Off to Seoul, capital of South Korea. Back in 2019 I visited Hong Kong. I flew non-stop from London Heathrow in a British Airways Airbus A380. The A380 is a sweet airliner. It's a
four-engined, double-decker behemoth. 100% pure sugar in a world of diet
drinks. Too good for this world.
The A380 entered service in 2007. Great things were expected of it, but Airbus
only managed to sell a couple of hundred before production ended in 2021.
Which is a shame. To this day it has an excellent service record, with no
crashes or fatalities. In 2007, the year it was launched,
no-one died. In 2008, one year later, no-one died. In 2009, two years after it entered
service, no-one died. In 2010 there was an incident with an uncontrolled
engine failure. In 2011, no-one died. In 2012, no-one died. In 2013, no-one
died. In 2014, no-one died. I mean, I could go on.
In 2015, no-one died. So why did Airbus stop making it? The A380 had a
protracted development. When it was devised, in the late 1980s, the market for
high-capacity airliners was booming, and in those days high-capacity airliners
invariably had three or four engines, because twinjets didn't have the power.
During the 1990s Airbus became fixated on the idea of a huge, four-engined
people-carrier.
The one-two punch of the Asian financial crisis of
1997 followed by the September 11 attacks of 2001 put a huge dent in the global
aviation market, and the success of Boeing's large, twin-engined 777 demonstrated that twin-engined airliners were the future, but Airbus carried on. The Boeing 747 was selling steadily, and
Airbus gambled that there was room in the market for an even bigger airliner.
Airports around the world spent a huge fortune upgrading their facilities to
cope with the A380's bulk. The A380 is shorter
than the Boeing 747, but wider and fatter. It looks like a big fat sausage, pictured here on the right at Schiphol
Airport, Amsterdam:
Sadly for Airbus the Boeing 747 turned out to be a beautiful one-off. There was not a market for a super-mega jumbo jet after all. A whole bunch of factors doomed the A380. The first was a specific
aircraft, the Boeing 777, which entered service in the mid-1990s and had about
four-fifths the capacity of the A380. By the time the A380 entered service the world's airlines had concluded that the twin-engined Boeing
777 could do the same job, but cheaper, at a much wider range of
airports, so they bought 777s instead. Boeing has sold over 1,700 Boeing 777s vs just 251 A380s, and the 777 remains in production.
Furthermore the A380 was awkward. Some large aircraft can be used on shorter routes, as high-capacity holiday aircraft, but the A380 can only use a limited number of airports. On paper its fuel economy was competitive with twin-jets, but only if the aircraft was packed full of passengers, which was difficult because there are only so many people who want to fly from London to Hong Kong. It was never sold as a cargo aircraft, because the top deck wasn't strong enough for cargo
containers, and selling it as a mixed cargo-passenger airliner was impossible
for safety reasons. This was unfortunate because two-thirds of the contemporary Boeing 747-8 were sold as freighters. The very last Boeing 747 was a freighter, and ultimately the 747 outlasted the A380 by two years, ending production in 2023.
Over a hundred A380s remain in service, mostly in Europe and the Middle East,
but they're slowly fading away. I will miss you, A380. Born from an age of plenty into an age of woe.
A decade before the A380 entered service Airbus sold another four-engined airliner, the A340, pictured above. Compared to the A380 the A340 was relatively dainty. It was more or less an A330 twinjet with a modified wing that had two extra engines. The shared development kept costs down, but the A340 still lost a lot of money.
It was developed in the late 1980s, when airlines were still wary of using
twin-jets on long-haul flights, but by the time it entered service in the
early 1990s twinjets had demonstrated that they were just as safe as
quad-jets, so the A340 ended up without a convincing role. As with the A380 it
ended up playing second fiddle to the Boeing 777, which could carry a greater
load of passengers almost as far.
The A340 flew a handful of record-breaking ultra-long-range routes. Singapore
Air had an eighteen-hour flight from Singapore to Los Angeles, while Thai
Airways had another eighteen-hour flight from Bangkok to New York. In a few
niche cases it made sense, but airlines generally preferred the A330 and
the 777, so the A340 ended production in 2012. It wasn't an obvious choice as
a cargo conversion, but there are a lot of cheap A340s on the used market, so the USC Aero cargo conversion pictured above
presumably makes economic sense. Perhaps they bought the airframe cheap and
plan to thrash it until it breaks.
