Good times if you're a Tron fan. Maybe a bit too much effort to rope in all the references possible to the original film, but its heart is in the right place, and it's a beautiful movie visually.
The original film, well back in 1982 Zandardad was five years younger than I am now when he saw it. Made a geek out of him, and when I saw it (and nearly wore out the new VHS recorder and the tape of it as a result) he noticed how my eyes lit up and knew I was going to be a geek too.
Pop was a pretty fair lightcycle driver back in the day too. Never passed up an opportunity to play the Tron arcade game when he could. I was a Marble Madness and Mappy man myself at the tender age of 7, but Pop? Tron was his game, and he was good. We'd go with my younger brother and hit the arcade at the mall on weekends. Pop's specialties were Hat Trick and Tron.
Didn't take long for the family to end up with a C64 and me with a Basic For Kids workbook and a subscription to Compute's Gazette in 1984, and the rest was history.
"I fight for the users" pretty much sums up Zandardad. More than a little Kevin Flynn in him, always wanting to help the little guy. The older Kevin Flynn, still played by Jeff Bridges in the movie, is a somewhat more of a Zen hippie than my practical father, but Flynn's gray beard is identical to the one my father sports. The older Flynn's motto, "Remove your self from the equation" is more than a bit of my father as well.
Flynn's son Sam (Garrett Hedlund), well there are more than a couple similarities. Painfully intelligent but a slacker more worried about the idea than the execution, not quite ready to be in his father's impressive shadow, Sam and Kevin Flynn along with program Quorra (Olivia Wilde) are searching for a way to take back the digital world from Flynn's creation, Clu (a younger, digitized Bridges) whose quest for perfection has of course turned him into the very tyrant he and Flynn set out to stop.
Will the film create a new generation of computer geeks? Maybe. It's a good film, but tries too hard, the Windows Vista to Tron's dependable, legendary Windows 2000. It doesn't quite get it right, but it's still pretty nice and worth giving it a look.
Your inner 7 year old geek kid will enjoy it. The older you? Well, let the kid enjoy themselves and you'll be okay.
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2 comments:
I'm probably aged between you and Zanderdad, but I think you nailed it. It was a beautiful movie, and I loved the references to the 1st one (particularly about the door), but I'm still trying to decide what they were saying. In "Tron" it was a version of "information needs to be free", I'm not sure there's a similar message here...
Still, I enjoyed it thoroughly, and will probably buy it the minute it comes out on DVD.
I'm a 90's kid, so Tron was 9 years before my time(I'm 19). I was really excited for the new one but I decided it would be in my best interest to pay homage to the original version by viewing that one first. Luckily someone had already uploaded it on YouTube(I hear rental is pretty expensive for that movie)
I have to say watching Tron for the first time made me nervous(coming from an age of digital animation and stunning CGI) I honestly wasn't expecting much,but boredom and discomfort to say the least)I figured like old video games, we gotta start somewhere...
But I was pleasantly surprised, it was pretty good and it was a really impressive movie for it's time! And I didn't feel like an idiot whilst watching it like I usually do with some movies dealing with extensive complicated "vocabulary".
Another perk was the fact that I knew Tron: Legacy wasn't a "remake" like other people my age thought. It is actually a sequel. I actually knew all the characters who came on screen and knew who was related to whom from the previous movie.
And one of my favorite moments was the fact that I was one of the only people in the theater who laughed at the door joke^_^. I felt like I knew some kind of secret, it was awesome!
I was also really excited to see Daft Punk(creators of the song "One More Time")in the film featuring their new song "Derezzed"
Anyways that's my spiel, I'm glad you guys enjoyed the movie. I myself hope a lot of 80's Tron fans went to see it, perhaps they'd be impressed with how much it's evolved^_^
Happy Christmas Eve, and I hope you have a Wonderful Christmas as well^_^
signed
-Happy to know that Tron still fights for the users-
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