It’s the third week of my Christmas break–classes start on Monday so I’m belatedly getting back to posting. Tron Legacy has been out for several weeks now and at around $245 million worldwide, is a respectable hit. If you haven’t seen it by now, you probably aren’t the target audience of mostly young-skewing gamers and techno-geeks, action film fans or middle-aged folks who fondly recall the strange 1982 film that makes the new film one of the longest to arrive sequels in history.
Being so generational in arrival, the film’s theme of father-son interaction gives the film it’s heart. Jeff Bridges returns as Kevin Flynn, the programmer of the “grid,” a cyber-world he was scanned into in the first film, and whom in the second film, returns for far longer than he intended as his created double, “Clu,” designed to assist him, rebells, and turns evil, as many doppelgangers tend to do. The digitized Flynn grows older in the grid, leaving his son Sam, to grow up fatherless and become a bit too independent, standing outside his father’s company rather than taking control and continuing his father’s, er, legacy. When Alan Bradley, (Bruce Boxleitner, reprising his role from the first film) encourages Sam to respond to a mysterious page from his father, Sam goes to Kevin’s old video arcade and discovers the secret lab where his father kept the portal to the grid–before you can say “Digitize me, Fred!” Sam has been zapped into the grid world, and the next two action set pieces mirror Kevin’s first entry into the cyberworld–first a deadly competition with the Frizbee like discs that will shatter one’s digital self if you don’t first shatter your opponent, and then the cybercycle deathrace. The point of course is to compare how it was done the first time with then new computer graphics and how state-of-the-art effect accomplish it today.
But the biggest effect in the movie and the one most worthy of buzz is the way Jeff Bridges has been de-aged to look around 30 years old to play both himself right before he leaves Sam for his long exile, and as Clu. One can know the concept of how digital effects can give a 61-year old an extreme makeover and still be astonished and a little creeped out seeing the fresh-faced Clu with features a little less detailed than when when Bridges appeared in the King Kong remake of 1976 or Starman of 1986.
While watching Tron Legacy, I was engaged in the story and enjoyed it, but there are inherent limitations in movies, both the first and this one, that are science fantasies set in a computer’s electronic innards. I think, given the vast growth in the complexity of video game technology, there should have been a corresponding growth in the inventiveness of the sequel. The world of the grid is still basically black with neon whites and oranges that inevitably affects the mood of the story and with the apparent underpopulation of Flynn’s creation, there seems to be some missed opportunities here.
For something completely different, try The King’s Speech, the story of Britain’s King George VI and his battle against a crippling stammer. No one plays uneasy men as well as Colin Firth and the role of a royal but private man on whom greatness is unwillingly thrust makes for a very appealing story. Born Albert and called “Bertie,” by his family, the second in line to the throne behind his more dashing brother Edward, the prince had suffered all his life from a speech impediment that made performance of his public duties a dreadful experience for both him and his audience–long awkward pauses in the wrong parts of sentences tortured all. Seeking help from an unconventional speech therapist, Australian Lionel Logue, the training sessions are the core of the film. Played by Geoffry Rush, Logue is self-taught and insists on a first-name basis from His Royal Highness, Prince Albert. An amateur student of Freud, Logue believes that if he delves into his patient’s psyche, he will uncover the true impediment to the royal’s tongue. This make for a sort of upstairs/downstairs buddy film which follows a familiar pattern of growing respect and mutual trust in the therapist–patient relationship and also of course supplies most of the dramatic conflict, which I suspected at times to be contrived for effect. The dramatized conflict went on about two scenes longer than necessary but the ultimate result is still a warm and rewarding biopic.
