First of all, great soundtrack. I cannot express this enough, but the soundtrack for the film is near perfect. True, there is nothing subtle about the score (not like the film is very subtle), and loud and rumbling it may be, but it is still a complete aural joy and helps elevate the bleak images greatly. Additionally, the sound effects and design were quite good…although nothing we haven’t heard before…
Secondly, the special effects were top notch. This is the first film to use age regression technology so well. "Young" Jeff Bridges looks phenomenal with nary a glitch or problem. Additionally, the basic computer generated world is quite detailed (though often times making little sense...which is okay since the world is supposed to be "imaginative") and extremely well executed...though the simplistic colours with little variance made for a drab colour pallet, and the amazing world created "off the grid" is completely lost in dark hues that make up the world (there is a later scene set over an "ocean", that alternatively looks beautiful but extraordinarily ill-defined...which I guess you can argue is what "off-the-grid" scenery should look like, but I do wish I could have seen more of the world). Additionally, the use of 2D was quite interesting: the film starts in 2D, but as the characters move the digital environment, everything becomes 3D, greatly increasing the emersion process for the audience, and really emphasizing the 3D in a unique way...though it is a little ironic that the "real" world is 2D, whereas the computer world is in 3D.
As for the acting...well everyone was completely average. I was impressed that Garrett Hedlund (who plays Sam Flynn) could stand up to Jeff Bridges presence quite well, but there was little chemistry between the two (through no fault of the actors, rather the script). Additionally, the quieter moments, where Sam reflects, or when he silently talks with Quorra, Hedlund shows some serious promise. Bridges himself is okay, and at times he is clearly getting into all the mumbo-jumbo, and special effects (I expect he loved seeing himself 30 years younger, and he seemed to get a kick out of playing the ill-defined villain evil computer program C.L.U.), but other times he looks simply lost. And finally, Olivia Wilde is probably the best part of the film. Not only because she downright beautiful (her beauty, along with Beau Garrett as JEM, is certainly one reason to see the film, in fact I expect some will see the film solely for this reason), but because she plays naive and earnest so well. Somehow, despite living in a tyrannical society, and being the last surviving member of a species of digital life form (that is casually exterminated for no real reason sometime before the film starts), Quorra is the only character that seems ever hopeful, and has a constant desire to help. While this makes the character a little unrealistic, Wilde's performance is actually pretty good...although, at times I expect the storywriters chose the personality solely to cause the more fanboyish fanboys to like her character more (and consequentially like the film more).
That being said, there's not much to the characters, and the acting is ultimately merely proficient. But, it should be noted that the acting never really gets in the way of the story/special effects (unlike, say,
Transformers 2).
As for the script...well the script is pretty bad. The dialogue can be quite awful at times, and definitely random. The story itself is okay, but it is clearly written by someone with little experience with a computer, so there is little realism to anything (not that the original was in anyway realistic, but viewers 30 years couldn't exactly pull out a fully functional computer during the film and do searches of key words either); which wouldn't be so bad if the film didn't put so much emphasis on the digital revolution (etc). Additionally, there were many side-stories that were introduced then dropped by the end of the film for no apparent reason. For instance, Cillian Murphy (yes, that Cillian Murphy), plays the head computer programmer/designer for Encom, who is briefly introduced during the initial scene of the film, but then never mentioned again. What makes this particularly strange though is the fact that he appears to be working with the evil-computer-program C.L.U. (or at least the ill-defined moment led me to believe this was possible), but this is never exactly mentioned, nor does anything about the scene actually impact anything seen in the rest of the film. In fact, I would even go so far as to say the entire scene could have been excised from the film with little to no repercussions to the story (which is a shame since Cillian Murphy looks a little hot as a dwebish nerd
). And, there is the entire macguffin that starts the story: Sam gets a message (on a family friend's pager), to met his dad. How this is done is never fully explained, and who exactly did it is also never fully revealed (we are told it is a plan of C.L.U.s, but he never actually reveals this to anyone, and he seems as completely surprised by Sam's appearance).
And, of course, there is the awful use of tie-ins that make little to no sense to anyone that hasn’t played the games or read the comics. Most significantly, the tragic plight of the ISOs is ultimately a footnote in
Tron: Legacy solely because the events in question only occurred in the game
Tron: Evolution. This makes for extremely clunky storytelling, and turns the entire plot point and important character definition for Quorra into a moot point to the film. Also, the entire philosophical discussion of perfection makes little sense, especially considering how completely imperfect C.L.U. is within the story…Additionally, the character of Tron (who briefly appears) makes no sense, the character conversion makes even less sense, and the character's conclusion is an unsubtle set-up for a sequel.
In the end, the script made little sense... the story was okay, though, but the script needed a complete revision...
As for Directing...strangely enough, despite being an action film, there was really only one decent set-piece in the entire film (the light cycle competition). All the other fights were badly choreographed and badly shot, with little semblance of mise en scene and little regard to transitions. This is especially burdened by the fact that all the characters, besides the main characters, are virtually identical to each other, so I often found it hard to keep track of anything that was going on. Besides that, the editing was also a little sloppy at times…