And once again Bruce Boxleitner returns as Alan Bradley aka Tron. Michael Sheen livens the film as Castor with his jestly rendition of David Bowie circa glam rock era Ziggy Stardust. Reciprocally, Olivia Wilde plays the character of Quorra with a truthful childlike innocence and wonder that demonstrates she has more to offer as an actress than just luscious fanboy eyecandy. Thankfully, he's no wooden Hayden Christiansen (although he would have made a much better Anakin Skywalker) and plays the cliched angst-ridden rebellious youth with convincingly noble admiration. Garret Hedlund is surprisingly likeable as his son, Sam. Once again Jeff Bridges is the chemistry that holds the foundations of the Troniverse together solely with his strength and conviction of his performance as zen guru cyber-Jesus Flynn to his Judas megalomaniacal alter-ego Clu in some sort of virtual yin and yang. We never learn the real reason why Flynn created this world in the first place other than the fact that it was far out biodigital jazz, man.
Tron Legacy's most astonishing revelation delivered by Alan when he tells Sam that his father was about to change science, medicine and religion in such a profound way is simply thrown away in a single line of expository dialogue. Narratively it misses those opportunities to explore such metaphysical questions as it so masterfully eluded to in the film's promising test trailer shown at Comic Con the way that the original Tron explored such intriguing philosophical ideas around the religious beliefs of its programs and their creators. It is never convincingly explained how exactly virtual programs existing in the digital world can somehow manifest themselves into tangible living matter in our physical world with Flynn's disc like a magician pulling a rabbit out of an ethereal hat, just as it does not attempt to explain why a User like Sam can bleed in its digital realm other than the fact he is simply a User and "he's different," nor does it attempt to explain how Kevin Flynn has aged 20 years trapped in his digital confinement when theoretically he shouldn't have physically aged at all as a digital avatar of himself. The plot is almost video-game like in its objective as the competing faction of Clu's militaristic forces must obtain elder Flynn's identity disc which is a master key to unlock the door to our world so that he and his army can take it over. In a creepy sort of way it almost works for the character within the context of the story because he is supposed to be an artificial construct and we can almost buy that he doesn't look quite like a real human being, but during the film's opening scenes when we see Bridges in flashback playing younger Kevin Flynn telling bedtime stories to his son, Sam, it robs the moment between a father and his son of its already forced sincerity and dehumanizes it in a cold and unsettling way. The eyes, the brows, the cheekbones, and the mouth have an unconvincing artificiality about them that betrays the illusion and his aged voice also belies the effect. Comparing it to how he looks in other earlier films of his career like Starman it's obvious that Bridges did not look quite like his poorly rendered doppleganger at that age. The CGI animation used to make Jeff Bridges look 20 years younger more closely resemble the animated cut-scenes from its video game counterpart TRON: Evolution. The technology that I had hoped would be the promise of taking Tron once again to a new revolutionary cinematic level and breaking new technical ground in much the same way as the original film had ushered in a new era at the dawn of the digital filmmaking frontier demonstrates that we still have quite a ways to go before digital actors can convincingly look indistinguishable from real human performers and reinforces the theory of the "Uncanny Valley" in robotics that says the closer we get to making artificial constructs look human the more we can identify their subtle inhuman imperfections. The film's biggest special effect is also its biggest failure. Joe Kosinkski's understated long-awaited sequel to Steven Lisberger's game changing electronic mythos is a visual triumph, a world unlike anything we've ever seen before, transforming the iconography of its predecessor into an awesome 3D spectacle, but it is an imperfect world, its breathtaking three dimensions propped upon the two dimensional pillars of its problematic plot and one that would be looked upon with the consternation of its biggest adversary who, ironically, is the one who nearly completely undermines and very nearly derezzes it.
28 years, 161 days later, Tron's legacy lives on.
0 kommentar(er)
