Yes and no. There’s the whole Terrorism thing and the Zombie craze, but I don’t necessarily think of the two as sympathetic.

Xenophobia? I’ll have to re-watch it.

The idea of protesting zombie Tea Partiers is, however, delicious.

Zombie Tea Partiers, their parasols and ornamental yip-dogs are something I would pay to see.

It totally taps into current culture’s fear of the foreign. Plus, imagine how much better the effects would be circa 2011 vs. 1988.

Disney has created a sequel to its 1982 film about cyberspace, when the most popular understanding of computers existed at the video arcade and there were no such things as a personal computers.

One would have thought that the producers of Tron: Legacy, if not Disney suits like majority shareholder, Steve Jobs, would see a late sequel to the pre-internet Tron as an opportunity to sell computers and steal Matrix-fire from Joel Silver, the Wachowski Bros. and Warner Bros’: Disney had the opportunity to do a MAJOR franchise reboot here, something which could have done ‘Pirates of the Carribbean’, numbers and become a new franchise, but they punted.

I didn’t see it in 3D, but seen anamorphically, ‘Tron:Legacy’ looks and feels like a Tron sequel, if it had been made back in 1983. The visuals and storytelling in ‘Tron:Legacy’ iare about as kludgy as George Lucas’ first feature, THX 1138 (1971).

For the $170M that Disney spent on this movie, it should have been plenty more interesting.

(‘Tron:Legacy’ opened on Dec 17th 2010, and almost a month later, it still hasn’t broken even.)

Enough of noble efforts and computer games — this one’s a fail.

49% Fail @ Rottentomatoes.com.

What the progression of military units both Logan and Victor are a part of between their father’s death and their parting in Vietnam is that apparently they are very good at being those soldiers on the front lines without revealing the secret of their mutant heritage, and that they are really quite old. To have delved on anything more during this would have been a mistake of trying to show too much in the wrong part of the movie. I’m sure Marvel would love to step up to the task of populating 8 more Wolverine titles to more fully expand and retro-fit his history with dubious profit making filler but I for one am grateful that Gavin Hood chose not to add unwritten chapters to the life of Marvel’s favorite mutant.

The struggle between Logan’s animal side and his humanity is missing. It isn’t enough that Victor eventually embraces his most predatory instincts, and is the stand-in for what Wolverine could become. Maybe they’re waiting for the inevitable second and third installments. Somewhere in the grand overview of the whole Wolverine prequel project, he needs to slip into a dangerous and debilitating anger-management problem. Berserker rage.

To say the problem with one prequel (Wolverine) is that, like another prequel (SWE3), it is a prequel and we know where it is going seems like an easy way to make complaining noises. No one likes to bitch more than me, and certainly I know the only way you ever get good at bitching is with constant practice, but once you’ve amassed the proper experience with bitching, you recognize complaining for complaining’s sake, and that is a rookie mistake.

If you come to the Wolverine movie hoping to find some levity then you likely smiled when you saw the preview of the Blob and Logan in the boxing ring where Blob belly-flops Wolverine through the ring-ropes, complete with some ridiculous sound effect of the Blob’s reverberating belly. That sound effect, thankfully is somewhere on the cutting room floor. The humor here should be much more sophisticated like the sink scene, or when Logan called the Blob ‘Bub’ and the Blob thought he heard ‘Blob’. Very slick that the Blob gets his name from not understanding a classic bit of Wolverine dialog, and that the Blob is the only person to refer to himself by that derogatory name. Too inside a trick for anyone but comic book fans to understand. Still, Hood reached too far when at the end of the boxing/sparring match his club-fisted handling of Logan bullying the Blob had Logan popping his claws through the big red boxing glove. You know Gavin was trying to be cute, which would have been appropriate if the movie were a Hello Kitty movie or something, but really I would’ve hoped he handle the character that is the Crown Jewel of all comic book characters with a little more consideration and quite frankly seriousness that Wolverine deserved. Oh well.

The character of Storm would be a good choice for a next Origins movie, but even though I have not whined as loudly as some in the manifest wrongness in the casting of Halle Berry as Ororo, she should not be allowed to pretend that that her performance was deserving of a whole movie being dedicated to it. I recall, it was either her appearance on Letterman or the Tonight show before the first X-Men movie opened where she whined this is what talented Black actresses are reduced to in Hollywood, having to play in… comic book movies. No. With any luck there will never be a Halle Berry ‘X-Men Origins: Storm’ movie.

That said, recent episodes have looked more intriguing so perhaps I’ll take another look.

Children and young adults should be reading to enrich the mind not being dulled into a stupor from the entertainment industry. Sure, some entertainment is good…a break from the routine, but this was just awful. Will we ever learn?

And though the substance is scary in its believable bigotry, and blatant mass media manipulations, I can’t deny that I am really diggin’ the style. I LOVE the clothes, furnishings etc… So sue me….*

a.

p.s. For Musical self-mockery on the very same topic, time and place, watch “How to Suceed in Business Without Really Trying”.
and
Also from the very same period, different Musical. Can you I.D. “Sue Me”?

The fact that you conflate knowledge of the comics with the movie is meaningless. The fact that you’re anticipating sequels rather than judging this film on its own merits as a stand-alone work is irrelevant.

You win. My review is shit. Thanks for your opinion.