Zarf Updates

Really? I'm going to blog about a movie which will shortly be known only as Jared Leto's last stop before oblivion?

(I wrote that before checking wikipedia. Apparently Leto has been cast as Skeletor in 2026. Good for him. Rock that bonehead.)

Tron is back. I am big fan and cannot deny. When the Tron: Legacy trailer dropped in 2009, I blogged it. I've written up two recent Tron games, Identity and Catalyst. Both games exist because Disney wanted to keep the franchise awake. They let indie studio Bithell Games run with that ball; to good effect, I thought. But the movies are the tentpole, and what the heck, I have a few thoughts.

(SPOILER warning. Surely you care.)

Tron: Ares is not a good movie, to be sure. Tron: Legacy wasn't a very good movie. The original Tron was a terrible movie. We don't watch these things for the plot. We watch them for the graphical pizzazz and the gimmick, which is "imagine little people inside your computer". It's Thomas the Tank Engine for a specific cohort of nerdy twelve-year-olds that I am smack in the middle of.

When I saw the trailer for Ares, I was sure they'd ruined the whole thing. Bring the little people out of the computer and you've got what? A guy in a Tron costume. (No offense to Tron Guy and my other brothers of the Glowing Garb.) You can fly a Recognizer around San Francisco -- or whatever city it is, they don't specify -- that's just generic alien invasion movie #152.

In fact, though, the movie is quite a bit better than the trailer implies. They spend plenty of quality time inside computers. When they haul stuff out into the real world, it's, I dunno, it's not gratuitous. It's specific hardware which has a role in the story. ...Okay, it's gratuitous within bounds.

There's a story. It's not going to blow your socks off but it hangs together. It's got action beats and character beats. Eve Kim (Greta Lee) comes in from nowhere, canon-wise, to pretty much hold the movie together. She's the one who sells emotional connections to everybody else on-screen. Even Jared Leto. Also, they let her be funny.

(Shoutout to Gillian Anderson, who is far, far better than the role she was given. Man, her face on the line "everything we've built." A good movie would have stabbed the kid and let Mom carry the third act.)

The action stuff is mostly fine. The boat chase business was cramped and overstuffed and I had trouble following it. Once they get into the real world, for whatever reason, the camerawork is cleaner. No complaints.

The script tries to be Current and Relevant about AI issues. We get a quick news squib of Eve Kim pushing back against AI skeptics. It would come off as a wholehearted defense of ChatGPT, except that's ridiculous, because nothing about this movie is 2025. The narrative register hasn't shifted an inch since 1982. LLMs do not exist. It's a story about people; they're played by actors; nothing in the movie even pretends to question their reality.

(In 1992, Melissa Scott wrote a book called Dreamships, in which the sensitive, seductive AI character turns out to be... a fake. Non-sentient. Interactive pattern-matching. Built specifically to fool credulous AI-rights activists. Nobody has had the balls to use this plot since.)

I seriously wonder if the original Ares script proposal included the idea of digitally recreating Tess Kim, Eve's dead sister. And then pulling her out of a particle laser. That would be a 2025 Tron story idea. The script just barely gestures in that direction: Ares absorbs Eve's dense digital footprint to learn what she's like as a person. But Tess is never connected with that; she doesn't really exist in the story except as backstory and unclear motivation for Eve. Obvious gap there! Oh well, they probably took it out to make room for another light-jet race.

(This is, I am sure, exactly what happened with Tron: Legacy. An entire thematic layer contrasting Quorra's drive with Flynn's Buddhist philosophy of inaction is glaringly visible by its absence. Oh, gods, give me Tron movies made by eccentric philosophical navel-gazers instead of Disney!) (This is why I play the games.)

Other random snickers:

The nerds on the film set continue to sneak delightfully plausible bits onto the computer screens. People use real shell commands. When someone's trying to stop a program from doing a thing, he types sudo killall.

I think Sark (from the 1982 movie) is here glossed as "Systems Analysis Reconstruction Kernel". I might have misread those words, it was just a quick flash. Nice touch.

Every object "printed" in reality appears in a giant pile of support struts, which is almost plausible, except the director doesn't seem to know what support struts do. They go underneath your print! I know, they're justifying their little dramatic reveals, but I laughed every time.

Another problem with the "Recognizer in real life" plot is that it breaks the idea that this is real life. I mean, our world. In 2010, you could just about pretend that Encom was a real, biggish-but-not-Google tech company; that the neon consensual hallucination was happening in the actual Internet. Now you have to pretend that an alien spacecraft crashing into a building didn't make headlines. Also, Encom cures world hunger 'n stuff in the epilogue. We're into a cinematic universe now. I have regrets.

The assault on Encom (red spies attacking blue fortress) was a good concept, but they cheaped out on the animated swarms of attackers and defenders. I know every movie mob-horde is CGI, going back to the LOTR movies at least -- but when they're skinned as videogame characters, it just looks like a videogame. A cheap one.

My nostalgia does not extend to getting gooshy over the original 1982 Grid graphics. However, quoting Wendy Carlos's score was a righteous moment.

Speaking of which: Yes, I bought the soundtrack. I am not a NIN fan but I'll keep this on my playlist. That said, I think the soundtrack from Tron: Uprising (the 2013 animated TV show) is my favorite of the bunch.

For all my snark, I don't regret seeing the movie. It wasn't a chore. It's cheerful and entertaining and easy to follow without thinking too hard. (Thinking too hard is counterindicated, really. See snark above.)

I might even go back to see it in 3D. Never have another chance, right? By all accounts, Tron: Ares has already died on the shelves. Nobody's gonna "morb" it back into the theaters, either. Disney's spreadsheet-churners will write off Tron for another generation.

Maybe we'll still get weird little indie Tron videogames. I hope so.