Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

Jim, There is a Historic Opportunity Here

The time has finally come for me to complete the original series of Star Trek movies.  It’s been a fairly decent run thus far.  Though I’ve really only found two of the movies to be fairly disappointing, I still don’t think I’ve seen one of these movies capable of making me understand how a Trekkie could possibly consider this series to be superior to Star Wars.  Even the best ones I’ve seen so far pale in comparison to the best Star Wars movies, in my opinion.  But they still have one movie left, and that movie is Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, written by Nicholas Meyer and Denny Martin Flinn, directed by Nicholas Meyer, and starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Kim Cattrall, Christopher Plummer, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, James Doohan, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, David Warner, Rosanna DeSoto, Iman, Brock Peters, and Michael Dorn.

One of the Klingon moons explodes, throwing the Klingon Empire into turmoil and causing them to call the United Federation of Planets and suggest that they enter into some peace negotiations.  Spock (Leonard Nimoy) recommends Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) to escort the Klingon Chancellor, Gorkon (David Warner), to the negotiations.  Kirk resents the assignment, still harboring a lot of resentment for the Klingons because they killed his son.  After a tense meal with the Klingon’s on board the Enterprise, the Enterprise appears to inexplicably fire upon the Klingon ship and, while the gravity is down, two Enterprise crew members beam on board and kill most of the Klingons, including Gorkon.  The Enterprise is blamed and Kirk, along with Doctor Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley), is sentenced to life imprisonment on a mining planet.  Kirk and McCoy have to try to survive imprisonment while Spock and the Enterprise crew try to find out what happened to clear their names.

I wasn’t really feeling this movie, but I suppose I’d relent as far as to say that it was an acceptable sendoff for the original Enterprise crew.  It just felt so uneventful.  I guess there were technically a lot of things happening, what with the peace negotiations, the framing of Kirk, the attempted assassination, etc., but I’m also not that interested in watching interstellar politics.  I found it mostly boring and did not inspire me to give it too much attention.  I think one of the things that kept annoying me is that they wouldn’t stop quoting Shakespeare.  That stuff barely keeps me interested when it’s an actual Shakespeare play!  And they just do it way too much.  I get it, you all like Shakespeare, and we’ve all cumulatively agreed to not pay attention to how the Klingon’s would get that interested in Shakespeare, but you can knock it off already.  And then, when they got bored of that, they started quoting Peter Pan, which is basically the same thing, I guess.  And when they end their movie with Kirk telling them to fly toward the “second star to the right and straight on till morning” made me think that it was their intention to have Star Trek VII take place in Neverland.  They’ve done more ridiculous things in the TV show.  But, best I could tell, I had not misplaced another movie, so they may not have made that movie.  Some of the non-classical quotes were also irritating.  The biggest one for me was when Spock decided that whoever they were looking for (the two killers) were still on board the Enterprise.  Yeah, they would logically still be on board the Enterprise … IF they didn’t teleport off already, as they’ve proven themselves able to do.  I also got annoyed at the end when they said they wanted to decommission the Enterprise again at the end of the movie.  Why does Starfleet have such a hard-on for getting rid of their most effective vessel?!  This is the second time they’ve tried that in these movies.  And after they said they wanted to decommission it, it got destroyed, and then they STILL rebuilt it!  Make up your mind!

This was the best looking Star Trek movie that I’ve seen until the J.J. Abrams joints.  It looked really good.  It started off really well too with that giant energy wave thing that looked great, even though it was very, very pink.  I guess I didn’t like it because I didn’t really see the point of it.  I understand that the Klingons needed some reason to talk peace with the Federation, but they didn’t really need something so elaborate.  The action was decent enough when it happened, but I got to thinking that the shields are nowhere near as effective as they should’ve been.  They announce that the shields are in the process of weakening, but then they show the hull and there’s physical damage on it.  So the shields when only slightly depreciated are only really good enough to keep out 10% of incoming damage?  And after that, I thought that it was cute that the movie ended with the signatures of the main crew before the credits began.  It’s a nice little finishing touch.

