TRON LEGACY: FORMED TO FUNCTION

Form over function. Style over content. Looking good vs thinking good .. gooder .. well .. whatever.

Does one trump the other, are they mutually exclusive, these are questions that have been kicking around for a long time. Almost as long as: Which came first, the chicken or the egg OR If a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound OR If Donald Trump is one of the richest men in the world why the fuck doesn't he get a better weave?

But let us shy away from any heady philosophical question (you do know which blog you are read correct?) and remain in a context that I understand. No, not beer, movies.

This is certainly an old topic of discussion when it comes to movie. There have always been those movies that looked great, from stunning full colour vistas to eye dazzling CGI effects but once you strip away the eye candy, all you had left was a crunchy frog .. that was a Monty Python reference, just to see if you were paying attention

A few years ago, Jennifer Lopez starred in a movie called The Cell, which concerned a woman who was able to get inside people's dreams, to help them with psychological issues

The concept was enticing, and the imagery was breathtaking .. even aside from Ms Lopez. There was an attempt at establishing an emotional connection, the plot involved Lopez "rescuing" someone from a serial killer. But in the long run, I felt more attention was paid to the visuals than the story, or even to the concept itself

Last year we saw Inception, another movie about people who are able to enter someone's dreams and alter their reality.

Certainly, the visuals, the look of the movie was breath taking. Like The Cell, this story also had an emotional connection but it's concept was about as fully realized as anything I've ever seen in a movie. This elevates the movie. You don't need the effects, the look, for this film to be compelling, the story (along with the fine ensemble acting) did that.

So, story over look, form over function? For me, usually, but not always. Film is, after all, a visual medium, and there are some film makers how can use the visual to tell their story.

Probably one of my favorite examples of this is Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott

Blade Runner is one of those movies that had an immediate impact on and that has lasted for many years. There is a story here, sort of in a way if you really want there to be. I will not delve into the rumour that this movie was based on the Phillip K Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I in fact do not want to delve into the situation of all the movies that have been based, if that is the term, on the works of one of my favorite authors of all time. That will be a rant for another post (and it will be ugly, if I ever publish it, you may want to look away.
I prefer to consider Blade Runner as an entity all unto itself. And yes, it is an entity with a story. Beyond all the gobbly gook in the film (and my goodness there is a lot of gobbly gook) it is an examination of what makes a human, human. Or it is supposed to be. The script only lightly dwells on this topic and much of the action seems entirely unconnected with the basic premise.

But then there is the look of the movie. From the sets, to the camera work, to the costumes, the film had a very distinct look. It put you in a time and place, which is cool, because it is a time and place that never existed. That movie was very much about the look. The grimy, multi cultural, used up, low tech, environment trashed look of the thing said more about this world. While the plot unfolds it is the constant rain, the bombardment of commercial messages, the babel of many languages, the "worn out" high tech that informs us about this world as much as any dialogue.

Then you have Avatar. Another world, one entirely dependent upon effects.

The planet of Pandora is, of course, artificial. In more ways than one. Movies have always created pretend worlds but this was one of the first where not only every aspect of the planet existed in a computer, so did some of its most important characters.

I love this movie and I love its story. It is filled with emotion, with a sense of wonder, with a sense of outrage and in the character of Jake Sully, it is a story of redemption, one of my favorite themes. But it is also gorgeous to look at. But it is not just eye candy. James Cameron needed all the detail so that we were sucked into his world, that we totally bought Pandora and, more importantly, that we soon forgot that the Na'vi are computer generated fantasies and not flesh and blood creatures and allows us to fully experience the emotional core of the story

Which brings me to the movie that inspired all this ponderous pondering: Tron Legacy.

Tron, I think, is very much like Blade Runner in that the stunning visuals are integral to the telling of the story. Much of Tron takes place inside a computer, a place as artifical as the planet Pandora but a place that we have to "buy", that we must believe in, in order to care about the characters and the story. Both of which, by the way, are worth taking note.

We saw Tron in 3D and it was as good as Avatar, an immersive experience that totally makes sense to the setting. Some of the movie takes place in the real world and those scenes are in 2D. Inside the Grid, the computer, the scenes are in 3D. The film has a definite colour pallette, with lots of blacks and muted colours with sudden and dramatic splashes of bright yellow and neon blue. It all makes sense to the story, its all there for a purpose.

The look of this movie is important, the colours are like a kind of code that begin to make sense as the story unfolds. The colours and the animation are like a kind of dialogue, as much as the costumes and lighting designs of Blade Runner.

As I side, movies are a visual medium. M Night Shyamalan used the colour of red in The Sixth Sense to indicate when we were in the presence of a ghost. Kansas is black and white, Oz is in colour. In the original Stairway to Heaven, earth was in technicolour, Heaven was black and white. What we see can tell us a story as well

So form over function? You still need a story and characters and chicks with swords .. ok, maybe that last part is just for me. But you see my point. But in some cases, the form serves a function.

And there is never a function that cannot be served by a chick with a sword ...

Ahem.