Sport
But enough of this gay banter. What about Seoul? Why Seoul? When I close my
eyes I am twelve years old, and the 1988 Summer Olympic Games are on
television. They are taking place in a city called Seoul, which is on the far side of the world. Will Daley Thompson repeat his gold-medal-winning decathlon
performances from 1980 and 1984?
No, he will not, but for a brief moment it
looked as though he might. Thompson narrowly missed out on bronze,
coming fourth behind a bunch of people whose names I don't remember. Sadly the 1988 Summer Olympics were overshadowed by the
men's 100m sprint, which went on to inspire Richard Moore's 2013 book The Dirtiest Race in History, which is a great read. I felt sorry for Calvin Smith. He was one of only two
participants in the 100m final who never tested positive for drug abuse during
his career.
Smith came fourth, but he was eventually upgraded to third after Ben Johnson's
record-breaking, steroid-fuelled victory was struck out. Eventual winner Carl
Lewis and second-place Linford Christie also tested positive for banned
substances during the games, but they were let off with slaps on the wrist. A
decade later, in 1999, Christie was suspended from competition for two years
following a positive steroid test. Lewis never formally failed a drug test, but there has
always been a suspicion that his high profile caused the officials to turn a
blind eye.
Meanwhile Florence Griffith Joyner won three golds and a silver in 1988,
setting several world records in the process, but her performance was also
overshadowed by accusations of drug use. When she died at an early age of
natural causes
the media automatically assumed that it was a result of drug-taking, although in reality she suffocated during an epileptic seizure.
The doping scandal didn't totally overshadow the 1988
Olympics. I have the impression that the games are generally remembered as a
success, it's just that the Olympics immediately before and after were more
dramatic. The 1980 and 1984 games are famous for their boycotts, the latter of
which allowed the United States to dominate the medal table on their home turf
in Los Angeles. The 1988 games were the last to have the Soviet Union as participants, and they won more medals than anyone else, but within a few years the Soviet Union ceased to exist. I have no idea if modern-day Russians are nostalgic for 1988. Meanwhile the 1992 Olympics had Freddy
Mercury and Montserrat Caballé, and the Olympic basketball "dream team", and Barcelona. Everybody likes Barcelona.
Unlike 2004 or 1976 the 1988 games were not a financial disaster that left
behind a mass of rotting infrastructure. The Seoul Olympic Park
still exists and is still occasionally used for sporting events and concerts.
About the only part of the venue that has fallen into disrepair is the
shooting arena, where Britain's Malcolm Cooper - co-founder of Accuracy
International, famous from innumerable video games - won gold in the 50m
shooting event. In the end Britain won a respectable five gold medals in 1988.
We won five golds in 1992 as well, but in 1996 our only gold medal was in
the coxless pairs. Steve Redgrave and Martin Pinsent did a lot of heavy lifting for Britain that year. Fortunately we improved. South Korea itself won
twelve golds in 1988. North Korea didn't participate because they wanted to
co-host, but the IOC said "no", so they boycotted the games.
The 1988 games were intended to put South Korea on the map internationally. I
have no idea how successful they were in that respect, or whether the people of South Korea enjoyed them, but at the very least,
as a twelve-year-old boy on the far side of the world, I suddenly knew that
there was a place called Seoul, and that South Korea existed. It was far away,
and one day I might go there.
The Illusion of Life
Many, many years later South Korea became a cultural powerhouse in the west,
and as I write these words Korean pop music and television are internationally
successful. But that's a relatively recent development. I have the impression that until the 1990s the West didn't have a mental vision of the South Korea. It was too focused on Japan. Even the Korean War was forgotten. The Simpsons occasionally implied
that Korea was full of sweatshops, which was ironic given that the show was
largely animated by South Korea's AKOM. The animation planning
meetings must have been awkward.
AKOM also animated two dozen episodes of the
1980s Transformers cartoon,
with mixed results,
and yet in 2013 the studio was nominated for an Academy Award for its work
on The Longest Daycare, a Simpsons spin-off, so I
guess the lesson is that AKOM can do good work, or cheap work, or fast work,
but not all three at once.
