Cinema Discourse

  • Home
  • About
  • Books
  • Classic Movies
  • Articles
  • Contact
  • Cookie Policy

John Lobell – John David Ebert

Movies as Theoretical Narratives


Cinema discourse looks at current and classic movies from a literary point of view. We also have top movie reviews, current movie reviews, film ratings, movie blogs and movie history.
You are here: Home / Uncategorized / On Tron: Legacy

On Tron: Legacy

December 30, 2010 By John Lobell 2 Comments

Tron: Legacy a Movie Review

by John Lobell

It is bad enough that movies have become so formulaic, but when they are, they could at least follow the rules of the formula.

In Tron: Legacy, we have:
– Search for and reconciliation with the father
– Travel to the underworld for the completion of the self
– Travel to the underworld to save the world
– The realization that technology cannot replace humanity

Search for and reconciliation with the father. Nobody does it better than Star Wars 4, 5, and 6 (the original three).  For one thing, there is the advantage of having three movies to unfold the story, but Lucas is also a great storyteller.  There is not much dramatic tension in a son finding his lost father and teaming up with him when they have always loved each other.  When your father is Darth Vader, you have the potential for real drama. And even The Who’s Tommy has more tension in this area than Tron.

Travel to the underworld for the completion of the self. The makers of Tron understand that Sam Flynn has to mature in the course of his adventure, but they could have done more to show the process.  He is pretty competent going in and the only change we get coming out is, “I think I am going to assert myself in the family business.”

Separation from ordinary reality (the first step of Campbell’s hero journey) by going underground (Sam goes downstairs into a cavern) has certain requirements (see my comments following Ebert’s review of Burton’s Alice in Wonderland on this site).  The hero should mature–specific adventures should develop weak areas of the hero’s character.  Going in competent to throw a frisbee and ride a motorcycle and then coming out still competent to throw a frisbee and ride a motorcycle is not a development.

Travel to the underworld to save the world. Clu (the bad guy) is plotting to leave the grid (virtual reality) and invade our real world.  Sam and Kevin Flynn have to stop him.  Here there is something odd about Tron.  In the beginning of the movie we see ENCOM, a giant Microsoft-like software corporation.  It might be evil.  And we see a hotshot programmer there.  One of the requirements of a well-done underground hero journey, besides the completion of the hero’s character, is that there should be parallels in situations and characters between the underworld and this world.  Thus Clu’s empire in the grid might parallel ENCOM, and Clu might parallel the hotshot programmer.  We don’t get any of that, but the notion is so obvious that one suspects that it was there in an earlier version of the story line and got dropped.  Probably at the insistence of suits who wanted more time for motorcycle chases.  Which was dumb because according to the New York Times, Tron, among other vapid movies, is losing out at the box office to Alice in Wonderland and other intelligent movies.

The realization that technology cannot replace humanity. Kevin Flynn, the father, was unable to fully appreciate the human love between himself and his son, and sought to make a better world in virtual reality.  His creation was “perfect,” but also a nightmare.  Kevin Flynn comes to realize his mistake, and at the end of the movie rectifies it.  One of the inhabitants of this virtual world is Quorra, a self-produced program that carries the potential to unlock mysteries in science, religion, and medicine.  She reads Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and longs to see the real world.  In the final scene she is in the real world on the back of Sam’s Ducati seeing a sunrise for the first time.  Her reaction is the best acting in the movie.

Tron: Legacy is satisfying in visual design, characters, and story telling, but not as satisfying as it ought to be.  The rules for this kind of movie are not complicated.  More Tron sequels are rumored.  Let’s hope they get it right next time.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Comments

  1. thesecretlivesofcats says

    January 2, 2011 at 6:49 pm

    The ending is a bit like Blade Runner too, when they’re flying through the forest.

    Um, point three is where I had the most problems with the story. It was so clear in Tron–there’s a real world and a computer world. In the computer world programmers have parallel avatars, and everyone is in threat of a huge program that wants to control earth’s resources(as all evil computers do I’m sure). In Tron Legacy, what exactly was the Bio-Digital Jazz Man that they were creating? Was it all taking place in Flynn’s basement? Or maybe they were in Who-Ville? Whatever they were doing it was totally rad and made some totally rad bitchin sexy Artificial Intelligence chick that is now in the real world and is going to do some bitchin stuff in the human world. Like what?

