Floppy disk drive.
Digital world + lightcycle race + obsession about your personal information being stored on a frisbee-like disk + an overall limp effort at storytelling = floppy disk drive indeed.
Short version: As a friend of mine just said, "Tron: Legacy is this year's Avatar -- pretty special effects and an empty story." Nuff said.
Longer version: I'm impressed, but in a completely bad way. I am impressed at how the filmmakers could take an idea with so much potential for interesting storytelling and then utterly wreck it. Of all the possible avenues they could have taken, from campy goofy fun to Matrix-like action with metaphysics to sharp satire about our increasingly technological/digital age, the filmmakers decided to make a movie that fails to be a good story. Tron: Legacy is a striking-looking movie; of that there is no doubt. The thing looks so cool, but as I've ranted so often before, special effects alone do not make a compelling story, and it soon became obvious that the movie had nothing substantial to offer beside the dazzling visuals ... and after a while, those visuals began to bore me. By the end of the movie, the 3-D neon effects had given me a raging headache. The entire movie seems to be composed of someone presenting Jackson Pollack with a black canvas and then giving him pots of glow-in-the-dark orange and blue paint.
Verdict: Technophiliac geeks and nerds may find this flick worth watching once for the visual effects and for the nerdstalgia of the original Tron movie, but overall, this wasn't a good movie because it lacked a good story. It's a sterile, cold, passion-less, soulless mess. (You can check out io9's judgment "Tron: Legacy is a colossal failure of movie-making.") I'm bored now just thinking about it, and I'm going to cut this review short so I can work on reviewing a flick I liked a lot better -- the new Narnia Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie. Oh, there is one amusing bit in the Tron: Legacy flick, and that's Michael Sheen prancing around acting like a mashup of Dr. Frank-N-Furter and David Bowie from Labyrinth. As for Jeff Bridges, he's never been so lackluster. I had gone into the flick hoping for a fun, goofy riff on our digital world; I had no idea I would be locked into a two-hour-long neon-lit spectacle of incomprehensible boredom that frittered away my goodwill bit by agonizing bit. (No, I do not apologize for the tech pun.)
MM gives this movie a rating of C. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a Rotten rating of 49%.
Tron: Legacy runs for 127 minutes and is rated PG for some violence and action sequences.
UPDATE: The Cine-Sib adds his review as he and I also watch the original "Tron."
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