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.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Cast: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Val Kilmer

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Missed any sort of convenient IMAX screening, and I’ll probably just have to live with that. Drifted into a matinee recently more than a month after the film’s release.

Which felt like a safe thing to do, not just from the COVID side of things, but because this tends to minimize encounters with the absolute dumbest people to emerge from underneath rocks. I’m definitely one of those guys generally less enthralled by seeing a movie with a crowd (although the right crowd—difficult though it is to find—does have its charms), than with seeing bigger movies on the biggest screen possible.

No such luck this time, though. The screening was already crowded when I got my tickets, which should have been my first alarm bell. I was enjoying my popcorn just at the limit of social distancing, and some jabroni takes the seat right next to mine. I’m doing a quick calculation in my head regarding the average vaccination status of a Top Gun audience on a Wednesday afternoon, and at first I think I have three choices. First, slap on my KN95 and abandon all hope of enjoying the rest of my popcorn. Second, just leave before the movie starts.

Both are unacceptable. So, in desperate need of a third option, I broke the social contract of the modern moviegoing experience and moved to a seat for which I had not bought a ticket. It felt simultaneously rebellious and safe, and I got to finish my popcorn. What’s more, I moved to the front row, and that was probably the better way to take in this film anyway.

Did I Like It: Oh, sure. You probably want to hear more about the movie itself. Much has been said about how much better this film is than the original Top Gun (1986). They are right, but I can’t help but wonder if this is because this film is truly that great, or because the original film is not much more than an energetic pageant of the state of masculinity in the mid-80s. This one has an actual story. There are stakes. Several characters go through something resembling an arc. That’s already something. Is the story kind of preposterous and ultimately hinges on the insane idea that an enemy (let’s not name them, because nothing in a film dates it more than identifying the collective bad guy) base has a mostly-ignored, still-in-working-order, retro-bordering-on-antique fighter jet ready for Maverick (Cruise) and Rooster (Teller) to use to make their escape? Yes, but it exists, and there’s a nice little romance between Cruise and Jennifer Connelly to help make the larger preposterousness go down easier.

I think what people are really responding to is the cinematography of the aviation sequences, which are truly an improvement not only for the series, but the idea of aerial photography in general. There were several moments I genuinely wondered how the production obtained the shots they did without just letting Cruise actually pilot priceless warplanes. I don’t think I really want to know.