The world of "Tron" (1982) was one in which as a ten-year-old, I was completely immersed. I played the video games, I had the toys and action figures, and I even engaged in Frisbee fights with my fellow "Tron" nerds on our front lawns that doubled as the Game Grid. I was in love with the colors, and perhaps unique to me, I loved the sterile coldness of the world, a world of corners and canyons that existed entirely inside of a computer. It was the dream of running around inside of a Lite-Brite! But I didn't stop there. I actually went further into the psychology of the movie, programming my Commodore 64 computer with a series of "programs" that would respond to me and go into my imaginative little system of 64 bits and do things. What I saw going on in my computer's mind was exactly what the filmmakers of the original "Tron" had fully intended me to see, and it was this charm that kept me engaged as I watched the new "Tron: Legacy," an updated version of the vision, but the charm wore off quick. I'm not quite sure what I expected, but I was disappointed, and I contribute this entirely to the elephant in the room, which is that technology has advanced so much since the early nineteen-eighties that the mere concept of "Tron" crumbles under its own weight. In a world where the Internet is commonplace, and where smart phones and GPS navigation systems and everything else that technology has given us is fully integrated into our everyday lives, "Tron: Legacy" feels like it's strangely behind the times. Even attempts to update the role of programmer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) as sort of a Buddhist philosopher trapped inside of his own creation, seem far too expanded to work inside the parameters of such a simple, initial concept. Back in 1982, it was somewhat easy to surrender to the idea of this universe due to our own collective naivete about computers. Today, it just seems ridiculous. With the exception of the somewhat impressive digital manipulation of Jeff Bridges to play both the Kevin Flynn of the eighties and his program counterpart, Clu, the technology of "Tron: Legacy" is not at all groundbreaking. And I'm sad to report that once again, the 3-D is not used to its full potential, an asset that would have more than likely kept me intrigued strictly for the sake of the visuals. Remember, I did love the colors! If you were a fan of the original, all the reminders that you loved "Tron" are there, from the glowing disc duels to the iconic light cycle races. But in the end, what you're left with is an attempt to update a universe that not only didn't require updating, but also defied it. I'd first heard about Tom Six's "The Human Centipede (First Sequence)" via Internet buzz, with post after post about how this was the movie that dared the viewer to watch it. With a premise that's simple enough -- a retired Siamese twin surgeon decides to stitch three young people together mouth to anus joined by a common digestive tract -- I think that this movie would have made a much better first-person narrative novel. Perhaps it was the watered-down Wal-Mart version that we were able to get our hands on (it's not the easiest thing to find a video store where I now live in the country), but I still hold the same opinion of the movie that I held before I'd even watched it. I'm sure there's an unrated version out there, but I doubt it would've changed my mind. If I were to walk up to you and pitch this gruesome idea, wouldn't the image that I've stained onto your mind already be enough? What more would there be to show on screen? And after watching the movie, I kept my resolve on this conclusion. I'm thinking that what would have made this story much more frightening in a psychological horror kind of way would have been to maybe get it from the perspective of "B" -- as she was referred to in the movie -- the middle section of the centipede and according to the demented surgeon (played with unsettling method skill by German actor Dieter Laser), the absolute worse part of the gig. But I don't think we needed him to tell us that. However, it's still a good-looking piece of work, especially the almost performance-art way in which we see the centipede crawling around the grounds of the post-modern house, joined together like a living sculpture. |
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