Cyberwolven Wrote:Hi Traahn. I hope all is well. It's great to speak to you!
While I did love the movie, I agree that it could have been so much better for the amount of time that was spent on it. |
Hey there, Cyberwolven! Nice to see and hear from you again. Hope you've been doing well, too
Yeah, I was sad by it. Since Daft Punk's soundtrack was so well-received in T:L (rightfully so) and the franchise is a bit misunderstood, I fear the Tron franchise may have been forever reduced to 2-hour long music videos with slick visuals and little substance... which is mostly what happened to Tron Ares, imo.
That didn't happen to Tron Legacy, of course, but T:L's soundtrack success and acclaim - along with the movie's strong focus on slick new visuals - has seemingly led to the franchise adopting that, arguably, simplistic identity. Tron Ares' marketing leaned heavily into the NIN factor, too, and most any conversation or trailer reaction I heard about the movie before it released was jubilant enthusiasm for NIN and reminiscing about the stellar Daft Punk soundtrack; with a much more muted response for everything else (the story, characters, canon). I feel the soundtrack and visuals to support it are now the main goals of any Tron movie.
It's not the direction I had hoped the Tron franchise would go in, but what can you do? I half-expect the next Tron to be "Tron: The Gorillaz Experience"
On the video game side, the franchise has become equally watered down, imo... with parkour, disc battles, lightcycles, and strange visual novels being, apparently, what every Tron fan longs for...?
The IP seems to have an identity crisis and nobody knows what to do with it. The franchise has become accustomed to hitting the master reset switch at almost every turn. From its video games, to its movies/cartoons/characters, and everything in-between... the slate gets wiped clean each time. Too bad. Imagine if Star Wars got the master reset switch every time. No continuity, no over-arching plots... just "cool music videos in space" movies, with random alien and human characters thrown in to have some simplistic plot barely held together by mediocre interactions. Why don't we have "Star Wars: Featuring The Chemical Brothers" movies?
lol
Tron: Ares even ditched what "Tron" actually was/is. They got around not having the "Tron" character in yet another movie called "Tron" by saying in Tron Ares that Flynn 'created a video game called, "Tron."' Yes, Tron is no longer even a character or watchdog software. It's just a game like Space Paranoids was! And it was created by Flynn. Wow. They're now freed from the "Tron" name that was I guess weighing them down? Now they can do whatever they want to the franchise, as long as it looks visually like a hi-tech video game. The easiest path is to just hit the reset button each time (once every 10-30 years), and bring in a popular music artist to make a cool soundtrack.
Yes, I know T:L had "Tron" character for about 3 seconds of screen-time midway through the movie, and probably 15-20 total seconds with a helmet on near the end. That's not my idea of a good "Tron" movie, but who am I to say. At least with T:L there was hope of a sequel where Tron would actually play a bigger or big role. Oh well... wishful thinking
The forum won't let me delete this final smile face, so I will just say, it's lovely to see you again! Too bad Tron doesn't have more going on with it for us all to talk about.