Dead RPP Society
Maybe it is just another form of self inflicted pain, but the Society section will be for those rare instances when there is more than two entertainment stories or just feel like throwing in story that just defies all other sections.
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Images are copyright of LivePlanet, Sean Bailey Productions and Walt Disney Pictures. |
‘Tron
Legacy’ delivers powerful performance as sequel During any given year, there are few movies that I feel bad about not catching, if I happen to miss them when they are still in theaters. One of those was the nearly 30-year-delayed sequel to a movie that was both groundbreaking and largely misunderstood because it was so ahead of its time. Most of my hesitation to see this follow-up flick was due to the fact that it had been so long since I’d seen the original and the inability to find a copy of it to watch beforehand. Thankfully I was able to watch the old technological epic and when I watched the new release, it felt as if hardly any time had passed other than the timeline established. In some ways, “Tron Legacy” not only revived interest in a cult classic, but surpassed in such a way that it can thrive on it’s own powerful performance. One thing some viewers may find confusing is how the iconic character Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) made it back to the virtual world and then was no longer able to return to his own reality. Fortunately, the film does a decent effort of explaining this gap by noting that he made regular visits back early on to rebuild the circuit friendly land saved by him and his program buddy Tron (Bruce Boxleitner). To help facilitate the time Flynn could not remain during the building process, he creates a new program in his image called Clu (also played by Bridges) to work with Tron on making a perfect utopia. Unfortunately, Clu takes his job a little too seriously and decides to overthrow the perfectly happy society to cleanse things not viewed as perfect, which then creates the situation of Flynn getting trapped and about 20 or so years later, the scenario that brings his own son, Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), into the grid. What follows is a race to prevent both worlds from suffering a far more disastrous fate with an ending a lot more deep than I would have thought Disney would allow. As with “True Grit,” Bridges’ presence throughout is nearing perfection, and in some ways more than the cowboy flick because he has to pull off himself as a grumpy old man as well as what we saw about 30 years ago in the same story. Sure the character’s are in some ways the same being, but so different that it feels like two different actors in the dance. The rest of the cast performs their roles respectably as well (really liked how Hedlund pulled off borrowing bits of Bridges’ personality traits) and throughout there is plenty of tribute to what was once popular to the dedicated few (even the special effects keeps some of the old stuff with a refreshed look). It should be appropriate for the whole family, who will certainly find themselves glued to this for possibly even more viewings. For bringing back something that has long had underrated franchise appeal, “Tron Legacy” earns an impressive four out of five light cycles. |
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Past Society: Review of True Grit.
1031 B.C. - 2010 A.D., Really Pathetic, LLC.