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Monday, August 15, 2011

BD impressions: TRON: Legacy

4:26 PM / BD Impressions / 14 Comments

The film: The original TRON left me cold. The sequel, oddly enough, impressed me more despite suffering from a raft of problems of its own. The plot is as generic as they come - augmenting the original's "defeat the evil emperor" with the overused "boy grows into man" framework - and Garrett Hedlund has got to be the most singularly wooden and uncharismatic lead I've seen in a movie in quite some time. But it has plenty of strengths too, not least an inspired (and more coherent) visual design for the Grid (though is it just me or do most of the visual and aural cues owe a debt to the MASS EFFECT game series?), as well as a more mature Jeff Bridges in grizzled sensei mode. It's actually a shame he's relegated to a supporting role - I'd much rather have watched a film about him, Olivia Wilde and her Louise Brooks wig than the personality vacuum that is Hedlund. Still, it never drags (unlike the original, and despite being nearly half an hour longer than it), and it stands up well as an actual film rather than the technology demo the original ended up resembling. Just don't mention the the uncanny valley Jeff Bridges CGI stand-in. 6/10

Image quality: A plea to all filmmakers: can you PLEASE stop making these multi-aspect ratio IMAX films, or at the very least stop releasing them on BD in this form? At least offer us an opportunity to watch the film in 2.39:1 from beginning to end, as we would have done had we gone to see it in a non-IMAX cinema. It's not clever, it destroys any sense of immersion and, most annoyingly of all, it draws your attention to the fact that, for home viewing, what you're getting with the 2.39:1 ratio is an image that is less tall rather than wider. TRON: LEGACY jumps between 1.78:1 and 2.39:1 throughout its running time, often seemingly arbitrarily (some dialogue scenes are 1.78:1, some action scenes are 2.39:1, and vice versa), and it adds nothing to the presentation.

With that little rant out of the way, TRON: LEGACY looks rather good on BD, though it's limited by the digital cameras used to shoot it in a way that its predecessor's 70mm photography wasn't. Interestingly, while the original TRON's "real world" photography was basically flawless and its "Grid" photography suffered slightly as a result of its heavy use of opticals, it's the other way round here: the digital photography lends itself well to the cold, artificial world of the Grid (and a lot of what we're seeing in those scenes is actually wall-to-wall CG anyway), but in the "real world" scenes, it has the feel of a cheap made-for-TV production. Shots occasionally look harsh and processed too - see Example 11. There's also a dead pixel visible in one shot, though I must point out I only noticed it after taking the capture.

That said, I suspect the disc is largely a faithful representation of the master. Mild compression artefacts are visible on occasions - see Example 2 - but otherwise it's a solid disc. Recommended.

TRON: Legacy
label: Buena vista; disc country: UK; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.78:1 and 2.39:1

14 Comments

 
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