The cast still brings it to the best of their ability, but the bulk of them are showing their age at this point.  I guess I can’t really blame them for that.  Not everyone can age as gracefully as I have.  I did feel like it didn’t really fit the character of Kirk to have him mutter some insult about one of the Klingon’s resembling Hitler under his breath without having the balls to repeat it when he was called on it.  I also thought it was a little over the top for DeForest Kelley to jump up on the Klingon and straddle him as he pounded on his chest to revive him.  I don’t know if I could call it cliché since I don’t know if this movie was one of the first to do it or not, so I’ll just say it was a little much.  I also thought Iman was good in the role of Martia, but mostly because she was hot.  It was a little strange that she still talked in her own voice in all the different forms she took until she took the form of Kirk, but I didn’t care that much.  Then I got really confused because Michael Dorn plays Colonel Worf in this movie, the Klingon that defends Kirk and McCoy at the trial.  This didn’t seem to make any sense chronologically for me since the same actor plays a Klingon with the same name hundreds of years later in The Next Generation, but they had already finished airing The Next Generation by the time this movie came out.  I guess they just never had the opportunity to explain it.  Had they mentioned it in this movie, it would’ve been predicting the future.  And TNG was already done, so they couldn’t mention it there.  Maybe just not worth the trouble.

Though I found myself somewhat bored with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, I felt as if it was an acceptable way to send off the series.  The story was a little boring and based mostly around interstellar politics, but the action and the performances were all good, and the story did succeed at what it wanted to do by closing out the original series with a nice little bow.  I wouldn’t recommend this movie on its own, but I would recommend the whole set of the original series movies.  They’re more good than bad, and overall worth watching.  Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country gets “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” out of “Let them die!”

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Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)

Please Captain, Not in Front of the Klingons.

Today may finally be the day that I watch the Star Trek movie even fans complain about.  So far, I’ve found the Star Trek movies to be mostly enjoyable.  The first movie was the worst that I’ve seen so far, but it was still only mediocre, not bad.  Then the next few movies were pretty good.  But today’s Star Trek movie is the worst rated of this generation in Star Trek movies, so I imagine I’ll have plenty of fodder for jokes.  But who knows?  Maybe every other critic is wrong and this is, in fact, a good movie.  There’s only one way to find out.  Today’s movie is Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, written by David Loughery, directed by William Shatner, and starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Laurence Luckinbill, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, Todd Bryant, Spice Williams-Crosby, David Warner, Charles Cooper, Cynthia Gouw, and George Murdock.

Something happens in a desert between a Vulcan named Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill) and a guy that looks like the lead singer from Midnight Oil.  Then the crew of the USS Enterprise – Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Doctor Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Engineer Montgomery Scott (James Doohan), Helmsman Hikaru Sulu (George Takei), Navigator Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig), and Communications Officer Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) – is camping in Yosemite National Park.  So those are things that happen.  Sybok takes some hostages on the planet Nimbus III and the Enterprise responds to the threat, only to get their own ship taken hostage as well, to be used in Sybok’s quest to find a mythical planet called Sha Ka Ree, where creation began and God hangs out.

Hooray!  I’ve finally found a really bad Star Trek movie.  This movie sucked.  Actually, I don’t even know how comfortable I’d be in saying that the movie sucked because I feel like I had no idea what was going on, and I was actually paying full attention for the bulk of the movie.  I even had my friend Forty along for the ride, and neither one of us had any idea what was going on until the last 15 minutes or so of the movie.  When we figured out what they were going for, we realized that it was pretty stupid.  They were looking for a God planet.  When they find what they think is the God planet, they are attacked by fake God and just leave without doing anything about the fake God.  Also, a Klingon ship with muddy motivations is following the Enterprise through the entire movie with such ineptitude that I forgot they were still following for most of the movie.  They were an entire non-entity that could have been left out of the movie entirely.  But the movie seemed to be filled with such things, and it could be argued that the entire movie could’ve been left out of the movie to the movie’s benefit.

