Best to avoid Tron: Legacy

Plodding, humorless, and excessively gruesome, Tron: Legacy is best avoided.  Garret Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, and Bruce Boxlightener do a decent job with a terrible script, while Jeff Bridges takes The Dude up to eleven for his Kevin Flynn performance.  He may be doing an ok job as CLU, but the digital youngified Jeff Bridges is to awful and distracting to notice anything else.   Lets make a deal Hollywood: Never use CG to make a young version of an old actor again, and I'll consider going to more movies.

While the plot, and the rules of the digital world make no sense, I found it more offensive that the special effects and production design were incredibly boring and derivative.  While the first Tron featured groundbreaking production design from visionary artists, Tron: Legacy has nothing you haven't seen before, and most of the sets, designs, set-pieces, and even dialogue are lifted from other movies (Wargames, Blade Runner, 2001, the original Tron).

Finally it's oddly grisly for a PG movie.  Limbs are severed, combatants are decapitated, and characters dissolve into gouts of electronic blood, and cubes of digital gore.   A scene of a woman sobbing as she held the remains of a slaughter loved one felt particularly excessive, and tone-deaf.

It's not Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, bad, but it's best avoided.  I did enjoy the Cillian Murphy cameo.

I'm also apparently allergic to Real3D, as it gave me a blinding headache, but that's for another post.