That's why the soundtrack is generating so much buzz, being all typical and stuff.
I thought the soundtrack was exceptional in that it fit the scene's energy really well at any given point in the film. Daft punk were able to blend symphonic music with techno without falling into the traps either genre tends to set up. We weren't driven insane by the same trance track played 30 times during the film, and we also weren't bored to tears by cut-n-paste symphonic music that seems generic or tacked on in places.
Agree or disagree, the fact remains that the score is being highly praised in many circles, and is already an early favorite for the best original score Oscar.
My girlfriend and I listen to the soundtrack while driving, and we have enjoyed it immensely. Daft Punk have successfully written a pretty lengthy classical music score with just enough electronic instrumentation in it to fit perfectly in this story about a virtual world. I consider it the biggest achievement of the film - but I guess that isn't saying much.
That said...the more I ruminate on the film, the more I think they dropped the ball here. They actually DID have some deeper stuff in the film, probably from the start, but it got trimmed along the way, eventually falling by the wayside as more and more action sequences and expository dialogue were cut in. The viewer sort of gets the idea that the film is all about Quorra and these special beings she represents (ISOs), but I think originally, it was all about Clu.
If one views Clu as the physical representation of a cultural phenomenon (namely the utopian ideals of the late 1960s and 70s), the potential for a dark, cultural cautionary tale emerges.
As a quick aside: I am often stunned when I chat with my parents, as they rail against the counter-culture of the 1960s with an almost rabid ferocity. They were both, of course, flower power hippies in the 1960s, and my childhood in the 70s was...colorful, to say the least. What would turn both these smiling flower children into hard core conservatives (especially since they live 3000 miles apart and never talk to one another)?
The best I can get out of my Dad is that he insists he dropped the philosophy once he was able to follow the train of thought out to its logical conclusion, which I think is exactly what the virtual world in Tron represents - Flynn's political activist ideals allowed to come to fruition in a closed systemic environment. At one point in his life, Flynn was able to isolate and inject much of what was represented by his ideology into a virtual environment, an environment that allowed his ideas to evolve, unimpeded, to their logical conclusion, which was totalitarian control of an entire society. Clu, a synthetic, remorseless automaton, simply followed what he saw as the best path to a perfect world - total domination.
Shade of Orwell, shades of Kubrick, all wrapped up in an Apple Imac shell (hey, the world was clearly designed by Apple, what with all the clear plastic
). Unfortunately, as with many other films today, this thing got pushed through so many post production processes that the wrapper became more important than the candy inside.
Bummer - this could have been an excellent dark sci-fi film, if the filmmakers had any balls.
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As a parent of kids under 10, I'm glad they kept it PG instead of going for the obvious "more mature" PG-13 that all the sci-fi and super hero movies seem to shoot for these days.
