly explained, and the leap from that to being able to cure cancer with them was just ridiculous. It reminded me of Lost trying to explain away all the mysteries of the island by saying it was electromagnetism; just because you say it's science doesn't make it so!

Now don't get me wrong, I like Daft Punk and the sound track did add a certain atmosphere to the movie, but all the songs blended into one instead of highlighting specific scenes. It felt like watching one long music video at times, especially during the scene in the club where the band is in the background as DJs. The Matrix had a far better soundtrack with a mixture of artists and genres to add variety too.

Rating: 2 out of 10, don't bother paying to see this movie, save your money and watch the first one again instead. As usual the 3D is a total gimmick and I've heard songs with deeper plots. This movie makes the Matrix 2 and 3 look good.