South Korea is also famous for its work ethic. Until relatively recently
South Korea had a standard six-day work week. The country is also famous for
its
stiff college entrance exam. Which is particularly difficult because it's in Korean. Have you ever tried
to understand written Korean? It's impossible. It's pictures.
Seriously, it's pictures. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Why didn't the
people who invented Korean make it so that e.g. "cat" was a
picture of a cat? Why not just use literal pictures of the actual thing?
Instead the Korean word for "cat" is 고양이, which doesn't look like a cat at
all, not even if you look sideways. It's like a cubist cat.
I actually swung by AKOM's headquarters. There's nothing there, really, but I wanted to see it. The same building pops up in this documentary from 1999, so they must have been there a while.
I stood outside AKOM's headquarters in south-western Seoul. The temperature
was minus eleven centigrade, which taught me a short, sharp lesson in pain, but I remember thinking to myself that I could not, would not give up. Better to die a hero than live a coward. Could I do no less? Like some predatory bird I began to sing to myself in the hope it would lift my spirits. "Transformers," I sang. "Robots in
disguise."
"Autobots lead their... battles for, the something of, the Decepticons." During the Second World War the US Army used to test suspected spies by asking them to sing The Star-Spangled Banner. Anyone who knew the second or third verses was immediately hauled in for interrogation, because no-one in the United States knows the lyrics. And so it is with the theme tune to the 1980s Transformers cartoon. I was there.
You know, it was years before I realised that they actually sing
"the Transformers". That's how the theme tune goes. It goes "the Transformers, robots in disguise". I've often wondered if it was a trademark
thing. Were the singers contractually bound to sing
"the Transformers"? It sounds awkward. We may never know.
I could have knocked on the door and asked the people of AKOM, but they didn't write the music. Does the Transformers franchise have a home? It's a range of Japanese toys, made in Japan, but the thing that gave them life - the Transformers universe, the storyline - was invented by Hasbro of the United States. And as a British child growing up in the 1980s my main exposure to the franchise came from the Marvel UK comic, which was mostly written in the UK by a chap called Simon Furman. And so the Transformers franchise is an idea, not bound to a place. Enough of this paragraph. It is over. Finished.
Do I know anything else about South Korea? The country is famous for its family-run mega-corporations,
or chaeboi, which come across as a peculiar mixture of 1980s-style
Japanese conglomerates and old-fashioned Imperial-era British family firms. As
a hipster retreat South Korea is less attractive than Lithuania or Thailand on
account of its great distance from Shoreditch and the lack of any famous
beaches, and it's not that cheap. Korea is also mentioned in "Everything
Counts", a classic song by Depeche Mode from 1983. In the very first verse
it's the venue for a joyless business deal. I suspect that Martin Gore
just wanted a country that rhymed with insincere, and in 1983
Kampuchea didn't exist any more.
Those are all of my childhood memories of South Korea. Kids today associate the country with
K-Pop, but I have different, older dreams. They say their prayers, and I say
mine. I was curious to see what Seoul was like, particularly
Cheonggyecheon, which used to be a dual carriageway but is now a river. I'd
like to say that the trip was borne of a lifelong obsession, but the reality
is that while browsing KLM's website I found some staggeringly cheap tickets for January 2026 and decided on a whim to visit. As mentioned up the page it
was bone-chillingly cold, but Seoul was worth it, Seoul. You're worth it.
Mission to Destiny - Heathrow to Seoul
The flight was unusually complex. It took off from Heathrow, with a
change at Amsterdam en route to Incheon Airport. On the way back the change was in Paris. As a consequence
I flew on four different airliners, none of which I have flown on before. Two of them were the very newest Western airliners, the Boeing 787 and the
Airbus A350. They're arch-rivals that fill a similar role. Which did I prefer, and why was it the A350? Read on, dear reader, read
on.
The route began and ended at London Heathrow. The total travel time to Seoul
was around fifteen hours, including an hour to Amsterdam, twelve hours to Incheon, an
hour for the high-speed train to Seoul itself, plus another hour getting to my
hotel. I had to remind myself that James Bond does this kind of thing
regularly, and he's expected to fight people when he arrives. On the way back
the flight from Incheon to
Paris was fourteen hours.
