How come Star Wars gets a fuck ton of shitty sequels but the first TRON film in 15 years is a flop? I was waiting for this film since I was a child.
How come Star Wars gets a fuck ton of shitty sequels but the first TRON film in 15 years is a flop? I was waiting for this film since I was a child.
I think the bigger problem is that it’s just moved away from what Tron is supposed to be about. Like the whole point of Tron is it happens in the computer world what is the point of bringing it into the real world. Then it’s just a weird sci-fi movie with sort of but not really aliens invading, and the market is saturated with sci-fi films with alien invasions.
Having seen the movie, I think it’s actually a decent setup for the plot. The crux of the conflict is that programs can only exist in the real world for 29 minutes before dissolving, and the good mega corporation and bad mega corporation want the “permanence code.”
This time limit adds tension to the real world scenes in a pretty compelling way, because the good guys only need to escape capture for that half hour before gaining some respite. This is reinforced by the moments of viewing the world through the programs’ eyes, which always include the countdown to how much longer they have. There were times I thought “oh they only have a couple minutes” without stretching my suspension of disbelief beyond what’s required to watch a movie where flesh and blood can be digitized by a laser.
It also allows more interplay between the real and digital world that I felt was lacking in the older movies. Those ones call the digitized humans “users,” but it never feels like they are that different when they are in the console rather than at it. This movie has a lot of scenes that cut between the bad guy sitting at his desk typing in commands and the programs in the grid of his computer hearing them as orders and treating him with reverence appropriate to a machine. There’s a hacking scene where you see the programs from one server grid break through the literal firewalls and cut through antivirus programs that does a good job feeling like an abstraction of what is happening in the real world scenes.
All that said, I went to this movie for the soundtrack and pretty visuals, and while the light bikes and such in the real world did look cool, they would have looked a lot cooler in the digital world. There’s one action scene that is, and it is the coolest part of the movie.
That’s just it. The money bros are spineless. Alien invasion movies have a track record of making money. Making Tron true the source material is a gamble insofar as there’s no movie said money bros can point to and use as citation for projected revenue.
This film is a weird mix of pokemon and superman 2.