It's two-act because you're making it that way by ignoring story points to make the film sound simpler than it is, just as I did with The Terminator.
Nah, in terms of two-hour mainstream sci-fi action movies, the plot of
Tron: Legacy really
is that simple. The movie is about the same length as, say,
The 6th Day, but in plot terms,
The 6th Day is a
lot more eventful and complex.
That doesn't mean
The 6th Day is necessarily better overall. But it's definitely more eventful and complex.
Besides all that, I personally don't buy into the implication that a film having two acts is some kind of damning criticism.
It's not, but it
is a useful observation in that it invites a frank discussion about how thin
T:L's story is. No one, not even an ardent admirer of the movie, could credibly argue that the movie has anything like a complex and eventful story in sci-fi action movie terms.
Besides all that, I personally don't buy into the implication that a film having two acts is some kind of damning criticism. Even if Tron Legacy was undeniably a two-act film, that means nothing in terms of the story, it's characters, or it's plotting. Is a five-act play somehow superior to a two-act play regardless of all other factors?
If the term "story act" has any meaning whatsoever, then that meaning must be "significant story development." So, yeah, a two-act story should be understood as having fewer developments as a five-act story. If you're not willing to recognize that basic math, there's no use in you using the term "act" at all.
If we're not willing to abide by a fundamental spirit of fairness, there's no point in having movie criticism discussions at all, because all we could say would be
"Me like thing" or "
Me not like thing."
Yeah. "Kyle and Sarah meet up, clash, and gradually learn to trust each other" would be the first act, and "Kyle and Sarah escape from the Terminator multiple times before finally destroying it" would be the second act.
No. Just for giggles, I checked: Sarah and John meet at minute 37 of a 103-minute movie (not counting end credits) - in other words, when the movie is 35%, or pretty much exactly one-third, over. Ergo, it's not remotely honest, in storytelling discussion terms, to say that Kyle and Sarah meet in the first act of
T1. In the context of two-hour sci-fi action movie storytelling, their meeting is about as classic an endpoint to Act One as they come.
The
only reason to say that John and Sarah meet in
T1's first act is to make a dishonest argument, in the sense that one is actively flouting basic fairness.
Edit: For the record, I'm not arguing that Legacy is some masterwork. Or that it doesn't have deficiencies. Only that "it's a story told in two acts" only says one thing about it. It's not an insightful criticism on any level.
Obviously, no one-sentence observation can be "insightful" in the sense of "it's argued at length," because "at length" inherently means "across multiple paragraphs." Therefore, calling the observation "not insightful on any level" is not a productive argument on any level. The meaningful question, rather, is whether said one-sentence observation is
useful - and, again, I argue that it
is, for the reason stated above.