In theory the trip was environmentally ruinous. In practice however the exhaust gasses of the airliners were exhausted harmlessly into the
atmosphere, and by pumping oil and gas out of the ground we are vastly
improving the subterranean environment. For the
handful of people in sparsely-populated Khazakstan and Mongolia who were inconvenienced by a
little harmless aeroplane gas there are millions of moles, voles, rats, mice,
and insects who can now tunnel beneath Saudi Arabia without drowning in oil.
Imagine all those little baby moles drowning in oil. Is that your vision of the future?
Moving swiftly on, my trip began at 10:47 GMT. I took a train, then a coach,
to Heathrow. The first leg of the flight took off at 15:45, in an
Embraer 195, a two-by-two regional jet. It was like a miniature Airbus
A320:
I've never flown on a regional jet before. The E-195 isn't all that common in the UK, but it's popular with European airlines, especially those based in the middle of Europe. It's essentially two-thirds the size of an Airbus 320 or Boeing 737, with four rows of seats in a two-by-two arrangement and a passenger load of around 100, versus 180 for one of the full-sized small airliners. In the United States regional jets are commonly used to ferry people from the middle of nowhere to a large international airport so they can travel abroad, but they also work as general-purpose short-range airliners.
I wasn't sure what to expect, but in the end the E-195 was essentially
transparent. The thin-but-supportive seats reminded me of EasyJet's Airbus
A320 cabin. The legroom, the overhead bins, the overall flight experience were
all just like an A320. The in-flight meal was a bottle of water and some Mini
Cheddars, which was paltry but I wasn't expecting anything at all, so plus one
to KLM. It felt odd to wash down Mini Cheddars with water.
I arrived at Schiphol during a nasty winter storm, and in a heartwarming touch
the airport had arranged some sleeping cots at one of the unused terminals.
Schiphol was pleasant. It's one of those airports that's essentially a big
long corridor, but there were plenty of seats, plenty of power sockets, lots
of signage, and the overall ambience was attractive. The internet suggests
that it suffers from lengthy queues, and perhaps it does of a weekend, but I
was going on a long-range flight on a weekday evening so the terminals were relaxed.
I took time to study my fellow passengers, who were almost entirely Korean. Perhaps they were going home after visiting Amsterdam's Christmas markets. My flight left for Seoul at 20:55, after a three-hour gap to account for the transfer to a different aircraft. I've never had a transfer flight before. I was worried about it. Was three hours enough? What if there was a delay?
My hunch is that people in the United States are familiar with flying to one
airport so that they can fly to another airport, but that's not common in
Britain and Europe. Journey distances are shorter over here, and we are
blessed with public transport, so it's easier to take the train to the nearest
international airport than fly.
In any case three hours was overkill. The
transfer experience at Schiphol took all of ten minutes. I walked off the
E-195, followed the yellow signs, and found myself at gate E7 for Seoul, where
my chariot awaited. I didn't have to go through security again.
The flight from Amsterdam to Seoul was twelve hours in a Boeing 787-9.
The 787 is Boeing's newest airliner. It's a long-range, moderately capacious
twinjet that slots into Boeing's range below the giant-sized Boeing 777 twinjet.
It's roughly the same size as the older Boeing 767, but it uses modern
materials and has quieter, more efficient engines and a longer range. One of the first things
that stood out when I boarded is that the 787 doesn't have window blinds.
Instead the window glass itself has a built-in dimmable LCD panel. I remember
wondering if the panel could be used to show adverts.
The windows reminded me of those episodes of Mission: Impossible where the team used blindfolds, sound effects, and a wobbly chair to
convince their target that he was being transported across the border, when in
fact he was in a warehouse all along. Which raises the question of whether my
trip to Seoul actually happened, or whether it was an elaborate prank. But
why?
The 787's fuselage is unusually tall. The luggage bins were quite a
stretch. The economy section was packed, but the slightly-better-economy
section just ahead had a bunch of free seats. We were allowed to spread out,
but only after paying a fee, and it wasn't obvious how we would go about
paying. Perhaps I misunderstood.
Settling in to a long-duration flight is a bit like joining a new family. For
a few hours I breathed the same air as several hundred new friends. We ate the
same food, watched the same films, slept the same sleep. We shared the same inertial frame of reference. For us, travelling through the air at at 500 knots, time passed slightly slower than it did for people on the ground.