The look of this movie was … confusing.  Don’t movies typically get better graphically as they get sequels?  This one took a step backwards.  It wasn’t the worst looking movie, but it wasn’t great.  The last part of the movie was the most annoying to me, because “God” was so him-damned bright that I think I went blind in my left eye.  Also, the cantina in Paradise City looked like it was stolen right out of another movie, but I can’t remember which one.  All I remember is that it was a cantina on an alien planet and the movie was called Star Wars.  Also, this is not what I’ve been told Paradise City looks like.  It was a desert, for crying out loud.  I’ve heard that Paradise City is a place where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.  If I went to the Paradise City in this movie, I feel like I’d just be asking for someone to please take me home.  Yeah yeah.  It also just looked like any old desert place on Earth.  Not nearly alien enough.  All they really did to make it seem alien was tape some fake horns to the heads of horses and put a three-boobed cat lady in there.  The sound was also a big problem for me in this movie.  I couldn’t tell if it was my sound system or the movie, but the movie was either extremely loud or it completely drowned out its own dialogue.  That might not have been the worst thing ever, I guess.

I mostly was fine with the cast, as I have been in all the Star Trek movies.  The only issue I took with Kirk was when he got so butt hurt when he told Spock to kill Sybok and Spock didn’t.  It doesn’t really feel like Kirk to order someone to kill an unarmed man in cold blood, let alone get pissy when he didn’t do it.  Leonard Nimoy was good again, but I hated his little rocket boots that they kept throwing in the movie.  They seemed to have no idea of how rockets work.  If you want to make these boots antigravity boots, then do it.  I’ll get on board with that.  This is a science fiction movie, so I can accept things like that.  But if you’re going to show me that they’re rocket based, then you can’t have Spock hovering when his feet are pointed upwards.  That would just propel him face first into the ground.  The only thing I had to say about Sybok was that I thought he was Sean Connery when I first saw him.  Then I found out they had originally cast Connery, so it seemed to make sense.  And it made even more sense that Connery decided to do Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade instead of this movie.  Connery seems to have a good head on his shoulders.  I had heard about Nichelle Nichols and her strange little fan dance that came out of nowhere and served no real purpose, and that was in this movie.  I wish I had seen that out of her about 30 years earlier, but I could’ve done without it here.  I didn’t have much to say about the God character in this movie except that I have no idea how he could miss when shooting beams out of his eyes.  I’ve never understood that in any situation when someone misses when shooting beams out of their eyes.  They just look at something and then shoot!  If you have the ability to look at something, you should be able to hit it!

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was finally the awful Star Trek movie I had been waiting for.  After the one mediocre and three decent movies, I was beginning to get bored with their quality.  The story of this movie was confused and confusing, and when I finally figured it out I was deflated by it.  The look also took an inexplicable step backwards in quality, and the sound could not decide if you should bother listening to the dialogue or have your ears blown out, so they decided to mix it up and do both.  The only way I could really recommend this movie would be if you wanted to make fun of it, but even then it might be a little too hard to keep up with to even bother with that.  Skip it.  Star Trek V: The Final Frontier gets “I do not believe you realize the gravity of your situation” out of “I don’t control minds.  I free them.”

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In the Mouth of Madness (1995)

I Think, Therefore You Are.

Remember my October Horrorthons?  Of course you don’t!  Why would you?  I apparently don’t.  Around the time I was reviewing horror movies for this Horrorthon, a movie review was requested of me by friend of the reviews Kendra that I never got around to.  And then it never really felt like a good time to review a horror movie because it was no longer October.  She probably forgot that she requested it.  I know that I forgot about it for a while.  But then it popped back into my head and I realized that I should not try to wait until October to knock this one out.  Let’s do this!  The movie is In the Mouth of Madness, written by Michael De Luca, directed by John Carpenter, and starring Sam Neill, Jürgen Prochnow, Julie Carmen, David Warner, Charlton Heston, John Glover, Frances Bay, Wilhelm von Homburg, and Bernie Casey.

