Tales from nowhere very interesting

Yeah, I’m still here. Somewhat. And look! Half-formed thoughts on movies I have been watching in between sleeping and Alias! Yay!

Tron: Legacy
Having not seen the Original Tron, and mostly going in out of Chuck-loyal curiosity and because I had to, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Tron: Legacy – but I ended up being pleasantly surprised.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not good. The writing is all over the place, with just the kind of dialogue that you’d expect from writers who come from One Tree Hill – no, really; they do – and plot points that get picked up and dropped seemingly at random. Tron himself, for example, shows up a couple of times, causing other characters to exclaim ‘Tron!’ in either glee or anger, and then disappears again. Especially given the name of the movie, it’s a plotline you assume will go somewhere, but it doesn’t. And it’s not the only one. I don’t know if the script was just too long and someone who didn’t really understand what was going on came in and cut stuff out, but that’s almost how it feels.

The acting is also just barely ok. Jeff Bridges the elder is awesome, as always, but the CGIed younger Bridges is … well, CGI. It’s a decent enough job, and it actually took me a couple of scenes to realise that it wasn’t just that Bridges suddenly couldn’t act to save his life. But still: wooden and stiff, which is unfortunate. Garrett Hedlund is unfortunately also pretty wooden, without having CGI to blame, and he just lacks the charisma to hold his own as a lead. Olivia Wilde won me over by the end, but it took a really long time and I couldn’t help but spend the first part of the movie thinking she was horribly miscast. And I usually like her a lot.

Yes, even on The OC.

But … it’s still a lot of fun. And I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy myself. Sure, it was silly and clunky and a teeny bit too long, but it was also stylistically awesome, with great music and visual effects, and lots of cool toys that I now want. The game scenes were lots of fun, and the whole thing was just too cheesy and over-the-top not to love, just a little bit.

Unstoppable
Another one that I think was more than the sum of its parts, albeit in a different way.

There’s a really old-school feel about Unstoppable, and not just because it’s about Ye Olde Trains. Almost everything about it is trope-tastic, from the pairing of the young, unproven apprentice with the old, bitter but loveable elder in a tense working situation, through the train full of schoolkids hurtling towards danger, to the evil and inept big-business middle manager, and even the shots of everyone’s loved ones watching the action play out on TV.

But I was also impressed by the trope that it avoided, because I honestly can’t remember the last impending mid-level disaster movie I’ve seen where the cause of the disaster is not an evil, icy, terroristy villain, pulling the strings from the other end of a phone. And Unstoppable doesn’t go that way. There’s no bomb. There’s no evil plot. There’s no mastermind. There’s just Randy from My Name Is Earl being the same screw-up he always is.

It’s a welcome change, while making for a really simple, straightforward movie: There’s a runaway train, and two guys go chasing after it, trying to stop it before it kills a whole bunch of people and destroys a bunch of stuff.

And it works. Tony Scott ratchets the tension up nicely throughout the ninety minutes, and the ‘human stories’ give the story enough emotional stakes to make that tension mean something. At ninety minutes, it also sticks to what I call the Passenger 57 rule: if you don’t have a lot of story to tell, it’s better to make a short, snappy movie than to pretend you do and bore people for two hours.

The cast is rather testosterone-heavy, with only Rosario Dawson doing enough to get any sort of main credit. Thankfully though, her character avoided becoming any sort of damsel in distress and/or romantic throwaway – but was instead competent and intelligent, if inhibited in what she could actually do.

Of course, it’s not perfect, mostly I think where Scott goes for dramatics. The writer’s complete misunderstanding of the term ‘evacuate’ started to grate by the end, as the crowds of onlookers lining the tracks in supposedly ‘evacuated’ areas just made my inner safety freak want to cry. And it is all totally predictable, so if you’re looking for something that will keep you guessing, you might want to look elsewhere.

All in all, though, an entertaining way to spend an hour and a half.

Salt
Oh, ye gads! The silliness! I’d heard it was better than expected, but oh! It was just so silly and so over-the-top and did I mention the silliness?

Now, usually I’m down for a bit of the silliness – see above, if you haven’t already – but in this case it was just … too much. I think I was hoping for something more of a physchological thriller, whereas this was just a weird Cold-War throwback with evil Russians and good Americans and lots of hand-wavey piffle.

There’s a scene really early on, where Angelina Jolie walking into her L-shaped kitchen and reaches along a length of bench to get herself a cup of coffee. It requires her practically lying across it awkwardly, and both the husband and I snorted, because has she taken one step to her left, she could have taken one forward and then reached for her coffee like a normal person. That scene pretty much sums up the movie: it’s all much, much more complicated than it needs to be.

Now, this is going to get spoiley, so if you care, don’t read the next bit, but when Salt killed the President so early in the movie, it was quite clear that something was up. This was her movie, so she couldn’t be all evil, because, for the whole thing to work, we had to be rooting for her, at least a little bit. So … yeah, maybe the assassination was staged but it was hard to look over the dozen or so guards and agents that she’d killed along the way, which obviously weren’t. And come to think of it – why did Orlov blow her cover in the first place? Was he just trying to make it so much harder for her to carry out her mission? Had he not, she could have walked right in the front door and killed the Prez without any fuss or muss or collateral damage. It was just unbelievably stupid.

Now, I watch plenty of crap, and in theory, I wouldn’t object to watching Angelina Jolie run around being a badass in crappy wigs for two hours. But if that’s all you want your movie to be, go light and simple on plotting, and avoid this overwrought mess of crosses and double-crosses which stop making sense twenty minutes into the movie.

Even the action scenes were a let down. I hate to say it, but Angelina Jolie is barely a shadow of her former kick-ass self, and she just seemed too frail – both in appearance and in movement – to be doing half of what she was.

And I’m not even going to mention the utter ridiculousness of the ending …