It struck me that if we crashed at high speed into Mongolia the airframe
would merge with our bodies, and we would become a fusion of flesh and metal.
We would be as one. We would be as one! That's a Star Trek: Voyager reference, by the way. They should put Jeri Ryan in more things. She's
good. Imagine snuggling up to Jeri Ryan for twelve hours. I don't mean
kissing. Just platonically. Sadly not even KLM's business class has that
option.
The safety video had a pottery theme. The big hit of the film selection was F1: The Movie. I didn't watch it myself, but I saw it out of the corner of my eye on several other screens, and I'm now familiar with the plot. I think the 787 had internet access, although it was a paid-for extra. I didn't delve too deeply into it. From what I remember the entertainment system had a standard 3.5mm headphone jack but no Bluetooth, but headphones were provided.
The meal was a choice between pasta and chicken. I chose the pasta:
It was okay, but on the whole the food wasn't very good. Perhaps because it was an overnight flight there were no mid-flight snacks. The stewards sat us down, fed us, and then turned off the lights for ten hours. I didn't warm to the 787. It felt cramped. A bit of Googling suggests that the seat was about 17.2 inches wide, versus 18 inches for the Airbus A350 on the return flight, and 17.9 inches for the Airbus A380.
The difference was less than an inch, but I felt it. On the way back I had no
problem juggling my iPad, my headphones, my mobile phone, the charging cables,
the pillow etc, but with the 787 I ran out of space and had to dump things
into the overhead locker.
Pre-COVID I came very close to visiting Mongolia. My plan was to fly
to Ulaanbaatar with my Brompton bicycle, then take the train to Darkhan in the
north of the country, then cycle back to Ulaanbaatar. It would have been a little bit
dangerous, but not very dangerous, and I might have learned something. I might
have learned how to say "drink" in Mongolian. But COVID happened, and I had
lingering doubts that Mongolia was a bridge too far. There is time.
Now, the 787 wasn't awful, but the A350 had the edge. Sleeping on an airliner
with a bunch of Korean children returning from their holidays in Europe was
not easy, but when in Rome, Rodney, when in Rome. Seoul music, that was it.
What was Daley Thompson's favourite type of music. Seoul music. Bill Withers
was the punchline to a completely different joke about ducks.
Before landing we had a breakfast snack, which was awful. It was a heated bap
with some kind of hot cheese slice. It had the mouth-feel of chicken, but it
was apparently cheese. I ate half of it and gave up. It was just tasteless
food mass and I didn't like it at all. KLM's website mentions a mid-journey
snack on flights lasting more than ten hours, but for whatever reason -
perhaps because it was an overnight flight - we didn't get that.
It was greasy and horrible. Still, after arriving at Korea I went to Korea. Do I have any tips? If you want to
convert WON into GBP, halve the value and chop off the thousands. Thus 30,000
WON is 15,000 minus the 000 equals £15. The non-stop AREX airport express train
isn't much quicker than the regular stopping train, and depending on when you
arrive, the forty-minute wait for the train might outweigh
the ten-minute-shorter travel time. On the other hand the attendant was polite,
bowing to the cabin as she entered, and crucially she sold T-Money cards.
The T-Money card is a bit like Hong Kong's Octopus card. It's less flexible -
the Octopus is widely accepted as a general money substitute, whereas the
T-Money is mostly a transport card - but it saved me having to mess around
with Korean metro tickets. As with the Octopus you have to withdraw cash from
a cashpoint, then add the cash to the card with a special machine. You can't
simply add funds from your bank balance. That might be a foreigner thing, I
don't know. The machines all had an English option, and so I put 30,000 Korean
Won onto the card, which lasted me a week. A single fare is around 1,500 won,
which is less than £1.
T-Money cards don't run out, and they're cute. They can be refunded, again
with a special machine, but I'm going to keep mine. What else do I remember of
the AREX? The screens showed a propaganda film about a Korean island that had
been taken over by Japan, then given back to Korea after the Second World War.
"History knows the truth", it said.
This article in The Economist
from 2018 mentions the film, so presumably a lot of people have seen it. I am
an outsider so I won't comment on Korea-Japan relations.
Any other tips?
