Daft Punk do an excellent tribute to Vangelis and deserve every flower thrown at their booted feet. Speaking of camp, whoever at Disney is pushing their IP towards perverse, jaded adults at the bewilderment of children, I salute you. That early sequence with the four ladies of the grid walking backwards to their plastic cocoons, in lock step and platform pumps, that is some high class trifle. Flash Gordon and Barbarella, you have been served.
Perhaps psyched to be working with talented actors like Jeff Bridges and Michael Sheen, the director appears to have let them riff without much supervision. The result is like a Grateful Dead jam. Great moments trapped in a miasma of missteps. Biodigital jazz, indeed.
To the set decorators and art directors: the baroque theme of Flynn’s fortress of solitude is spot on for CG camp. Corrupting the mid century modern Eames and Mies van der Rohe furniture in white leather was also a nice touch. But it would have been so much fun to see some contemporary furniture in IMAX 3D (e.g., the Karbon chaise lounge, the aptly named Terminal 1 or the Surface Table).
Finally, the plot. The story. The reason tendered for the too-long running time. It’s to Disney’s credit that one cannot rent or buy the original Tron right now. Doing so would likely open up their franchise reboot to comparison and, well, derision. Tron the father is beloved because it was such an awesomely phrased “Hello World” – maybe even a “Hello World!” Simply running the program over again, with better hardware, was a needless concession to their worst doubts about the movie-going public.
Case in point: they hire Cillian Murphy, star of Breakfast on Pluto, and then bar him from entering a synthetic world filled with glowing body suits and Lucite walking sticks. It’s just not fair.
The NYT reviewer posits that the writers, some involved in the series LOST, had developed good ideas that were cut. Perhaps those writers, their ideas and Cillian Murphy will surface in the sequel.
postscript
Olivia Wilde was great, if solely for her first laugh. I can’t be the only one who wondered if the insult to her body would become part of her character. (Sadly, it doesn’t.) Or who sighed with disappointment when she got on the back of whatshisname’s motorcycle in the final scene.
And was the PK Ripper product placement – as surely the Ducati bikes were – or a plug for authenticity?