10 Things I Thought While (Re)Watching “Tron: Legacy”

by Gabriel Valdez

1. I have a synesthetic reaction to Tron: Legacy. There are scenes that are filmed in an almost black-and-white fashion, except the tones are blue-and-orange. The whole design is built out of LED-influenced grids, neon angles, and laser lights. I have the same reaction to director Joseph Kosinski’s second film, Oblivion, although that is designed as differently as you could imagine. The thing with Kosinski is that he doesn’t just design his films well, he designs them unconventionally. Rather than the more-more-more philosophy of many modern fantasy and science-fiction films, Kosinski is unafraid to let his designers create boldly spare architectures and sets.

2. Rather than overly rely on green-screen, Kosinski has entire sets built. This allows his actors to more fully inhabit their scenes. Good actors know how to use the space around them, how to use the walls and the dirt. You need to act big in front of a green-screen, to shout so the back row of the theater believes you (like Gerard Butler in 300). When there’s a real set involved, you can still communicate quiet moments. Make no mistake, Tron: Legacy absolutely abuses green screens, but for the key moments – the quiet moments – it relies on sets.

3. You know who would’ve made a GREAT Anakin Skywalker? Olivia Wilde. Sure, that’d throw some mythology off, but…gender, whatever. Garret Hedlund makes a fine protagonist in Tron: Legacy and Jeff Bridges is having a lot of fun playing dual mentor and villain roles, but Wilde is the one who steals the show as the older Flynn’s protege. It would be easy to say a film like this lacks good performances, but the truth is it’s not built to have them – it favors big stylistic moments and experienced scenery chewers like Michael Sheen (who plays a nightclub owner drinking from the Tim Curry well). Hedlund doesn’t hold our attention as a protagonist. Wilde pretty immediately overtakes him.

This also brings up another note. Given Wilde’s history and popularity, I can’t help but wonder if she were a man, would she be a leading action star by now? She’s hardly unemployed, but when she’s finding her best roles in direct-to-DVD indies like Better Living Through Chemistry, and she’s awkwardly relegated to “leading girlfriend” in big budget films like Rush, something’s very wrong.

4. Relying on restrictions in CGI makes your visual effects last longer. Tron: Legacy doesn’t aim for graphical fidelity. Instead, it limits the scope of its style. Ridley Scott used to practice a form of this, choosing moments in Alien and Blade Runner to hint – rather than show – the viewer toward worlds full of astonishing sights. (Since then, Scott occasionally jumps the shark on CGI.) Kosinski doesn’t follow quite the same path – times have changed – but in adhering to design philosophies instead of a pursuit of overall visual fidelity, the visual effects in his films take on a similar quality of aging very slowly. The CGI in other 2010 films doesn’t hold up as well as this.

One reason for this is that the visual effects artists for Tron: Legacy are often only making something look real using a few colors, not thousands. This is far easier, and allows the artists to re-prioritize how they spend their time (and your budget).

5. There’s a scene between Hedlund and Bridges, soaring across the sky on a freighter, where they catch up on all the advancements the elder Flynn has missed while stuck inside his computer program. It involves a neon-highlighted walkway, fog, and just a hint of stars. Never forget that, in the middle of your effects-heavy movie, it is the simplest scenes – Luke sharing a last moment with a dying Yoda, for instance – that anchor the emotions that make the crazy setpieces worth a damn.

6. The score. It’s the best thing Daft Punk’s ever done. Kosinski doesn’t sign up classic-styled composers. Instead, he chooses an electronica band whose tone he believes he can fit to the film, and enlists them to compose the score. Daft Punk created film music that uses orchestral components in a hard-edged, electronica manner. It creates a full orchestra out of aggressive violins, walking feedback lines, gentle harps, violent brass highlights, and voobing synth tones. There are moments where they harken to the deeply emotive, early experimental electronic music of Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, moments where they push the envelope of modern electronica, and moments when it sounds more like a Hans Zimmer-like triumphal film score. I’ll make no arguments that Tron: Legacy is a great film – it’s not – but this score is one of the best in the last decade. It was my score of the year for 2010, with apologies to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network) and Zimmer himself (Inception).