Seoul's metro map
is ludicrously, hilariously complicated, and makes me feel proud to be
British, if only because the London Underground map is a model of clarity in
comparison. On the other hand you can go a long way with just lines 2, 3, and
4. The metro uses the same system as Berlin, where the lines are
differentiated by terminus, e.g. if you want to travel south on Line 4 you
need the Oido line, because that's the most southern station on Line 4.
The metro has gas masks, ostensibly in case of fire. Now, on the one hand, Seoul
is less than thirty miles away from the border with North Korea, which is within
the range of rockets and some long-range artillery, so my assumption was that they were really there for civil defence, but the authorities didn't want to be morbid. But on the other hand there was a nasty train fire in Daegu, south-eastern Korea, in 2003, that killed 182 people, and in June 2025 a lunatic set fire to a train carriage in Seoul, so perhaps they actually are for train fires.
The Way Back - Seoul to London
After drinking Seoul dry and breaking the hearts of its women and some of its
men I came back. KLM is owned by the same corporate entity that owns Air
France, so the flight back was actually run by Air France, although it was on the same ticket. This caused a bit of bother during the check in process - did I have to check in with KLM, or Air France? - but it seemed to work out in the end.
Did I mention South Korea's entry requirements? There are in theory three. There's a Korean Electronic Travel Authorisation (K-ETA) system, but the UK has a deal with Seoul whereby it's unnecessary until the end of 2026. There's a COVID-era quarantine system, Q-CODE, which is basically a click-the-box formality. And there's an E-Arrivals form, which I filled out electronically. You have to enter your address plus the flight numbers, which required a bit of experimentation. But the stewards also handed me a paper arrivals form on the plane, which I filled out just in case.
There are several options to travel from downtown Seoul to Incheon Airport,
but I took the AREX train again. It sped through a flat, industrial landscape.
Incheon and Seoul have grown so much that they form a continuous mega-city,
slowly enveloping Bucheon, which is located between the two. A walk-on shuttle
coach apparently leaves from outside Myeongdong tube station, which would have
been ideal as it was staying in the area, but I decided to stick with the
devil I knew. It was foggy on the day I flew back, after a week of crisp, sunlight, freezing cold days.
Incheon Airport resembles Schiphol, in the sense that it's a big linear
corridor with the terminals in a long row. It had plenty of seats, plus a
traditional dancing display. South Korea's Big Mac Index is highly favourable,
so even the airport restaurants are relatively cheap. There was no
Wetherspoons, but I had to remind myself that I was in a foreign country. They don't have Wetherspoons yet.
The Seoul-Paris leg was on an Airbus A350. Conceptually it's a lot like the
Boeing 787. A moderately large twinjet with a three-three-three seating
arrangement designed to carry a lot of people over a long distance at a lower
price than the previous generation of airliner. A refinement, rather than a revolution. It entered service in 2015 and has
amassed around three-fifths as many sales as the Boeing 787, although both
aircraft are still engaged in hot competition with each other.
Its visual
trademark is a Mask of Zorro over the cockpit windows, supposedly a way
of equalising the temperature between the cockpit glass and the fuselage, but
probably just for show.
The flight back was from Incheon to Paris Charles De Gaulle, which is frequently voted the worst airport in Europe. The flight was fourteen hours, with a
two-hour transfer window at Paris. This worried me, especially given that the
flight arrived 45 minutes late, but there are worse things than being stuck in
Paris. The flight left at 12:40 local time. The in-flight display included a
pair of cameras, one on the tail and one underneath.
As mentioned up the page Air France's A350 seats are slightly wider than
those of KLM's Boeing 787, and although the difference was very small I felt a
little bit more comfortable. I had a more space to stuff my charging cables,
my headphones, my pillow, my iPad, my reading glasses, plus the little hat I
pull over my eyes. The main meal was more diverse and tastier than KLM's
equivalent. In the following photograph the chicken looks pretty ropey, but
it tasted nice albeit bland, because France hasn't discovered curry yet.
I had grand plans to watch a bunch of films on the two flights, but on the way
out I wasn't in the mood. On the way back I checked out the IFR. Perhaps
because it was French the album and film titles were uncensored, and there
were a bunch of French television programmes, such as Emily In Paris,
which is Emily Du Paris in the original French. It's not my cup of tea, but the English dubbing is superb, almost undetectable. In a nice touch the tray table had a little miniature tray
table inside it that could be used as a mobile phone or tablet holder.