John Trent (Sam Neill) is a patient in a Looney bin that recounts his story to Dr. Wrenn (David Warner).  Trent worked as an insurance investigator who is hired by the director of Arcane Publishing, Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston), to locate popular horror novelist Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow).  At first, Trent is not interested.  But he then inexplicably decides to buy all of his books and read them, giving himself nightmares.  And that is exactly the reason that any rational person would take up the case!  Also, he cut up the covers of the books and found a map that only people in this movie can read because it just looked like a collection of various book covers to me.  Anyway, it leads Trent and Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), editor of Cane’s books, to a town that doesn’t exist called Hobb’s End – the place where Calvin’s tiger died – where they find that Cane’s books are coming to life.

Uh … why did I watch this?  I don’t say that because this movie was “bad” per se, but I don’t really understand how this movie became requested.  The movie feels like it intends to be deep and psychologically scary, but was really only a slight step up from a regular “gore and makeup” horror movie.  I started thinking negatively of this movie right in the beginning as the movie opens with the most 80’s, Karate Kid-style rock music.  What have I gotten myself into?  And then it got into a lot of its nonsense.  Like the whole situation with the agent trying to kill Trent with an axe and Trent talking to Harglow and Styles about how he thought it was a publicity stunt.  A publicity stunt?  That guy is dead now!  How much did he believe in Cane’s new book that he’d take part in a publicity stunt that ended with him being dead?  Trent says a lot of stupid things in this movie though.  Near the end, he makes the claim that “every species can smell its own extinction.”  What are you basing that on?  How many now extinct animals have we interviewed about what they can smell?  And what does extinction smell like?  I like to think it smells like White Diamonds.  And then it gets into the story, which isn’t that interesting but felt like it really wanted to be.  Is the book causing all of this?  (Probably)  Does Cane have super powers?  (Sure)  Is Trent crazy?  (Seems to be)  Do I care?  (No, not really)  And then the movie ends with Trent in a movie theater, watching the movie we just watched like the horror movie version of Blazing Saddles.

I wasn’t really impressed with the performances in this movie either.  Sam Neill gave a good enough performance, but it felt like he was not good enough at hiding his accent yet.  He has one on the realsies, right?  Well, if not, he talks weird.  Also weird: his character keeps a squeaky horn in his glove compartment, specifically to wake up passengers that fall asleep while he’s driving?  That’s odd.  Especially since these vehicles actually have built-in squeaky horns of their own.  I spent the greater majority of the movie trying to decide if I wanted to bang Julie Carmen.  By the end of the movie, I decided that I wouldn’t kick her out of bed, but I also wouldn’t actively pursue it.  The only thing I really thought about her character was that she must’ve been SUPER dedicated to her job.  I know she’s Cane’s editor, but does that necessarily entail that she memorize every detail of his books?  She knows which direction the church is from the hotel in a made up novel.  Unless there’s a map or he just spends a lot of time describing the layout of the towns in his books, there’s really no reason to do that.  When I saw Frances Bay in the movie, I recognized her but didn’t know from where.  I thought she was the rapping grandma at first, but then I realized she was a grandma, but a grandma for Happy Gilmore.  That made me so happy.  She’s good too.  In Happy Gilmore, she was a sweet old lady that you wish was your grandma, and she starts out that way here, but shows some range too.

Because of my lack of expectations, In the Mouth of Madness was unable to disappoint me.  But I didn’t like it.  It’s not bad; it’s just average and insignificant.  The story wants to be special and deep but isn’t, and then it’s left to stand on its aging visuals.  The performances didn’t do anything for me, but the Grandma from Happy Gilmore is in it.  Besides her, I can’t think of any reason to recommend this movie to you.  Go ahead and skip it.  In the Mouth of Madness gets “Reality is not what it used to be!” out of “I’m sorry about the balls!  It was a lucky shot, that’s all!”

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Titanic (1997)

Music to Drown by.  Now I Know I’m in First Class.

I was really perplexed by today’s request from my friend Loni.  I typically review movies and video games, and have only rarely reviewed random things like hair dye.  But, I said I’d review anything and I meant it.  Today’s review is for the Titanic, or more officially the RMS Titanic, built by Thomas Andrews and the Harland and Wolff shipyard, and captained by John Smith.  I couldn’t do any personal research on this boat, but everything I’ve read about this boat leads me to decide that I cannot recommend this boat.  Sure, it was big and pretty when it first came out, but it has not held up well.  It’s practically a pile of rust on the bottom of the ocean by now!