7. Should the powers that be ever get around to making a movie out of the Deus Ex video game franchise, there would be no better choice than Kosinski, especially now that the franchise’s most recent entry has gone so New Renaissance in its design philosophy. I’d push him for the long-gestating Mass Effect movie, too, since Oblivion showed off how well-versed in multiple eras of science-fiction Kosinski is.

8. Personally, I think Disney’s missing a huge chance to get Kosinski in the director’s seat of a Star Wars movie. I’ve written why I do like J.J. Abrams for the job, and Rian Johnson is an inspired choice to direct a more character-driven Star Wars. Gareth Edwards, however, has yet to prove he’s suitable for the job – Godzilla (read the review) had some moments, but it was a narrative and emotional disaster.

9. Hedlund is fully capable of battling out the action scenes himself, but I keep counts in films that have both a male and female action star. There are hints toward romance between them, and there’s the problem of her being his “reward” for his adventure…I don’t think that’s what the film’s initially trying to say, but it soon follows the beats of that trope and implies it in the ending.

Anyway, I keep counts of how often the man saves the woman and how often the woman saves the man. Wilde saves Hedlund several times. He saves her once. There’s even a later scene where she literally swoops to his defense, and she stands guard in multiple scenes between Hedlund and various villains. That’s usually the male role in science-fiction and fantasy films.

Furthermore, Hedlund isn’t exactly the special one who can save the world here, she is. Tron: Legacy isn’t a great film or a complete film when it comes to women – it doesn’t even pass the second or third rule of the Bechdel Test – but it does do some very nice things that aren’t often seen in big budget films.

10. Tron: Legacy isn’t great but it is fantastic. When I decide to sit and watch a favorite scene, that favorite scene ends up lasting until the end credits. I never feel frustrated or like I wasted my time for having watched more than I intended because I’m always so incredibly engaged with it. Again, this goes back to the synesthesia. I don’t just admire the visuals and music, I feel them. I’m not someone you could describe as a synesthete. I don’t feel that effect often. That’s why I value Tron: Legacy so much – it can trigger a euphoric multisensory response that’s foreign to me, like a visual drug.

Not everyone’s going to feel that watching Tron: Legacy – some people will feel it for other films that I might not. I’ve read about the synesthetic reactions some people have to 300 and, while I enjoy its visuals, I’m hardly experiencing referred sensory responses from them. I recognize Tron: Legacy isn’t a great film, but it does (along with the much better Oblivion) represent something unique and special in my own personal viewing experience, something that I really can’t get from anything else.

Thursday’s Child — Caravaggio, Poverty P*rn, and Superhero Wardrobes

Thursday’s Child is what happens when Wednesday Collective runs long or gets pushed a day. The only requirement is that it features a David Bowie song in the opening paragraph. Let’s go with that time he told Trent Reznor how he feels about Americans.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Get to Know Filmmaking’s Most Influential Painter
Stephen Akey

A big part of filmmaking (and critiquing) is knowing your art history. Hell, we wouldn’t have the establishing shot as we know it without Impressionism. Even as a viewer, you never know when that knowledge is going to enhance a movie. Hieronymus Bosch’s carnally oppressive, otherworldly madhouses pop up in thankfully brief, soul-scathing moments of Noah. The first Hunger Games owes its incredibly immediate sense of place to the Depression-era photography of Dorothea Lange.

War photography – especially from failed wars like Vietnam – has heavily influenced the Mexican-Spanish pulp resurgence. I suspect it reflects the lost wars that led to decades of Fascist rule under the PRI in Mexico and under Franco (after the Spanish Civil War) in Spain. Everything from Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men to Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim has found glum, terrifying moments to reflect on their personal ideas of loss, ones that never fail to horrify more than any battle or monster can.

Perhaps no single painter has influenced filmmaking more than Caravaggio: the stark close-ups of Carl Dreyer’s formative 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc; the matter-of-fact, sometimes uncomfortably foregrounded violence of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epics; the precise arrangement of players and light in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather; all the way through to the striking use of color and composition of Zack Snyder’s 300. Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, Tarsem Singh’s Immortals, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, the list goes on and on.

Martin Scorsese might be the filmmaker who, early in his career, embraced him the most. Caravaggio seeped through the seediest moments of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. The painter was, as Scorsese once told Caravaggio biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon, the entire reason for doing The Last Temptation of Christ.

Caravaggio himself had an interesting life. Not unlike a Scorsese character, Caravaggio had been formed by a violent, hardscrabble upbringing that was both key to his many successes and his strange, historical mystery of a downfall. He found more comfort with gangs, beggars, and prostitutes than he did with high society, and he was exceptionally clever at revealing – both in life and in his paintings – that high society played at that very same, cutthroat level.

Thanks to Chris Braak over at Threat Quality Press for pointing this article out.

What is Poverty Porn?
Tom Roston

Don’t worry, it’s safe for work. I’ve talked a lot about the ‘genre of excess’ that Izzy Black proposed a few months ago. It seeks to make an accounting of at-any-cost stories of social and financial success, but it refuses to judge the characters therein (think The Wolf of Wall Street, Spring Breakers, The Bling Ring).

The inevitable corollary of that is “poverty porn.” As Roston writes, it’s used to describe an image of the poor “that takes on an almost fetishistic quality, wherein the audience savors how miserable people can get. This can happen even with the best intentions, like those extended commercials for charities in which barefoot children from a third world country stare into the camera.” It takes shape in large part when documentary filmmakers each seek to out-bleak each other in the pursuit of funding.

Roston suggests a “poverty porn clean-up crew,” and has an interesting proposition to form it.

Work It, Superman
Lauren Davis

That’s quite a get-up Superman has there. You wouldn’t take him seriously. I wouldn’t take him seriously. Yet it’s pretty standard for women in superhero comics. Why does what superheroes wear matter? What does it tell the youth being brought up on them?

I’m thankful Marvel’s had the sense to mostly skip this sort of fetishism in their film adaptations. For Black Widow’s co-leading role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, she’s mostly portrayed wearing something sensible with a leather jacket. As I’ve said before, her most notable accessory is an assault rifle with an underslung grenade launcher. It’s Captain America who appears in various states of undress and just has to break into the Smithsonian when every federal agency is looking for him. Why? To get the right piece of fashion for saving the world. It’s a refreshing and humorous twist.

What Captain America, RoboCop, and Her Say About Surveillance
Willie Osterweil

I don’t entirely agree with this piece. First of all, never ever start an article off by insulting a large group of people (in this case, liberals) – it signals you’re either playing to a base, or you’re too narrow-minded to consider your opponent as anything other than a hive-mind. Both mean that anyone sitting on the fence, as well as many sensible people who are already on your side, will consider you shrill and discount both your opinion and your effectiveness as someone who can influence others.

Secondly, I don’t agree with many of Osterweil’s points. But that’s no reason not to highlight someone else’s work if he makes those points intelligently.

Osterweil ultimately presents a challenging article about the use and interplay of surveillance and gender dynamics in Captain America, the RoboCop remake, and the Oscar-winning Her.

As an aside that this article touches on, I myself have become increasingly on-the-fence about Spike Jonze as a director. Critical kryptonite, I know. It’s not because of any fault in his abilities – if anything, he might be the best American director when it comes to marrying the various technical elements of film (visual structure, production design, costume, cinematography, editing) to pure artistic flair. More than anything else, perhaps no director has ever used sound as expertly and emotionally as he has. But man, his films’ views of women as creatures too erratic to think of others and as the cause and solution of every problem in a man’s life, no matter how young or old…it grates.

Throw onto that his production and story roles in the Jackass films, which increasingly think hidden camera is meant to be an excuse to sexually harass and abuse women without repercussions, and I have some serious reservations about many of Jonze’s values as a storyteller.

The Price of Rebooting a Successful Franchise
Scott Mendelson

Forbes is a terrible magazine when it comes to knowing what the real world is like. It’s also not often very good at analyzing economic policy, but when it comes to analyzing individual industries, it can actually be quite on-the-money (in this way, it’s the exact inversion of The Economist).