    A lesser quip is 30 years have gone by and the computer world and there’s not one little nod to new technology except a mention of wi-fi at one point. I know they covered their tracks in the plot because they’re in a basement from 1985(glad someone kept paying the electricity bills) and there wouldn’t be any computer updates because of that…but, you know, it’s a computer movie. One scene where they bump into an internet meme or say , “Why is this place so empty?” “It’s an old social networking site,” or some such thing.

    I could go on(Why Nike Wetsuit Costume Design?)…but actually, it was fun enough. The look was expansive and didn’t look like they cut corners, nobody cloyingly annoying(Young Sam, the mop top kid, came close), young Jeff Bridges was done well enough to make you blink(even if the concept is creepy), and there were fun and sexy characters that moved the plot along.

  2. Larry Pearce says

    February 4, 2011 at 8:51 am

    I was really disappointed by this new Tron picture. I know it’s pointless and sort of a cheap shot to criticize films like this on the basis of their scripts and character development(a bit like complaining that the plots and performances in porno movies are ludicrous), but the visuals are not grand or imaginative enough to sustain our suspension of disbelief that what’s happening on screen is completely uninteresting. I thought the computer animation was not only modest and kind of ho-hum, but the entire design aesthetic of the digital dreamworld was completely wrong! The new “Tronworld” looks too much like an actual, physical place, like the dystopic nightmare future of Blade Runner or Spielberg’s A.I. rather than the abstract, rudimentary linearity that made the look of the original Tron stand apart from other SF films of the era. It all looks so moody and dreary. And for some reason there’s smoke and mist and storm clouds in the computerworld for some reason that just doesn’t feel right. The much hyped action sequences (all 3 of them) are all rather short and are few and far between. Like a lot of these elaborately mounted, hi-tech, CGI fantasy extravaganza’s of late, Tron Legacy gets stuck in narrative quicksand pretty early into it’s running time by plunging headfirst into “exposition hell.” There’s more standing around and yacking and explaining things that we are trying our damnedest to care about than in Tony Gilroy’s ponderous yack fest Michael Clayton. I demand more from my Tron!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

 

CLICK-FOR-CULTURAL-DISCOURSE

 

CLICK-FOR-VISIONARY-CREATIVITY

 

Contribute

 

Giant-Humans-Tiny-Worlds book cover

 

Post-Classic-Cinema-book
clickforpromovideo

 

Catastrophe book cover

 

newMedia-book

 

CELEBS-ICONS-book

 

Ebert books

Recent Posts

  • Animation Artistry in the Alps ~ by Larry Ruppel
  • Animated Cinematic Innovation Celebrated in the French Alps ~by Larry Ruppel
  • On Annihilation
  • On Blade Runner: 2049
  • On American Gods

Archives

Site

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Resources

  • Articles
  • Books
  • Classic Movies
  • Contact
  • Cookie Policy
  • Data Access Request
  • Help Support John Ebert
  • John David Ebert Movie Review of Being John Malkovich
  • John David Ebert Movie Review of Inland Empire
  • John David Ebert Movie Review of Lost Highway
  • John Lobell on Myths and Movies
  • Privacy Policy

John David Ebert Videos

click for video

Heidegger's Being and Time

click for video

Jean Gebser's Ever-Present Origin

click for video

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

click for video

Fichte's Science of Knowledge

click for video

Schelling's First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature

click for video

Karl Jaspers' Origin and Goal of History

click for video

Spengler's Decline of the West

click for video

Walter Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility

click for video

Derrida's Of Grammatology

click for video

Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment

click for video

Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus

click for video

Deleuze's Logic of Sense

click for video

Deleuze's Difference and Repetition

click for video

Vattimo's A Farewell to Truth

click for video

Alain Badiou's Ethics

click for video

The Works of Paul Virilio

click for video

Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres

click for video

John David Ebert on The Age of Catastrophe

click for video

John David Ebert on The New Media Invasion

click for video

John David Ebert on Elvis Presley

click for video

On Carroll Quigley and Historical Cycles

click for video

Heiner Muhlmann's Maximal Stress Cooperation Theory of Culture

click for video

On Borkenau's Cycle of the Dead

click for video

John David Ebert interviewed on Kubrick, Gilgamesh and the Dangers of Technology

click for video

John David Ebert Interviewed by the Artist Jacques de Beaufort

 

Click for John Lobell's Website

© 2014 John Lobell & John David Ebert | Webmaster jbQ Media Web & SEO

Manage Cookie Consent
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}