Tron: Legacy

The decision to make Tron: Legacy came way before the script or any motivations that didn't have to do with buttloads of cash. There was no compelling artistic reason to make this movie, and it wasn't given a green light by people who thought there was a story to tell. This, more than most other movies, is the product of the unholy alliance of Hollywood and fanboys. It's the baby that a syphilitic whore and an obese asocial mouth-breather made when they got together and fucked us all.

The fat fucking fanboys decided there would be a new Tron long before they knew what it was. The fat fucking fanboys slobbered and jizzed all over their keyboards in their sad little studio and basement apartments, or back home in the bedrooms they grew up in, where their weight now makes the bunkbed groan as they tuck themselves into their star Trek sheets every night. They demanded this movie get made, they swore their allegiance to it, they squealed over the wires about how awesome it would be, nevermind there was no product, no concept and the original sucked purple nurples. They are why this movie was made. Not because it deserved it, not because the story had to be told and not because some suffering genius had something to say.

The fat fucking fanboys wanted Tron: Legacy purely because Disney made a shitty movie called Tron 28 years ago that was about computers. Fanboys love computers because they connect to the Internet, because they don't ask questions or laugh at you. The 1982 Tron was an awful, boring movie with a preposterous story and some cool-for-the-time computer graphics. To the fat fucking fanboys, a remake, or continuation of that shitty movie, further validates their conviction that it's okay to never grow up, that the shit they loved when they were ten was and is the best stuff ever to be created. For the fat fucking fanboys, it is easier to perpetuate that conviction than to try to understand the adult world around them.

Rather than mature and acquire grownup tastes of nuance, subtlety and intellectual discourse, the fat fucking fanboys haul their childhoods everywhere they go in Radio Flyers. They cling to Star Wars and comic books, they pretend to be knights at Renaissance Faires, and they learn to speak Klingon. They care more about Call of Duty than world peace. They insist The Dark Knight is literature because claiming that is easier than understanding actual literature, what with all those words.

Not growing up isn't such a bad thing, although, it was ultimately sad for Peter Pan, and he actually got out of the house and did stuff. It's only sad because the fat fucking fanboys, now adults, have provided nothing to society except more dreck for fat fucking fanboys to consume. Now that they're adults, they have more disposable income and time to whine and moan. The Internet and their dollars give them ways to demand that the world pretend their childhood obsessions are acceptable for adults to indulge in. They want us all to think that Superman, Spiderman, Batman and all of their other childhood fantasies are all grown up, too. They aren't just men in tights anymore, they are dark brooding characters with rich backstories. Hollywood let's them believe they're right because it's incredibly popular. Real grown ups don't stand up to them because they have lives and shit to do, and the hue of Daredevil's hotpants just isn't important.

Comparing the fat fucking fanboys' make-believe heroes with anything in the real adult world is superficial and convenient. Nietzsche is Nietzsche, Batman is not. Tron is not an elegant essay on the role of technology in our lives. It may pretend to be at a surface level, but that's just cynical marketing. Any look past the surface reveals that it has nothing to say. It's about computers and people, but not in any profound way, and with nothing to say about how they affect our human condition. It's cheap, pointless, shitty entertainment brought to you on demand by fat fucking fanboys.

I'm sure Disney was more than happy to resurrect a dead product for the fat fucking fanboys digging deeper into the toyboxes of their youth for entertainment, rather than look for something age-appropriate. Hell, if crack were legal, Disney would be happy to sell that to them, too. It's not, though, so Tron: Legacy will have to do.

Jeff Bridges reprises his role in Tron as a software engineer who gets trapped in "The Grid", which is either one computer, or one application, or every computer and all software. Through contrived bullshit, Bridges can't return from the ethereal Grid and leaves a young son behind. When the son (Garrett Hedlund) grows up, he enters the Grid to find his father, and the two of them must race to get out. The ticking timebomb of a closing portal to the outside world is arbitrary. The way into the Grid is arbitrary. The bad guys and most of the action inside the Grid is silly and, wait for it, arbitrary. There are no rules that create boundaries for the movie, so it does whatever the fuck it pleases. The result is that the audience doesn't know the limits of what may and may not happen, so we're stuck watching and waiting for it to end without a sense of tension.

Inside the Grid, Bridges is held captive by a younger version of himself named Klu. Klu is the program he created years ago. It doesn't age while he does, so the movie uses that creepy Robert Zemeckis motion-capture shit to make an animated younger Bridges. It's supposed to dazzle us, but the cartoon dude looks fake, with very little movement is his smooth skin and such dead eyes that it gave me the willies to watch. It's distracting as fuck, too.

Tron: Legacy's plot is the standard "we must escape before the portal closes" horseshit. The older Bridges has what is supposed to be a hot sidekick, a chick played by Olivia Wilde, who gives furtive glances but doesn't really have much to do other than look hot. Michael Sheen does a long, cheesy, horrific impersonation of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. I don't know why, and I wish he hadn't.

As in the original, there are light cycles playing Snafu, disc warriors and light planes that shoot laser beam machine guns. The action sequences are doled out sparingly, and separated by too many boring people talking about nonsense with too much seriousness. Even though Tron: Legacy is supremely silly, nobody in it except Bridges seems to recognize that, or have the skill to express that. They all think this is really fucking important shit.

The fat fucking fanboys will tell you it's not about the plot, though. What matters to them is that it got made because they wanted it to. They are predetermined to love it, to demand a sequel, and to ascribe all sorts of significance to it, just as they have with their other childhood toys. They'll also rave about how fucking cool it looks.

It doesn't look cool. Tron: Legacy looks as good as computers and a lack of imagination can make it look. Actually, I thought it mostly looked like kids at a rave party with a blacklight: strips of neon and bright colors in a sea of black. For contrast, there are a few blindingly white scenes, as though an iMac circa 2003 threw up. While the movie is loaded with special effects, the design is slavishly based on Tron. There is little artistic invention, and no new spectacle, just the same old shit, only now rendered by better computers and in 3D (for the rich fucks or the fat fucking fanboys who can afford it because they don't pay rent to their parents).

You can thank the fat fucking fanboys for the lack of originality. They don't want original because that takes imagination, which they don't have. They want it to be just the same as what they saw as a kid, so they can compare and revel in detail, and they can be vindicated that their childhoods deserve to endure. Disney is only too happy to do that for them. Something new is a risk, but the same old shit is money in the bank.

The point of Tron: Legacy was never to make a good movie, though. It was to make what the fanboys wanted. They wanted a ten-pound sack of shit, and that's what they got. Had it been a movie, they'd have been pissed. They want what the want, and Disney delivers.One finger.