Here’s a rather good article on how Sony originally planned to reboot Spider-Man as a smaller, more personal story focusing on secret identity Peter Parker’s school life, with the action being less extravagant and more intimate. Now, I quite liked The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which could deliver fantastic individual scenes but not an entire, cogent story. The best moments undeniably involved Andrew Garfield’s interplay with Emma Stone and Dane DeHaan, when their characters were just bumming around New York and working out their personal issues. A Spider-Man focused on that? Brave, but with this group I have no doubts they could have made it special.

Instead, Sony (just like Warner Bros. is) got jealous of Marvel’s Avengers canon and – instead of blazing their own path – decided the best financial option would be to copy Marvel wholesale and go as big and multiple as possible. The result is…well, it’s certainly not the windfall Sony imagined, and the franchise may not even have the financial success it could’ve if they’d just stuck with Sam Raimi at the helm and Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man another few films.

On a personal note, Spider-Man got rebooted after five years. It’s been 10 years since the last Blade movie. Get on it, New Line.

Screw the Movie, We’re Making a Production

One of the most successful movies of last year was the critically reviled The Canyons. Now, this takes some explaining. The Canyons was not a good movie. Written by Bret Easton Ellis, directed by Paul Schrader, and promised a film about the future of movies, we imagined the possibility of a searing assault on the conscience similar to Ellis’s previous American Psycho. Instead, The Canyons was a wooden collection of uninteresting psycho-drama, soap opera filmmaking, and borderline soft-core. It cast Lindsay Lohan opposite adult film star James Deen.

One of the most intriguing – and accurate – theories about the film is that the entire production was a piece of performance art by Ellis, that the process of putting the movie together – recorded in painstaking detail by journalists and tabloid reporters alike – was the real commentary. The performance lies in those details and in our obsession and reaction to them, not in anything put on-screen. That a movie was made was just an unavoidable side effect. In that way, The Canyons may be one of the most important efforts in filmmaking we’ve seen in years. It’s just not one of the most important films.

John Patterson at The Guardian writes about The Canyons‘ contemplation on the wreckage of cinema.

Adam Batty at the beautifully titled Hope Lies at 24 Frames a Second writes about Schrader’s transcendental style.

And, of course, here’s Lili Anolik’s brilliant original article, Post-Empire Strikes Back, which lays out the argument for Ellis’s the-production-is-art, screw-the-movie approach to what he wants to say. This article in particular is for mature audiences only.

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned That the Most Outlandish Ideas in That Film Were True
Erich Schlosser

Dr. Strangelove is Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy about the dangers of nuclear war. It posited a number of ridiculous contrivances – that a general who up and lost it one day could single-handedly launch a nuclear attack with no authorization. That the Soviets had built a “dead hand” system wherein nuclear weapons would be launched automatically if the Kremlin couldn’t be reached.

These were all insane and ribald concepts as to how the military of both countries really worked. Right? They were exaggerations Kubrick and crew made to make a point. Right? Turns out not so much – the reality was far riskier than the insanity Dr. Strangelove proposed.

Wednesday Collective – Bollywood Evolves, Shark Attack, The Lion in Winter, and So Many Jake Gyllenhaals

We’re running 3-5 articles a week here now, so there are some efforts to simplify the blog – browse down the left hand side and you’ll see a new Categories section that breaks articles down by type: Awards, Guest Writers, Movie Reviews, Television, and Wednesday Collective, which I hear is pretty fantastic. There will be some bigger moves toward streamlining, and the eventual transition to a more full-service website down the road.

For now, please enjoy this week’s collection of the best articles on film and storytelling from around the web.

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
“The New Wave of Indian Art Cinema”

Janaki Challa at The Aerogram writes about the evolution of Bollywood, the independent film movement in India, and its burgeoning supply of arthouse directors (if not arthouse audiences) seeking to tell more realistic, socially insistent narratives. The article centers around Anand Ghandi’s new film Ship of Theseus, a relatively unknown film in the West that has jumped to the top of my radar.

