CORT AND FATBOY: 'True Grit,' 'Tron Legacy' and some follow-up questions

The Friday, Dec. 17 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast is a journey through the agony and the ecstasy of Jeff Bridges. "True Grit" is fantastic. And while "Tron Legacy" is gorgeous and its Daft Punk score is terrific, it's also a near-total screenwriting disaster.

To illustrate the hilarious number of dangling and internally inconsistent story threads in "Tron Legacy," my review on the show consisted largely of confused follow-up questions. There were several I didn't get a chance to ask on the air. All of these questions are after the jump. WARNING: "story" spoilers to follow.

TRON LEGACY: QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW.

(Several of these came out of an IM discussion with my pal Andre Dellamorte and a separate post-film chat with Fatboy and Erik Henriksen.)

1. It's endlessly discussed that Jeff Bridges has magical user powers. Why does he barely use them -- once just to turn out floor lights, and once to create a windstorm that would have been useful on roughly 100 occasions earlier in the film?

2. How is CLU unable to find Flynn the Elder's remarkably well-lit wilderness retreat for like two centuries?

3. Why did the movie spend so much energy setting up Dillinger's son (Cillian Murphy) as a character, only to utterly forget him?

4. How does CLU's invade-the-real-world plan make even a tiny lick of sense? How would programs constituting in the real world work, exactly? Wouldn't the laws of physics send all the floating stuff crashing to earth? Did Flynn set aside a keg of raw matter near that quantum laser in his office to aid the data-to-flesh conversion process?

5. What exactly got written into that hard-drive necklace?

6. Did the filmmakers really think it was okay or clever to bite the Falcon-vs.-TIE Fighters bit from "Star Wars" nearly beat-for-beat?

7. Did Disney know they had a clunker on their hands and thus refuse to spend the money required to make the de-aged Jeff Bridges look in any way convincing? (In terms of special effect advertised vs. special effect delivered, it's a near-total failure, especially in the wake of "Avatar.")

8. In 1982, Kevin Flynn refused to kill a gladiator. He was a rogue with a conscience. Why is Sam Flynn just perfectly happy to immediately start derezzing everyone in sight when he's conscripted for The Games?

9. Why do all the spontaneously generated Chosen People programs have a fancy glowing arm tattoo? (More to the point, why would the removal of the "spontaneously generated Chosen People programs" from the storyline impact "Tron Legacy" in no way whatsoever?)

10. If you have a fancy glowing tattoo you need to hide, should your S&M outfit really have partial sleeves?

11. What, exactly, are the "identity discs"? Do programs need them or not? (They seem to survive perfectly well while separated from them for long periods of time.) Why are the discs carrying all your essential ID and serving as the weapons you throw? Isn't that a bit like defending yourself by throwing your Social Security Card at someone Ricky Jay-style?

12. As Andre asks: What the f*** was CLU's plan re: Sam? "I'm going to page him hundreds of years after I haven't seen his father. So Sam's going to show up, and I'm going to try and kill him. But I'll give a speech to get people's attention, even though I have no idea if Sam can actually use a light-cycle."

13. At one point in the film, Sam pockets a spare light-cycle-generating rod -- and never uses it. Why?

14. How was TRON turned into an evil henchman? Why don't we ever see his face? Is it because the filmmakers decided late in the game to make the Rinzler character TRON in ADR? Because that's how it feels.

15. Why can't Sam just leave through the Grid-universe Flynn's arcade, where he arrived? Why do you have to travel to the remote countryside to leave?

16. Michael Sheen's totally superfluous character has a glowing cane that shoots lasers, "Flash Gordon"-style. If cane-laser technology exists, why are people still throwing Social Security Number Frisbees at each other?

17. Where does Kevin Flynn procure whole pigs and fresh vegetables on The Grid, exactly? Did he buy live animals and produce two decades ago and beam them in for farming?

18. Ryan Pollard brings up another question in the comments: "When Quorra and Sam escape the light cycle grid, Rinzler can't follow because his bike isn't meant for the terrain. Why didn't Clu immediately dispatch an air pursuit? Or why didn't Rinzler bust out one of those jets seen in the final chase scene?"

19. MAJOR SPOILER: If Bridges switched identity discs with Quorra at the end, couldn't that potentially mean that Bridges is now inhabiting Quorra's body in the real world?

You get the idea. God, what a disappointment.
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Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Dec. 17, 2010)

Comments

[Vyrm]

C'mon, you never saw Virtuosity? [re: No. 4] Makes perfect sense!

[Ryan]

Another one... When Quorra and Sam escape the light cycle grid, Rinzler can't follow because his bike isn't meant for the terrain. Why didn't Clu immediately dispatch an air pursuit? Or why didn't Rinzler bust out one of those jets seen in the final chase scene?

[gtronic]

2. I assumed he did know where it was. But he basically left Flynn alone (maybe waiting for the right time to try to jack his disc, or out of respect).

3. I only noticed Dillinger's son mentioned once, at that executive table. He was in it more?

13. hrm, I thought he used that spare light cycle a few minutes later.

Also... I actually enjoyed this movie. But that's because 1) I read reviews beforehand and lowered my expectations a ton, 2) I ate a pot brownie before going in, and 3) I ignored all the unexplained and nonsensical stuff with the discs and CLU's plan to invade the real world.

[Will Sargent]

My biggest one: you're CLU, and you've managed to hack into the phone system to the point where you can identify a board member of ENCOM and send a page out. If you managed to do this, how on earth have you failed to spread out into the larger internet?

Point the second: you've come to the point where you have the CAPABILITY to send a page out. You can reasonably expect that sending this page will result in a) a user downloading themselves into the system and b) the portal being open for 8 hours as a result.

In that event, it is entirely prudent to do the following:

1) Make sure that you have absolutely everything that you need to hand BEFORE you hit the big red button (i.e. Flynn's disk)

2) Ensure that any unrecognized programs are kept safely and securely until they can be IDed, and NOT throw them into the games until you've pumped them for information.

CLU fails to do either of these things -- despite having all the resources, power and time he needs, he pushes the button and THEN tries to secure Flynn, and he almost loses the first user to come across the pipe in 20 years through sheer carelessness.

[Will Sargent]

Also, someone who tried the antics that Sam tries in the first five minutes of the movie would not only be in jail with charges, he would be dead. Especially since it is stated flat out that he does this EVERY YEAR.

[gtronic]

Oh, I have a pretty big beef with one thing in this movie (not having to do with plot):

This is a simulated world; a digital construction. In the first movie, all of the objects in the world (but not the people) appeared to be non-carbon-based. The walls, the vehicles, etc - they were sleek and untextured and appeared to be "digital." In this new one, these objects look VERY carbon-based. And to really drive it home, at one point during a chase scene the planes they're flying go too high up in the atmosphere, which ends up killing the engines. Engines and atmospheres should not present themselves like this in this world! I don't get it. Did Flynn reprogram the world to adhere to real-life physics?

Anyway, I think my point is that I think they went too far with the CGI, in terms of making stuff look real. At times you can see the vehicles huffing and puffing as they roll around.