Tron: Legacy (2010)

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Jeff Bridges, Olivia Wilde, Bruce Boxleitner

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. The thing I remember most from seeing this one in the theater is that it was shortly after I bought a used PT Cruiser which I drove for two years, despite the film never working right.

That’s probably a bad sign, right?

Did I Like It: Whereas the original Tron (1982) managed to use the limitations (both then and now) of computer animation to great effect depicting a world that, by its very nature, was never meant to look natural.

That film wasn’t nearly as successful as Disney might have hoped, but became a cult favorite over the years, hence someone somewhere in the Mouse House thinking that a sequel might be warranted, if not urgent. By the time they got things together, something had happened with movies. CGI became ubiquitous, but it didn’t become better enough to have viewers view it through anything other than jaundiced eyes.

With those cards stacked against it, does a Tron sequel have any kind of hope of wowing—if even to the point of becoming only a cult film like its predecessor, to say nothing of capturing the public imagination at the level one probably needs for a movie costing over 100 million?

Maybe, almost… But not quite. The computer realities Sam Flynn (Hedlund, sort of unmemorable) find himself in are not the simple geometries his father dealt with, but instead a myst filled laser-tag arena that fails to feel either clever or believable.

I’m not even willing to give the special effects the benefit of the doubt for depicting artificiality. Clu (Bridges) looks like an animatronic for most of the film, which might be forgiven as he is a computer program, but the same effects work is used to portray Kevin Flynn (also Bridges) in 1989, and that works a fair sight less. That doesn’t even begin to cover that Bridges’ main level of performance as Flynn is to do a warmed-over riff on his work in The Big Lebowski (1998), which feels roughly right, if a little pat.

I will say though, that the film is helpfully titled. This is a legacy sequel through and through, but an imminently average one, at that. It fails to capture the ingenious quality of the original, and seems designed throughout to satisfy a list of elements studio executives would want in a film, fi no one else.

Tron (1982)

Director: Steven Lisberger

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I would imagine that I kind of missed the film at that moment when it really had the ability to burrow into a person and become a part of their personality.

Did I Like It: Aside from the always charming presence of both Bridges and Boxleitner—to say nothing of the always reliable presence of David Warner—the film could really start to smell. How many live action adventure movies from Disney are anything other than the pits? A few Pirates flit through my mind, but one really has to wonder how much those are going to hold up as we’ve generally decided—guilty or not—that we’ve decided we don’t want to hear anything further from Johnny Depp.

The film’s real strengths lie in its simplicity. Lisberger and company looked at the still embryonic technology of Computer-Generated Imagery and realized something that I wish other filmmakers and studios might have kept close to their heart: It looks like crap. Still does, usually.

So, it looks like crap. What do you do with it then? Let it be the backbone of every opening title to a movie of the week? Let it sell tchotchkes in commercials for the rest of eternity? Or is there a story to tell using this tool?

Telling a fantasy adventure story—equal parts The Wizard of Oz (1939) and gladiator films—that takes place in the midst of the computer itself makes the images make the kind of sense that seems obvious but only occasionally happens in the world. Artificiality can work—can save itself from being jarring—if it exists among more artificiality. It was the first time they were able to do that, and for my money, it might be the last.

Babylon 5: A Call to Arms (1999)

Director: Michael Vejar

Cast: Bruce Boxleitner, Jerry Doyle, Jeff Conaway, Tracy Scoggins

Have I Seen it Before: I’ll do you one better, I even watched the few episodes of Crusade that aired before TNT made good on their Babylon 5 buyers remorse...

Although, to date, I’m pretty sure I never watched the ones that didn’t air. And that doesn’t begin to cover the fact that the epic story set up by this never gets resolved in any real way.

Did I Like It: And that may be the problem with the movie as I watch now. When it first aired, it was a thrilling new adventure that launched into what we could hope to be a new grand story that would capture our imaginations for another five years.

Only, it didn’t go anywhere. Kind of like The X-Files*.

Watching it now, the big-bold finish—with Earth being soaked in an alien disease with a hard timer of five years before every man, woman, and child on the planet would succumb—rings hollow. It’s understandable that there is no hint as to the resolution of this epic story in the latest story in the chronology, the series finale “Sleeping in Light”** didn’t refer back to it, but when Straczynski returned to the universe in Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2008), I don’t recall even a throwaway line to the effect of “Hey, they sure did cure that huge plague, didn’t they?”

