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.

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

Director: Jon Favreau

Cast: Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell

Have I Seen it Before: Yep.

Did I Like It: On spec, this a movie I’d be there for opening weekend, which I was. Harnessing the best parts of John Ford and Sergio Leone to tell a hybrid tale incorporating the quintessence of Spilebergian awe and wonder? The film practically makes itself.

Except, it didn’t. For the years since the film’s release and lukewarm reception, that failure seemed like a mystery to me. Were people so bothered by the mere existence of a post-modern western that they couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of having fun with the prospect? Is the same thing that causes people to bafflingly look down on Back to the Future Part III (1990) still unfairly affecting the moviegoing public twenty years later?

On this viewing, I don’t think so. At the very least, I don’t think that reflexive boredom with cowboys doomed this film to be instantly forgotten. That sense in the movie watching public may yet exist, but the movie’s problems exist beyond. For two out of three acts, the film is a good homage to those classic westerns and is well on its way to be one of those brilliant genre mashups that—like the Cornetto films of Edgar Wright—stand the test of time. And then the conclusion is a mishmash of cliches not of every movie it is trying to emulate, but every frozen TV dinner action movie released around the same time. Many of those films were written by the same writers who wrote this film, and that is a pretty good reason why most of them don’t write feature films anymore*.

The film has good performances. Daniel Craig cuts a convincing mysterious cowboy figure, especially when one considers that Robert Downey Jr. was originally cast in the role. While charming, he would have been completely wrong for the role as it was eventually presented, and even for the genre, now that I think about it. Even Harrison Ford looks like he’s mostly awake through the film, in an era of his performances where that was pretty rare. Had the film tried just a little bit harder and reached for a little bit more in its conclusion, it could have been something really great. Then again, Favreau certainly has proven his adeptness with similar material with The Mandalorian. Maybe if the focus had been on the aliens, and the cowboys were secondary, we’d be having a different discussion now.

*Granted, Lindelof was always better at TV and returned where he could unfurl his true skills. Kurtzman is a better producer than he ever was a writer, although many current viewers of Star Trek might take great pains to disagree that he’s worth anything. Roberto Orci can’t seem to get projects off the ground anymore, which feels like something approaching justice.