I think I drained that joke for all it was worth, and that was not much.  I’m guessing (based mainly on the fact that Loni has a vagina) that she was requesting that I review the MOVIE Titanic.  I had seen this movie already because I’m a member of the human species, and it’s viewed as a requirement.  I was dragged to see this movie because I grew up in a household of women and it could not be avoided.  But, though I had already seen this movie, I really didn’t remember that much about it.  What I remembered about the movie was more accurately what I remembered about the actual Titanic.  So when it was requested of me, the only thing that made me delay the review for as long as I did is not having the desire to dedicate a large fraction of my day to watching a movie.  I finally decided that it’s time had come.  Thus, here is my review of Titanic, written and directed by James Cameron, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Gloria Stuart, Bill Paxton, Billy Zane, David Warner, Victor Garber, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Danny Nucci, Jason Barry, Suzy Amis, and Ioan Gruffudd.  Also, it should be noted that I will not entertain the notion that spoilers are possible in this movie.  Even if you’re one of the three people in the world who hasn’t seen this movie, I’m sure you have heard plenty about it.  And if you’ve managed to avoid that, then I’m sure you know about the actual event.  And if you don’t know that, then you’re an idiot and you haven’t understood half of the words I’ve used.

In 1996, Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) and his crew are searching the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, looking for a valuable diamond that was last seen aboard the ship known as Le Coeur de la Mer (the Heart of the Ocean).  They get excited when they find a safe, thinking it would contain the diamond, but find only papers inside.  But, as they are cleaning the papers, they find one of them to be a drawing of a naked chick wearing the diamond.  When it’s shown on the news, 100-year-old Rose Dawson Calvert (Gloria Stuart) sees the picture and calls Lovett, revealing that the girl in the picture was her back when she was young and extremely fuckable.  Lovett flies her and her granddaughter (Suzy Amis) to their boat above the wreckage and Rose unfolds her life story to a group of people that just want to know where she left her jewelry.  The story then turns to Rose back when her name was Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) who boards the Titanic on its maiden voyage with her fiancé Caledon Hockley (Billy Zane) and her mother Ruth DeWitt Bukater (Frances Fisher).  She starts a love affair with a drifter/artist named Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio).  Later, the boat hits an iceberg, Jack dies, and Rose is rescued by Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd).

Yes, I did only decide to tell the entire story of the movie so that I could make a joke about Mr. Fantastic saving Rose.  …WORTH IT!!!  And here’s another thing: this movie is WAAAAAY too long, but ultimately it is also worth it.  I feel like I had a very masculine reaction to this movie, but I was not totally against the female, lovey-dovey parts.  The love story occupied the bulk of the movie, and tended to make the movie feel a little slow and drawn out to me, but I liked that it was vaguely Romeo-and-Juliet-esque in how the two of them were like star-crossed lovers whose status was trying to keep them apart.  Also, we know that their relationship is probably not going to end well.  Speaking of which, though I thought the love story part of the movie was fine, I admittedly didn’t really get interested until things started going wrong and people started dying.  That’s when the movie got exciting and, sometimes, a little funny.  C’mon!  You tellin’ me that you didn’t snicker at all when that CG dude fell off the vertical sinking ship and hit the handrails, sending him into a crazy spin until he hit the water?  If you didn’t laugh, you just don’t know funny when you see it.  I didn’t find that quite as funny as the fact that it seemed as if Cameron was trying to build suspense right before the Titanic hit the iceberg.  Fer real, dude?  You want me to wonder whether or not the boat’s going to hit the iceberg?  I probably knew that was coming before I knew anything else about the movie, including who James Cameron, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kate Winslet were.  But I suppose it’s what a filmmaker was inclined to do, and I’m not sure just how much of my generation actually paid any attention to what the Titanic was before this movie made it a household name again.  And I can’t deny that I got a little choked up at the end of the movie.  It didn’t reach tears, but it got close.  And I also like the message of the movie.  The bulk of the movie is just about how classes are bad, but that message doesn’t go quite as far with me.  The one that resonated with me was what showed up at the end of the movie as the camera panned over the pictures from Rose’s life that she had endeavored to live to the fullest because of her promise to Jack.  Although it seems like something you should always have on your mind, sometimes I do need a movie to remind me that life is finite and you should really try to live it.

