Anyway, I pretty much wanted to see this movie for all the scenes in the trailer. Lightcycles! Digitally younger Jeff Bridges! Fight scenes! Awesome sets!
All of those things delivered, for the record. This movie is ridiculously cool. As you may have heard by now, Daft Punk did the soundtrack--all the things I hate about them (the '80s vibe and the rather too-persistent-for-seven-straight-minutes beat) was just perfect for this. Basically, it's a giant homage to the early days of video gaming and probably even computing...you should see the laser cannons fire. (pew pew!)
Anyway, the overall design is inspired by that '80s aesthetic, which was heavily fixated on lasers...but, because it's the 21st century, the lines are far more modern and slimmed down, plus there's a nice minimalist touch where the backgrounds are black and set off the bright lines even better. Turns out lasers are still awesome. Who knew?
Aside from the very appealing aesthetic (if The Future doesn't look like this, I'm going to be severely disappointed...or at least the algorithm built around my personality will), the other art-y thing of note is the young Jeff Bridges business.
It looks good. I mean, you can totally tell it's digital when he's with other people and the skin just starts looking a little too smooth, but overall it's awesome. Just one small problem...they didn't bother finding a way to de-age his voice. Despite the importance of sounds--what movie doesn't have a soundtrack? --they kind of forgot to make sure he sounded younger, too. So it looks really weird when he's talking, but not when he's yelling because then the hoarseness works. (Plus, Jeff Bridges, despite being way older than I remember, is kickass. "You're killing my Zen, dude." ...I don't think anyone else could pull off a line like that in the middle of techno-paradise, except Jeff Bridges. (If you haven't seen 'The Men Who Stare At Goats,' he does that for the entire film. It's awesome.)
Okay, so obviously the plot itself/characters didn't deliver that hard (they could easily have dumped in the philosophy of 'what makes a person?' à la 'Neuromancer'; however, there was a rather surprising homily to open-source in there that I would've expected of Napster, not Disney). But, quite frankly, I don't give a shit. This could have been two straight hours of lightcycle battles and references I only half-get and I would've been glued to the screen anyway. It is pretty.
Fuck Pandora, I want to live in the grid.
(I didn't see this in 3D. You don't need to, but I bet it's totally sweet. See it on a big screen, either way.)
P.S. 'Cowboys and Aliens'...what the hell. I keep wondering if it might accidentally be decent, just because it has some great people on board. Still, what the hell.
Also, the Green Lantern trailer proves that CG is an all-or-nothing deal, it doesn't mix well with reality if everything else is real. (At least I'm very sure his mask is digital, maybe I'm secretly wrong.)
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