journal features

movie review - Tron

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2017.11.18

This is my second review of "Tron", some sixteen years after the last time and I presume thirty years after I first saw it. I tried showing it to my kids for "movie night" and their reaction was sharply negative. I admit that the beginning of the flick is hardly engaging, and that the overall story fails to really hold together as the in-game story loses its grip on the real world. Also, the graphics are now so dated as to have absolutely nothing in common with the kids' experience of gaming or other computer-based activities. Even casual gaming environments like "Roblox" absolutely blow the doors off Tron.

But, it's the story that matters and this story feels made around the special effects, rather than the reverse.

Not recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton