Guest Author: Justin on TRON

I already attempted my own Tron review in the previous post, but my friend Justin is a much better writer than I  am. Here's his in all it's glory, with some pictures and captions by me. Enjoy!

FUCKING TRON! :D:D:D

I want one.

Or, "How I learned to stop worrying and love Hollywood's disgusting habit of taking some sort of cherished aspect of your childhood culture, CGI the fuck out of it, and slap a '2' at the end of the resulting movie's title."

So, being the suave and debonair man I am, I pulled a few strings (Read: I followed a viral marketing campaign that was giving out free shit by the bucket) and ended up yesterday at a free advanced screening of TRON: Legacy in Downtown Disney.

This movie has been hyped up like shit to mainstream audiences, and, well... It's made by modern-era Disney, the bastardized, corrupt, corporate shadow of a once great and mighty leader of the film industry. As such, you'd expect the movie to be a total piece of shit.

It isn't.

I have good news for you. They outsourced it to a completely different studio. One who knows how to make FUCKING. AWESOME. MOVIES.

Any of you who lived their childhood as a DnD nerd in the 80's (Or were pitifully born in the early 90's like myself, but is still integrated enough into modern nerd culture to still be able to appreciate the nostalgic value of that time) will remember a movie called "TRON," a film about a bunch of white people on robo-togas flying lego space ships through a computer to prove that some bitch who clearly has never touched an NES in his life pirated the code for several popular video games from their original designer, Kevin Flynn. You will also remember they somehow managed to shoehorn a shitton of religious overtones into the movie, turning into a sci-fi, non-musical rendition of "What if God Was One of Us"

I can't think of a more perfect formula to create a cult-classic film, something that's absolutely horrid as a cinematic piece, yet somehow just absolutely grows on you until you come to love it. The cinematic equivalent of a puppy with a second tail for it's left hind-leg, if you will.

Well. Good news. TRON LEGACY cuts off that second tail, and equips it with a bitching cyborg leg composed of an alloy that's a composite of Daft Punk, a shitton of research into 50's-60's modernist architecture (Or so [Tyler] claims, READ HIS FUCKING BLOG ABOUT IT HERE OR I WILL SHANK YOU. EVEN IF YOU DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ARCHITECTURE. [TRON Modern] ), and... Well... This beautiful motherfucker, who absolutely did not deserve to be a degraded to a secondary character. [link]

Also included is the cutest benevolent computer glitch to ever grace a custom-built Linux-based operating system. Who also happens to somehow be the cure to cancer, SCIENCE and RELIGION. You will never want to fuck an error message more ever again. She's also got the whole "Detatched sleeves with a cute serial number tattoo peeking out" thing going on that Vocaloid seems to love, for all you anime fans out there, and even managed to work that into a major plot point. I was surprised they didn't have any Zettai Ryouki going on, either.

But anyway. Enough babbling about nerd shit. Let's talk about something all you common folk can understand: The story. I was very surprised to say that Tron somehow managed to be something that can appeal to both the cult classic nerds and the mainstream audience without making either feel like they got ripped off. Why? Because both are made entertaining by their gratuitous usage of cliche. HOWEVER. TRON: Legacy, being the pretty cool guy who doesn't afraid of anything that he is, decides to turn the whole cliche of a cliche storm on it's head, by being responsible with them. You've got twice the religious overtones Tron 1 did, you have a scene that clearly implies that the main character is symbolic of Hitler, you have cute sci-fi girls in skintight jumpsuits EVERYWHERE, you have a rebellious college dropout alchoholic main character who rides a motorcycle and goes searching for his long lost father not because he gives a a fuck (By which I mean "Pretends not to give a fuck, but clearly misses him like all shit"), but because he just happened to be in the neighborhood on the way to McDonalds. Or something.

Said anti-establishment college dropout also performs the most badass and hardboiled example of pirating an OS from a software company and uploading it to a torrent site JUST TO GIVE SAID COMPANY THE MIDDLE FINGER in the history of history. One that involved uploading the entire OS to the internet in under ten minutes, and then base jumping from a skyscraper. I guess that's more of a stereotype taken to a FUCKING BADASS extreme than it is a cliche, but the movie industry would be the best thing ever if it were to now adopt this as a cliche.

BUT ANYWAY, tacky cliche and completely unnecessary "We did this stunt because it looked cool" is indeed abound, but... Absolutely none of it is shoehorned in. It's almost bizzare. It's a two-hour long string of cliche where every cliche is undeniably essential to the plot, and where they all somehow work in synergy towards a common goal. Sure, the mysterious masked man who's been trying to kill everyone turns out to be Tron (Which should not be a spoiler, since he has TRON'S GODDAMN LOGO ON HIS SHIRT) and he has a change of heart and becomes a good guy again at the last possible minute in order to heroic sacrifice the shit out of himself (Which is a spoiler, yeah. Sorry. You should have seen it coming as soon as you realized who he was, though. Which should have been when they first released promotional art of him back when the movie was still in production), but... It's not tacky, because there's buildup to it. It doesn't come out of nowhere for the sake of "SHIT WE NEED A CONFLICT TO MAKE THE PLOT LONGER," nor is it even the main conflict to begin with. It's just something that happened, and something that HAD to happen in order for the rest of it to happen. To put it short...

It's a mainstream cult-classic well-written B-movie, with revolutionary CGI (Hint hint: The main bad guy, CLU 2.0 [Who, might I add, is based off of CLU 1.0 from Tron 1, a background character who's only named in passing and dies in the first fifteen minutes of the film. That in itself is major nerd cred.], is entirely CGI. And you don't even realize it until you start to wonder how they magically had Jeff Bridges and Jeff Bridges from 20 Years In The Past together on the same stage without a single DeLorean in sight. Look up some videos of him.) that takes a backseat to the double revolutionary set design, which most of the time is also CGI.

Yes. That statement contradicts itself on almost every level, and it should not logically exist. But it does, and therefore, is badass.

Pictured: diagrams for awesome.