Everybody else watched F1: The Movie again, but I took pity on TRON:Ares and watched that instead. Is it any good? No. It's awkwardly paced, with masses of exposition at the beginning followed by a series of repetitive chases. It introduces plot threads, and then forgets about them. The script is made up entirely of functional dialogue. "They're through the firewall", "you need to go left", "he's gaining on us", "hold on", "trust me", "duck", "perhaps that's what life is all about" etc.
One thing in particular irritated me. The title character - a digital robot,
made flesh - expresses his new-found grasp of emotion by talking about his love of
Depeche Mode. The band's music moves him in a way he can't explain. It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but with better writing it could have
worked. If the film had thrown in a montage set to "Enjoy the Silence" or
"Never Let Me Down Again", it might have worked, because those songs are emotive. Depeche Mode had a knack for making music that was goofy but also totally sincere, and occasionally they pulled it off.
Sadly the writers didn't know a thing about Depeche Mode, or perhaps the producers wanted a big
pop hit that the TikTok generation might be familiar with, so instead they used "Just
Can't Get Enough", which is a fun song, but it's not the kind of
deeply emotional tune that might cause a robot to doubt his programming.
The film stars Jared Leto. His performance came in for a lot of criticism from
the press. I couldn't tell if he was trying to channel Jeff Bridges
from Starman (naive, likeable) or Christian Bale
from American Psycho (detail-obsessed, inhuman). But I warmed
to him. He has a sardonic charisma. In contrast, the entire rest of the
cast are broad stereotypes played by nobodies, with the exception of Gillian
Anderson, who appears to have been beamed into the film
from Succession. At one point she slaps another character in the
face, which ordinarily would be sexy, but the other character is her son, so
it's odd. Imagine being slapped in the face by Gillian Anderson. Or being used as a
footrest by her while she wears a leather dress. Or being forced to kneel while she calls you a naughty boy. Thank God nobody can see into my mind.
Jodie Turner-Smith is decent as the villain's chief enforcer. As mentioned a
couple of paragraphs ago the film has a habit of introducing plot threads,
then dumping them. There are suggestions that Turner-Smith's character might
undergo a heel face-turn, but nothing comes of it. A sequence in which our
heroes frantically try to repair a vital piece of equipment so that they can
beam Leto's character back into the real world is played for tense drama, and then forgotten about a few scenes later, because our hero manages to return to the real world just fine. The film fumbles elements
that should be significant while focusing on irrelevancies. There's a mass of
exposition that sets up the corporate landscape, none of which is particularly
interesting or relevant, and then, later on, Jeff Bridges appears as Kevin
Flynn, which is in theory a major thing, but until that point Flynn has only
been mentioned in passing. Newcomers to the franchise would have no idea who
he is.
The visuals aren't bad. There are a couple of memorable shots. The image of a
brick-like digital flying machine slowly emerging from behind a skyscraper "in exactly the way that bricks don't" is
arresting. A subsequent shot in which a mass of drones trace through the grid
pattern of a city stands out, as does the image of a motorcycle crash that
leaves a spiralling red trail hanging unsupported in the air. But the first
two TRON films were showcases for what CGI could do,
whereas TRON: Ares is visually ordinary. The majority of the film takes place in the real world, with no obvious
CGI at all, which raises the question of whether it's the least CGI-heavy film
of the entire franchise, which is ironic given that it's now cheaper to film
on a virtual stage than in the actual real world.
The original TRON wasn't very good either. It's a good example of a likeable bad film. I like it a
lot, and I'm glad that it exists, and it has a couple of visually arresting
images. The final shot - a timelapse image of a city turning into an
information network - distils the essence
of Koyaanisqatsi into a few seconds. "Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and
constellations of data, like city lights, receding." But the rest of the film is just a big chase, with an abrupt ending, and
the characters are dull, which is a shame because the cast is solid. Compared
to Wargames or Time Bandits, from the same time
period, it isn't in the same league. But it's likeable. It belongs to a canon of 1980s films that
are hard to dislike, and they're powerfully nostalgic, but they just aren't
very good. Labyrinth, The Goonies, Short Circuit, Flight of the Navigator, the list goes on.
