Saturday, December 18, 2010

Tron Legacy: My aching head

Did you know that there is a distinct sound when the human body collides with a vehicle while either one or both of them is moving at a high speed? There is. It’s a very distinctive sound.

There’s not a lot out there that can replicate the sound of an object – which is predominantly soft and squishy but has a comparatively solid center – colliding with another object – which is much larger than the first object, predominantly hollow and made of plexiglass – at speeds which that the first object was never meant to travel. The thump that these two objects make upon collision is not solid, it is distinctly soft, almost muffled but not muted, and invokes in most people (I think) an instinctive wince of pain.

I mention this because, being as I am somewhat hyper-aware of this sound, my only real gripe about the new movie “Tron: Legacy” is that this sound is used. Constantly. And it gave me a bad migraine.

That said, I did enjoy the movie. On one hand, it’s a fun, family-friendly sci-fi action-adventure that fully pays off on the high-concept premise that the original, being made in the 1980s, had a bit of trouble capturing. On the other, there are some storyline hang-ups, characterization mismatches and dropped subplots that could have been realized better.

And on the third hand (please don’t ask where it came from) it does exactly what good science fiction should do: it uses its speculative fiction elements to address themes and ideas that apply to the real world, rather than focusing exclusively on the speculative elements without context or relation to the viewer’s reality.

It gave me a lot to think about. That’s why I’m going to split my wonderings about it up over many posts and probably a few days as I take a little time to absorb it all.

But first…some ibuprofen.

No comments:

Post a Comment