The Wonders of GoPro

It’s been a very good week for the phone-sized (and sometimes smaller) sports camera. It’s rugged nature and affordable price-tag mean everyone from independent filmmakers to divers can capture unique footage that proves the adage “everything’s been done already” dead wrong.

My favorite, perhaps of all-time, is spear-fisher Jason Dimitri’s recording of his reef preservation work off the Cayman Islands on March 13. While culling invasive lionfish, a 10-foot Caribbean Reef Shark gets curious. The pair engage in an extended battle that is enthralling, terrifying, yet safe for work/family-viewing. I have no qualms saying it’s among the best three minutes ever put to screen. Watch it full-screen, but not if you’re looking forward to the beach this summer. Thanks to Lara Hemingway for making me aware of this.

A cute narrative film comes from Corridor Digital, a studio that specializes in combining short films and visual effects. They combined footage from a drone with CG and ground footage to create a short film entirely from the perspective of Superman. Some clever editing gives the impression this is drawn from one long continuous take.

GoPro curates many of these user videos on YouTube. There’s this clip of a pelican in Tanzania learning to fly and this rescue of deer stuck on ice by two men with hovercraft. If those don’t make you tear up, there’s always “Fireman Saves Kitten,” which I’ve seen turn the burliest of men into balls of weep.

“The Lion in Winter: The Reason I Became a Medievalist”

My favorite experience as a performer was as Philip, the king of France, in The Lion in Winter. It was during my first year of college and it was when I was still oblivious enough to think everything was running smoothly when, in fact, I’m pretty sure the entire crew was either killing or dating each other behind-the-scenes. The experience introduced me to a number of friends and a few mentors when it came to film and theatre.

The blog An Historian Goes to the Movies goes over some of the historical nuances of the Oscar-winning film version starring Katharine Hepburn, Peter O’Toole, Anthony Hopkins, and Timothy Dalton, and explains why it’s enough to make anyone change their planned career path. The articles on The 13th Warrior and 300 are also worth checking out.

“Film as film: What’s the point of movie criticism?”

This brilliant article by Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson at Prospect Magazine asks the question, “In the digital age, what is left for a critic to supply?” His response is very close to my own view: the rote summarize-and-judge template of criticism is obsolete. There are too many audiences and too many resources available for viewers to do this themselves without reading 700 words.

The job of the modern critic is a difficult one – to fuse knowledge of cinematic techniques with emotional response and, through doing so, translate what the experience of the film itself is like. It echoes something I said in last week’s Wednesday Collective, that an ideal review should read two different ways before and after readers see the film: translating the experience beforehand to give the reader a sense of whether the film is for him or her, and drawing technique and meaning from the experience afterward as a further contemplation of what they’ve just seen.

Doppelganging Jake Gyllenhaal

Writer JP Hitesman got a chance to see Enemy, Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up to last year’s Prisoners. It follows a milquetoast college professor played by Jake Gyllenhaal as he tracks down a bit actor played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Suspensefully paranoid hijinx ensue. Villeneuve got something out of Gyllenhaal in Prisoners that’s always been hinted at, but isn’t always realized in his films, so I’m very excited for an even more out-there story from the pair.

Hitesman wrote a reflection on Enemy and on the understated qualities of Canadian theatergoing.

Mica Levi on Under the Skin

Speaking of actors breaking into new territory, Scarlett Johansson’s avant-garde Scottish nymphomaniac alien mindbender Under the Skin opens soon. I’ve heard some of the score by Mica Levi, frontwoman for Micachu and the Shapes, and it is a strange, brave thing all on its own. The Guardian has a brief piece on her influences and experiences while writing and recording the experimental soundtrack.

Mendes. Sam Mendes.

