joeyontheguitar

i think tron was good enough, but it should’ve been amazing

The movie’s score on Rotten Tomatoes, 49 percent as of this writing, is misleading and accurate. 49 percent implies that Tron Legacy is a bad movie — it’s not — but does a nice job reflecting the good/bad movie limbo in which this film finds itself. Tron is just kind of… middling. But not necessarily middling in the sense of “bad,” because it’s an unmistakably cool movie to watch; it’s just that when we compare the film’s story to its amazing visuals… we’re left a bit hanging.

The beginning is cool, and it sets the tone well. But then the movie stalls. Maybe it’s because we expect a bigger story, but the rest of the movie feels like a minor escape sequence you’d expect in the middle of a film. Still, I’m happy I watched it (shoutout to Michael and Simon for also watching this 49-percent movie with me). Tron was a movie I didn’t want to pass up regardless of how good it was, and luckily it wasn’t too bad. Let’s move on to gripes…

Gripe One: Cliché lines… you didn’t have to bust them out again. Do you really need to have Sam say, “This can’t be good…”? PUH-LEEZ! lol

Gripe Two: Couldn’t the director have asked Garrett Hedlund (the guy who plays Sam) to not talk so gruffly? Sam is supposed to be a bright-eyed kid who has no idea what he got himself into, not motherfuckin’ Clint Eastwood for crying out loud.

My third gripe is really about the screenplay, which I’ve already said is less grand than I thought it would be. The movie ran a little over two hours, probably because the action sequences took a huge chunk of the running time. Action sequences make popcorn entertainment, but IMO if they’re not contained within a strong progression of story-related events then they can suck away time that could be used for a good plot (as demonstrated in Tron Legacy). I think with a little restructuring and reimagining Tron could’ve been the film that everyone expected it to be. Ah well, a little bit of a miss, but at least it was a cool movie.