Tron Legacy
From Zanecorpwiki
Plays it way too safe.
Squandered Potential
Visually this movie is spot in. You could pair the look with almost any mediocre vision and cookie cutter cast and I'd still recommend the movie to anyone with even the smallest interest in visual aesthetics. Unfortunately, that's pretty much exactly the case we find ourselves in: a visually stunning but otherwise very mediocre movie.
They just spent so much time getting the visuals down, it really is impressive. A lot of work went into that look. Very minor spoiler: The cleverest bit of the movie was the younger Jeff Bridges Doppelganger. Excellent effect, and great use of the uncanny valley.
The main character, Sam Flynn, was so aggressively mediocre and uninteresting... it was weird. Both the Jeff Bridges characters--Kevin Flynn and Clu--had some thought and depth, but everyone else was just so flat, it was kind of bizarre. Especially for a story with so few characters. The context was pretty much the same way. Visually striking but otherwise entirely unoriginal references to the original movie without a single twist, update, or evolution of any idea or concept.
Frustratingly, they almost had a moderately interesting metaphor involving Kevin Flynn as the creator involving hubris vs. emergent order and responsibility vs. self-preservation, but in the end, the story failed to develop either. It almost seems as even the potentially interesting bits in the plot and concept where almost accidental.
Except for the raw visual images, everything about the movie is an unfocused mess. No surprises or twists to any reference. A narrative that promises a some interesting ideas, but fails to develop into anything interesting and pretty quickly falls back to an entirely generic plot. What may be even worse, the action sequences seem to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by pairing some good choreography and excellent action-actors in the supporting with leads who literally stumble through the key sequences.
If they'd only dropped any attempt to add depth to the plot and just made it a straight action/sci-fi, or dropped the action and focused on the plot, or developed some of the more interesting concepts... or something... you could have had a really good movie. Instead, we have a movie that would make an absolute top-notch 5 minutes portfolio footage for a visual arts studio.