I could write at length about TRON: Ares but I'm not going
to. The plot this time is that the villains have a 3D printer that can build real-world analogues of the programs that live inside mainframe computers, but
the resulting creations only have a short lifespan, just twenty-three minutes.
This raises all kinds of questions. Do the 3D creations have to obey the
real-world laws of physics, or not? If they don't, why do the villains need to
build separate motorcycles and flying machines for their digital soldiers? Why
not just make the soldiers fly? What powers the creations? If the 3D printer
can build a complicated flying machine with a built-in power source, can it
build a nuclear bomb? Wouldn't that completely revolutionise the global balance of power? Twenty-three minutes might not be very long for a human lifespan, but it's more than enough time for a nuclear-tipped ICBM.
If the 3D creations are super-advanced machines rather than violations of the
laws of physics, why not 3D print the individual components, measure them,
and then duplicate them with metal and carbon fibre? Why not just use a
regular 3D printer? The digital world of TRON is capable of
modelling multiple human-like characters in real time, with one hundred
percent accuracy - so much so that a 3D-printed recreation of a human is
indistinguishable from its digital copy - in which case the digital world
of TRON must be vastly smarter and more resourceful than any
human being, on a par with the supercomputer from Colossus: The Forbin Project, and yet neither the human nor the digital villains seem any smarter than ordinary people.
All these thoughts and more swirled through my head as the A350 steamed
back to Europe. Including the stuff about Gillian Anderson. During the publicity for TRON: Ares she modelled a particularly fetching leather dress. It might not be a good film, but it did give us Gillian Anderson in a leather dress, so I give it five stars.
It takes
a lot of energy to alter reality, and the real world tends to fight back.
Before drifting to sleep I read a bit of The Speed of Sound by Scott Eyeman. It's a book about the advent of talking cinema. It has
the right mixture of interesting history and occasionally picky technical
detail to get me to sleep.
Several hours later we had breakfast. Air France's breakfast was simple, but
much better than KLM's greasy tasteless cheese thing:
I visited Seoul with just a thick coat and a small backpack. This came in handy when we landed, because I didn't have to mess around. We were late, and I was worried about the transfer, but as before it was quicker than I expected.
I still had to go through security, though. And Paris Charles De Gaulle would
benefit from more signs. I manage to pick the correct terminal entirely by
chance, which was a good thing because the gap between leaving the plane
and arriving at the security gates didn't have a single departure board.
The journey from Paris to Heathrow was on an Airbus A220. I've written about this airliner
before. It was developed by Bombardier of Canada and launched in 2008 as the
Bombardier CS100. A couple of years later Bombardier essentially sold the
aircraft to Airbus, who renamed it the Airbus A220. As with the Embraer E-195
it's a two-by-two twinjet that looks and feels like a scaled-down Airbus A320
or Boeing 737.
I wasn't sure if I could use the "papier microbicide" as toilet paper, and I was too nervous to ask the stewards, and in any case I don't know how to say "explosive diarrhoea" in French. It's probably "le diarrhoea de boum" or something like that.
The A220 was almost indistinguishable from the E-195. About the only
differences are that A220 has a mobile phone clamp in the back of the tray
table, and the lighting seemed dimmer, but that might have been because it was
a night flight. The flight itself took off, got to altitude, and almost
immediately landed. Flying from London to Paris feels odd. It's theoretically
quicker and cheaper than the Eurotunnel, but only if you don't factor in the
cost of getting to the airports, and the time involved in going through security,
and the mental disruption of getting on and off a cramped airliner. I'm not a
fan.
After arriving at Heathrow I made my way to the central bus terminal. English
people love to bash England, but Heathrow is undeniably grim in comparison to
Incheon or Schiphol. Nonetheless I found my bus, which then drove very slowly
to the train station. The very last train to my destination left Woking
train station at 00:08. I arrived at 00:02 and got to the platform with four
minutes to spare. From taking off at Seoul just past noon to arriving at
Woking train station at midnight it had taken me twenty hours, and in the end I
arrived with six minutes to spare, which probably says something about
computers and the modern age.
"Excuse me", said the strange man, "I have to go to space now". And then he
leaned back and raised his hands and he was in space.
