NFGworld: Tron Uprising

Tron Uprising

I’ve been sick with the flu, and when I’m not regretting being born, I’ve been watching a lot of TV. Downloading it, mostly, ’cause most of what’s on the actual TV is pretty amazingly bad. While scouring the ol’ HDD, I found a few old Tron Uprising vids and fed them into the queue. I’d tried watching them before, but couldn’t really get into it ’cause other things seemed more interesting, but with plenty of time to kill now it’s turning out to be very watchable.

And I mean that. It’s a fun take on the Tron universe. But I pretty quickly realized where it falls a little short.

First, all the bad guys are red, the good guys blue. Colour coded shows aren’t really new, but this is pretty stark. A red helicopter flying over the blue city? Yeah, it’s a bad guy. Red cape? Bad. Even a guy with red points on his normal (ie: blue) outfit turned out to be bad. Pretty lousy camouflage there guys.

Second, and this is a problem that the second movie had as well, there are no rules in the Tron system. Physics just don’t apply, until they do. Vehicular acceleration seems to indicate that mass is basically optional, until one thing slams into another. No matter how fast you’re going, you can still slam the accelerator under pressure and go faster. It’s sort of hard to invest yourself in someone’s attempts to succeed when the universal constants are variable and, ultimately, always fall in the good guy’s favour.

Finally, the plots are a little dumb, and the dialogue a little stilted. People come around to the right point of view in surprisingly little time, dumb things are pursued ’cause the plot requires it, etc. Sure, it’s a kids’ show, but still. It’s a bit daft most of the time.

But it’s Tron, and it looks great, and the music’s sort of inoffensively just like the great Daft Punk movie soundtrack. So long as I’m sick on the couch, I’ll keep watching. And since the series is all but canceled and I’m guessing won’t see a second season, I’ll at least watch to the end of the extant 19 episodes.