Maybe I just like to see stories where large, overwhelming health crises are eventually resolved. That’s what twenty years will do to you.

Even with its inherent flaws, I can’t entirely dismiss it, even if I am still stuck with the inability to recommend the film, and would instead point readers to the series***. The special effects have been updated, slightly, and that’s a little bit of a memory. The new effect of the jump gate—completely unchanged for the entire five-year run of the series—is a revelation. Objectively, it too has not aged exceptionally well, but anything new in this arena from a Babylon 5 story is like a drink in the desert. The story contained herein—divorcing itself from any larger implications—is still a lively adventure story, though. And the fact that the adventure story can rise above its flaws at all certainly puts it above the other TV-films produced in the franchise.

*Yes, I said it. And, no, I’m not taking it back. 

**Filmed at the end of the fourth season in 1997, and not aired until 1998, several months before this movie.

***Tellingly, all of the series, but none of the movies (aside from Babylon 5: The Gathering (1993)) are currently available to stream on HBOMax.

Babylon 5: Thirdspace (1998)

Director: Jesús Salvador Trevino

Cast: Bruce Boxleitner, Claudia Christian, Jeff Conaway, Patricia Tallman

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. My memory of it is that it was my least favorite of the four TV movies aired by TNT during the last year of the television series.

Did I Like It: Ultimately, I do think that my memory of not thinking much of it holds up under the scrutiny of time and experience.

The TV budget—and the Babylon 5 special effects, which have clearly not aged well—can’t sell the horror. The artifact which tries its damndest to bring a touch of the Lovecraftian to The Last Best Hope For Peace looks more intricate and lovingly created than the swirling CGI sprites that normally passed for the ships and creatures on this show, but I can’t move on from the feeling that it looks like a cut scene from a video game, and not a cut scene from a modern video game, mind you. One from the 1990s. How did we ever think this show was ahead of its time, special effects-wise? The mind boggles.

The story is this weird blip, this huge epic moment that takes place in the middle of the most epic season of the show’s larger storyline. There is no lead-up to it within the context of the show, and it is never mentioned again. It’s especially strange, when one considers that Sheridan (Boxleitner) is dealing with Interplanetary Expeditions (IPX), the organization his wife worked for, and there’s only a perfunctory reference to that fact. It should weigh on him heavily, especially because that history caused him to die and come back from the dead less than a year ago. Wouldn’t that have more of an effect on him?Ultimately, it feels like an episode from the show’s first season, before ti had found its purpose or stride as a novel told over several years.

Babylon 5: In The Beginning (1998)

Director: Michael Vejar

Cast: Bruce Boxleitner, Mira Furlan, Richard Biggs, Andreas Katsulas

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. The Babylon 5 movies were an interesting thing. After the series moved to TNT, we got four full fledged-movies aired over the course of the last year of the series. Although, for my money, the story was pretty much told in the first four years, so everything that aired on TNT felt like wheel spinning. And yet, I can’t help but think of both this movie and Babylon 5 - A Call to Arms (1999)—both aired as New Year’s events—as the first movies released in those formative years in my life.

Did I Like It: The movie has a series of less than enviable tasks. First, it launches a new era for the show which, as I mentioned above, were already behind them. It needs to weave together a complex mythology into an exciting story on its own rights. It also needs to bring in a new audience, so as to justify TNT’s enormous expense.

In case you’re wondering, it succeeds mildly in those earlier tasks, while utterly failing as the list goes on. Built out of a mishmash of flashbacks from previous episodes and some new material, the story never gels into a coherent narrative. There are moments where it transcends its restrictions, mainly surrounding the framing device in the future with Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik). Still, the productions collective budget on hair dye in pursuit of convincing everyone the story takes place nearly fifteen years prior to the main storyline must have been staggering.

It does launch a new era for the series, but that new era underlines how, when the Prime Time Entertainment Network was collapsing in on itself and the story rushed to its natural and satisfying conclusion a year ahead of schedule. Babylon 5 has not been the same since the end of the fourth season when we saw humans a million years hence reaching their ultimate destiny.

And, too, it failed to pull in a new audience. Utterly, so, as it would turn out. It had no hope of doing so, as bringing in new people to a show whose story is already done appears to have been a fool’s errand in retrospect. The network quickly gave in to buyer’s remorse, and the future this movie promised was done within a year, and the series relegated to DVD sets for all time within another year.