There’s not a whole lot to say about the look of this movie.  It goes for epic and it blows epic out of the water.  The launching and the sinking of the Titanic were both as epic as they should have been.  They even had some impressive transitions, like how they morphed the corroded image of the sunken ship’s bow into the recreation of the brand new ship.  Of course, there’s one thing that cannot be ignored when talking about this movie and that’s that Céline Dion song, “My Heart Will Go On.”  I remember finding that song somewhat annoying around the release of this movie, but it was really more due to the fact that it was entirely overplayed.  I feel prepared to say right now that it is a good song.  And I don’t care how gay it makes me.  It sets a great mood, and it’s actually fairly versatile, which you can tell by how often they used it in the movie.  Sometimes it was the score and sometimes it was the version with Dion singing, played fast and up tempo or slow and melodic.  But it does make me laugh on the few occasions when I see a movie that does this kind of thing.  Some movies just like the song they picked so much that they beat the audience over the head with it, demanding that they like it too.  Armageddon did it with that Aerosmith song, and I think one of the Transformers movies did it with a Linkin Park song.  At least this movie bothered to change the tempo on the song to change the mood.

I couldn’t think of much of anything to say about the performances in the movie.  I didn’t particularly find anyone that mind-blowing, but they all did very well.  And I think we all know the performance that stood out for me.  Was it the Academy Award nominated old broad?  Nah.  She did fine.  Was it Mr. Fantastic in his pivotal tiny cameo role?  Nope.  I’m more of a Human Torch person.  Obviously it was Kate Winslet’s boobs.  I could look at that lady naked all day.  And I have.  I also think there’s a chance that they revealed that Winslet would be nude in the end of the movie early on so that the male audience would sit through all the lovey crap to see the boobs.  It would’ve been off-putting at first because we’d be thinking that the nudity they were hinting at with that sketch was going to be that old lady, but then that old lady turns into Kate Winslet.  Alright, I’ll stick around for an hour or two, but you better deliver, movie!

So there’s a really long review to accompany a really long movie.  I would say Titanic holds up as one of the most watchable chick flick type movies that I know of.  You do have to sit through a good deal of a romance novel (albeit a decently written one) to get to the boobs and mayhem, but if you give it a chance it actually pays off in a way that surprised me with the expectations I had going in.  It’s mainly hindered by its ridiculous length, much like the Titanic itself.  I don’t know if that metaphor makes any sense, but I do know I will be saying that Titanic is a good movie.  Go check it out.  Titanic gets “It’s over a hundred feet longer than the Mauritania, and far more luxurious” out of “That’s one of the good things about Paris: lots of girls willing to take their clothes off.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Tron (1982)

Old Enough to Remember When the MCP Was Just a Chess Program

Fabio recommended that I review two movies today at work.  The first movie (today’s movie) is a science fiction classic from the early 80’s that I had never bothered to see until they released a sequel in 2010.  I felt like it was necessary to see the original before watching the sequel that had piqued my interest with its cool, stylish graphics.  And, since the first movie was known for its own cool, stylish graphics, I figured I’d be right on board with it.  As with most movies, before I review the sequel, I feel it’s necessary to review the original.  So here comes my review of the first Tron, written and directed by Steven Lisberger, and starring Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan, Dan Shor, Barnard Hughes, and Peter Jurasik.

Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) has been repeatedly trying to hack into the software of his former employer, ENCOM, looking for files that would prove that the current chairman of ENCOM, Ed Dillinger (David Warner), plagiarized several video games that Flynn created in order to rise to power in the company.  Flynn’s numerous attempts have failed so far, having been prevented by the artificial intelligence program that controls ENCOM’s mainframes, the Master Control Program.  Hearing about the attempted hacks, ENCOM employees Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) and Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan) go and see what Flynn is up to and agree to help him get what he needs.  Alan tells Flynn he needs to get his security program, Tron, away from the MCP and allow him to do his job.  While trying to forge higher clearance for himself, the MCP activates an experimental laser that turns Flynn into data and puts him into the ENCOM mainframe.  Now inside, he must meet up with the manifestation of Tron (Boxleitner) and take down the MCP so that he can make lots and lots of money.

It’s a little sad to say this, but this movie is more than a little overrated.  My opinion is not hindered by nostalgia as I didn’t see this movie in its entirety until 2010, but I feel sad about not liking it because it seems exactly like the type of movie I should like.  It’s science fiction and it’s set inside a video game.  What’s not to like?  The lackluster story, that’s what.  It’s just not very interesting.  The story has an interesting premise, but not an interesting story.  I like the idea of someone being turned into a computer program, but you then should have something happen.  You get a couple repeated scenes of a tank shooting at a flying upper-case M, then some people play Jai Alai to the death, some light cycle chasing, but none of it is particularly gripping.  I can’t really recall a time in the movie when I felt like Flynn was in danger, and without that it’s just a process of waiting for the hero to inevitably win.  The biggest issue with pacing I had was the moment when Yori, the female program, died … for 2 seconds.  What the hell is that, man?  She’s just standing in a room, the lights turn off, she swoons, but then Flynn catches her and she’s alive again.  My brain didn’t even have time to say, “What the hell just killed her?” before she was alive again.  The outcome of the movie also didn’t make any sense to me.  ::SPOILER ALERT::  Once the MCP is destroyed, Flynn returns to the real world and gets a printout that says Dillinger stole the program to the video games from Flynn, which he apparently uses to take control of the company again.  The problem with this is that I don’t know how a couple of words printed out on a dot matrix printer is proof.  I could print out a statement on a piece of paper that would look way more professional that could say, “Idea for the iPod.  Created by Robert Bicket.  Appropriated by Steve Jobs.  Give Robert lots and lots of money.”  I don’t feel entirely confident that this would convince anyone.  I’ll let you know what the outcome is.  After that, the full ending of the movie is completely lackluster as well.  Alan and Lora are waiting on the top of the ENCOM tower, Flynn arrives in a helicopter showing that he’s in control of the company (the piece of paper works!), and that’s it.  I suppose it’s a happy ending, but it’s entirely blasé.  ::END SPOILERS::

Some people actually find the story of this movie super amazing, but to me the only thing noteworthy about this movie is the look, and it is still very noteworthy.  By today’s standards, it’s not the most impressive thing in the world, but this movie was made in 1982.  At the time, this movie would’ve been mind-blowing.  I respect the movie for its visual accomplishments.  Though it’s something that I’m sure would not be hard to accomplish with today’s technology, it’s still awesome to look at and very stylized.  I’m sure the younger audience wouldn’t understand it, but I remember full well when video games looked like this, and they captured the video game feel very well.  I’ve played those little tank games, and I’ve played games like the light cycle battle, where you created a wall and tried to make your opponent crash into it before you did.  I remember it as a snake that kept getting larger, but it’s the same principle.

All of the performances in the movie were fine, but none of them really impressed either.  As it seems like the movie was more geared towards the younger audiences (and because it was a Disney movie) they never went for anything super heavy in the story, so the characters never really required any stretching of their acting chops.  Because of this, the only thing I could think to say about anyone in the cast was that Cindy Morgan looks like a nerdy Michelle Pfeiffer.  …That is all.

I found myself somewhat disappointed by the original Tron movie.  The premise of the movie is great, but problems with pacing and a misunderstanding of how to make scenes have impact made the movie somewhat boring and monotonous.  I would definitely agree that the look of the movie deserves all the praise in the world, pulling off a very cool and very stylish look with technology far inferior to that which is available today.  It’s cool enough, but nothing special beyond something cool to look at.  It’s a movie worth seeing once, but not worthy of that much acclaim.  Tron gets “If the Users can no longer help us, we’re lost” out of “End of line.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.