We’ll close with director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Skyfall) and his 25 rules for filmmaking. I have a love-hate relationship with Mendes. His best, most raw film may be Jarhead (starring Jake Gyllenhaal, no less). American Beauty and Revolutionary Road are beautiful, but have some issues of staging, broad stereotyping, and overt showmanship. Skyfall is a discussion all in itself, a film shot so gorgeously it often forgets to give its viewers proper access into its action scenes. It also betrays Mendes’s perspective by replacing the nod-and-a-wink sexism of most James Bond films with an outright and unsettlingly violent misogyny. Nonetheless, that’s three successes and a popular miss, and much of this is good advice, so Vanity Fair‘s article on Mendes’s 25 rules of directing is worth checking out.

“300: Rise of an Empire” a Colossal Disappointment

The first 300 was, ostensibly, a movie about men in their underwear hacking at each other with swords in slow-motion. Needless to say, the girl I was dating at the time declared it her “new favorite movie ever.” It was also an art movie told through action scenes.

What I remember best from 300 isn’t any particular fight, though. I remember the field in which Sparta’s King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) says his goodbyes to Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) before heading off to battle. As much as that film glorified war, it also glorified a field of wheat in sunrise as the wind carried through it. It made going to battle a bittersweet, complex choice, and it glorified the reasons to stay home just as much. It was the rare action movie from which liberals and conservatives both lifted messages, and that both sides still argue is “theirs.”

The sequel, 300: Rise of an Empire, is not an art movie. It’s an action movie that looks artful because if it didn’t, it couldn’t call itself 300. What it champions is warmongering. There’s not a single scene that shows us what’s at stake. Our Athenian hero Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton), who dreams of a united Greece, treats Athens like his own private, military dictatorship. You might expect this in itself to be a strong political statement, but nope – it just hurries the plot along faster if the screenwriters don’t require anyone else to speak.

300: Rise of an Empire also makes its villain far more interesting than its hero, but commits the cardinal sin of not realizing this. We cheered for Leonidas in the first film because Butler knew a movie filmed entirely in front of a green screen needed an anchor. He needed to act like the audience was 1,000 feet away, so he had to shout and wink and chew every piece of nonexistent scenery just to match the tone of his CG surroundings. This time around, it’s Eva Green (Casino Royale) who snarls and sneers and stares piercingly through every line of dialogue. She plays the evil Persian general Artemisia as if Darth Vader found the goth section of Katy Perry’s wardrobe.

The film gives Artemisia such a tragic backstory that you’d be a terrible person to root against such a survivor. I tire of boys in genre movies being captured and trained to be gruff and manly and fight as noble gladiators while the narrative equivalent for girls is to be sexually abused. It’s needless, lazy, and offensive. Combine such tragedy with Green acting circles around the rest of the cast and Themistokles’s incessant blandness, and I found myself rooting hard for Artemisia to win the day.

Yes, in the film, Greece represents democracy, Persia represents slavery, and Themistokles can’t sneeze without trumpeting the word “freedom,” but the movie does an awful job of championing any of these ideas or showing them in practice. When Themistokles isn’t outguiling bad guys, he spends all his time trying to get Mel Gibson’s Braveheart monologue right. I stopped counting at the sixth attempt. There’s some fresh air when Sparta’s Queen Gorgo finally gets involved (I’d much rather the movie had followed her into battle), but it’s too little too late.

Some of the art direction is inspired – particularly in the first two battles when the actors are the focus. As more CG is involved, however, the mostly naval battles feel increasingly generic and fast-forwarded. Zack Snyder, who directed the first 300, was smart enough to treat his visual effects in a painterly way. Graphics were to add background and tone, to emphasize the human form or, at most, to create some unspeakable enemy. When there was blood and viscera, it was strangely beautiful, and clarified each move of the fight choreography by extending it into an arc of unreal color. In Noam Murro’s sequel, the effects increasingly take over the battles and play both hero and enemy. Blood gushes everywhere for the shock of it and, like most shocking effects, becomes quickly tiresome.

As for 3D, Murro often washes out his backgrounds with shafts of sunlight or flashes of light in darkness. These are nice effects in 2D, but have the tendency to blur out details and strain viewers’ eyes in 3D. 300: Rise of an Empire is rated R for pretty much everything – bloody violence, sex, nudity, and some language. The first 300 used these things to make a point. It’s hard to forgive its sequel for not bothering to have one.