Surprise! Surprise! I bought the TRON: Legacy DVD the day it came out and the next day, I came home from work to find the rest of the family sitting on the floor in the loft watching it. It was heart-warming. :)
It's no secret that I'm a fan of the whole TRON thing. I remember back to the early 1980's when the movie came out. Computers were still pretty new and so to think that a person could be sucked into one and experience a world based on simple electrical charges was pretty fantastic. Additionally, the original video game was one of the best video games at the time. I remember going to a few arcades and playing it and just being utterly fascinated with it. If they would have installed the arcade game at my local 7-Eleven when I was younger, I probably would have spent all my lawn mowing money on it instead of Double Dragon. (By the way, I rocked it when it game to Double Dragon. I probably dropped hundreds of quarters in that arcade game. That was fun too!)
Anyway, almost 30 years later, the follow-up of the original movie came out and for me, it was mostly impressive. I'll concede that the story line wasn't very strong. But pretty much everything else was SO AWESOME! I saw the movie four times in the theater, twice in 3D, and spent $70.25 on movie tickets. In my opinion, 3D is definitely the way to go on this one. In fact, I'd go so far as to say 3D was made for this movie. The scenes of the disc wars were tremendous! The light cycle races on the grid were astonishing. It was fascinating to see how the light trails were almost fluid when they came out of the light cycles and then they hardened up. When one light cycle crashed into another, the portion of the light trail closest to the crashing light cycle splattered and I thought it was a very cool effect. The subtle glow of the electronic world against the dark background was mesmerizing.
I've done other things to support the movie too. The night the movie opened I went to the 11:59 PM showing with some friends. Before the show started, there was a game console set up beside a huge flat panel TV where patrons could play a light cycle tournament for prizes. I beat Kirk at the light cycle video game and won a prized identity disc necklace. I proudly wore my geek bling to dinner the next night when we went out again with some friends and probably embarrassed myself (and Bethany) but it was my way of living a little. :) A couple of hours before going to see the first showing of the movie, I made my own little iPhone countdown app. The look and feel was centered around the TRON movie and I had set the countdown date and time to the minute the movie was to start.
In addition to the tickets, I have the physical CD of the movie's soundtrack scored by Daft Punk. Then, when the DVD was released, I bought it as well as the R3C0NF1GUR3D version of the movie soundtrack on CD too. And, I even got the three extra songs for the soundtrack, two of which could only be bought from the iTunes store and the other from Amazon's music store. If you are willing to try a bit of techno music, I'd recommend the TRON: Legacy movie soundtrack. It's pretty dramatic stuff as far as a techno movie score could go. And if you're really into techno music, give the R3C0NF1GUR3D soundtrack a try. It was pretty funky stuff when I first heard it but it's grown on me a little.
While I don't usually get this fanatical about movies, this one was different. Go figure.
If you're interested to know, TRON 3 is in the works. They are writing the script for it. Hopefully, it will be much better than this last movie's plot, although, if not, at least there will be the killer special effects to look forward to.