Today I thought I'd follow up on some reaction I've been getting about recent reviews / articles. Two threads have been met consistently with strong reactions - one of which I'd hoped to have closed the book one, and the other that continues to bother people I mention it to, so much so that it stopped a conversation dead the other night.
Here's your warning, folks; I'm going to talk about True Grit and (hopefully for the last time this quarter) Tron / Tron Legacy. Tune out now if you like, I'll be back tomorrow with a Retro Review of Peter Jackson's Meet the Feebles. For everybody who stuck around, let's jump into the controversy, starting with the more trivial of the two:
It has been rightfully pointed out that I left out two critical components of the "world" of Tron that are undeniably difficult to justify, let alone explain. The first is that if a program is fitted with an identity disc that records everything they learn - and is expanded in Tron Legacy to be everything they knew prior to that point in the case of Quorra and Kevin Flynn - why on earth would that be the EXACT same disc used to fight in the games? Sark does say that anyone who loses their identity disc is subject to immediate de-resolution, but it seems like it would be very easy to lose your disc without dying, so much so that in Tron Legacy Quorra doesn't seem to care that Flynn replaces her disc with his. I gather that the discs are like boomerangs most of the time, but isn't it a really horrible idea to combine the most important component of your being with your weapon?
The second is a "please don't think too hard about this because it doesn't make sense" plot point: the MCP brought Kevin Flynn into the Grid, but why exactly does killing the Master Control Program automatically send him back out? If one takes a moment to consider this, it's clear that the MCP controlled the laser that brought Flynn into a virtual dystopia, and dragged him in to avoid dealing with a User on their terms. Flynn jumping into the MCP's "beam" and taking advantage of his "User powers" to help Tron destroy the program would actually work against liberating him from the Grid. After all, without the MCP, the laser isn't instinctively re-create Flynn because he helped "free" the programs. The laser isn't going to do anything, because it was only on when the MCP turned it on to incorporate Flynn. There should be no way that Flynn gets out of the Grid at the end of Tron, and they conveniently switch the laser to an input / output tower in Tron Legacy so as not to have to deal with a plot point I cannot defend.
By the way, I would like to correct the assumption that I leapt to Tron's defense in order to further discredit Tron Legacy - mostly by people who hate Tron Legacy, to be fair - but that's not actually the case. I disagreed with the false equivalency that it was okay that Tron Legacy was an awfully silly movie in many ways because Tron was also silly and I was conveniently forgetting that. Not only is that not true, but it assumes that Tron, Tron Legacy, and movies like them are given carte blanche to be "not good" because they're simply meant to be "dumb, roller-coaster ride" films, like Transformers or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
There is an asinine assumption that because a film has a large budget and is marketed relentlessly that is must also be "stupid." It's as though the blockbuster releases are now not intended to be anything more than "mindless entertainment" to be consumed like cotton candy at the fair and forgotten immediately after. I don't know exactly where or when this started, although I'm inclined to jump back to 1996's Independence Day or 1999's The Mummy as key examples of what people mean when they describe "that type of movie." It likely goes back much further, but it assumes that most movies can't be clever and appeal to mass audiences at the same time.
To this I call shenanigans. Stepping aside the fact that Inception and The Dark Knight totally disprove that model, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Star Wars - which are the basis for the "blockbuster" movement - are all entertaining without being mindless. Ghostbusters is both immensely watchable and chock full of smart screenwriting. Even the action film, so maligned for being ridiculous in and of itself, produced Predator, Aliens, and Die Hard, which are actually entertaining and clever.
If the argument is that times have simply changed and that all people really want are farting CGI characters, then let's take a look at some other modern exceptions to this so-called "rule": Spider-Man 2, the Pirates of the Caribbean films, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Up, Batman Begins, The Incredibles, Kill Bill, The Sixth Sense, hell, even though it wasn't successful, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World disproves the concept that "big" does not equate "stupid." I'll even give 2009's Star Trek and the first Men in Black a nod, because they entertain on repeat viewings. It's not all Armageddon's and Avatar's and Alice in Wonderland's (yes, I deliberately chose "A"'s) - films with plenty of eye candy that hurt your brain if you try to apply causality and basic logic to the story.
While Tron and Tron Legacy have many silly things about them, they are at times brimming with ideas. Not always good ideas, or thought out ideas, or even ideas executed in a plausible manner, but ideas nonetheless. Tron Legacy's biggest failing is relying too heavily on future Tron films to fill in plot holes, a tactic that provides audiences with a half-cooked story that razzle dazzle can't in and of itself overcome.
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The True Grit section ended up being so long that I'm going to split this article up and continue it on Thursday, after the Meet the Feebles review and Wednesday's Video Daily Double. See you then...
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