Tron’s Legacy

Advance your system clocks another seven years, and Disney releases the film Tron: Legacy in 2010, 28 years after the original dazzled and puzzled audiences in equal measure. It is directed by Joseph Kosinski, who lands the gig after a series of startling CGI commercials, for such high-profile videogames as Halo 3 and Gears of War. If any film would allow a “reboot”, you’d think it would be Tron, but screenwriters Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, of TV show Lost fame, keep the canon and proceed from where the last film left off. Jeff Bridges returns as Kevin Flynn, trapped for decades inside the computer world which has advanced itself many fold. It is his disaffected 27-year-old son Sam’s turn to get zapped to computer land and find his way out of the grid. Sam is played by Garrett Hedlund, most well-known at that time for playing Patroclus in 2004’s Troy. Bruce Boxleitner returns as Alan Bradley, but aside from appearing in a cameo in the opening real-world scenes, only provides the voice for his alter-ego Tron; a helmeted stuntman plays the character inside the computer. Cindy Morgan does not join the cast this time around, with the female love interest instead being played by Olivia Wilde as Quorra, the last of the spontaneously evolving ISO (Isomorphic Algorithms) programs that miraculously appear inside the Grid. Michael Sheen, looking like a cross between Julian Assange and David Bowie circa Ziggy Stardust, rounds out things as Castor/Zuse, the flamboyant owner of the End Of Line Club inside Tron City. This club is where, incidentally, you can spot the famous French musicians Daft Punk, who supply the music for the club AND the movie. They look quite at home in Tron: Legacy with their trademark futuristic helmets.

While CGI advances over the intervening 28 years allow for a more completely realized cyberspace, the creators decide to forego blowing up every frame of film and backlighting actors for the neon effects, and instead opt for spandex suits with sewn-in strips of practical lighting, provided by Light Tape, powered by a 9V battery pack hidden in the ID disks all characters wear on their back. Light Tape is an invention by Electro-LuminX, located in Chester, Virginia. The thin, flexible light strips are realized by exciting phosphors located between two electrically conductive plates, looking great on-screen but allowing for only simple lines on the costumes instead of the intricate circuit patterns of the original, and allow for about 10 minutes of illumination before exhausting the suit’s battery pack. Also, the entire Grid environment is limited to dark, stormy exteriors and dimly-lit interiors, in order to have the low-wattage Light Tape show up well on-camera. About 150 different suits are produced for the shoot, and their fragile circuitry prevents the actors from sitting in them when fully dressed; boards with bicycle seats are provided so the talent can lean back into them and rest between takes.

While one could argue that the visual effects, while pretty, are just more of the same in a film-making industry quite adept with the technology by now, Tron Legacy does have one bit of ground-breaking CGI up its sleeve. In order to allow Bridges to play his younger self in the guise of the ageless computer program Clu, an effects team de-ages him to look like himself circa Against All Odds (1984) to match the conceit in the film that Flynn had created the program a few years after the events of the original. To do this, they film Bridges delivering his lines using a helmet with several small cameras capturing his facial movements. They then digitally erase all those pesky crows feet, forehead wrinkles and other tell-tale signs of being 61 years old. With the younger faux-Bridges’ head placed on another actor’s body in scenes, the effect is remarkable but still traverses into the uncanny valley with the doll’s eyes and mouth movements that tip the subconscious that something is a bit off.

All of this eye-candy gets the 3-D treatment that becomes seemingly obligatory when releasing a film in 2010, using an upgraded version of the camera equipment James Cameron developed for his tour-de-force 3-D CGI extravaganza Avatar. Disney precedes Tron Legacy‘s release in December of 2010 by utilizing a promotional scheme not available to them in 1982: the Internet viral campaign. The website Flynn Lives first crops up, posing as a grass-roots effort of concerned hackers (a la the notorious Internet collective “Anonymous”) looking for traces of the missing Encom executive. News conferences held by Boxleitner in his Alan Bradley guise announce the effort. A stellar pixilated online videogame trivia game called Arcade Aid is also associated with the campaign, inviting users to click around a giant interactive picture guessing which games the rebus-like art represent. Flynn’s most famous videogame creation, Space Paranoids, also comes to life at Space Paranoids Online, aping the arcade game Flynn is playing with such panache at the beginning of Tron. All in all, it is an admirable attempt at the brave new PR paradigm and contributes to Legacy‘s impressive, #1 opening weekend at 44 million dollars, and total worldwide box-office take after a few weeks of $246,784,358. Not bad, even considering the budget of the sequel is $170 million, 10 times the original.

Traces of Tron

Back in 1982, the original Tron befuddled audiences, and it’s not hard to see why. The film abstracts things perhaps too much, and plot holes abound, such as the film starting out by showing Sark competing with a “user” at an arcade lightcycle game. How would Sark be playing against someone at a machine simply plugged into an electrical outlet? There’s no indication of the MCP controlling the power grid, or even being able to network through it, so how does he know Sark’s actions playing the arcade game are “brutal and needlessly sadistic”? The religious overtones make an interesting aspect of the story, with the programs in awe of their all-powerful users, who Flynn at one point insists are actually as controlled as the programs consider themselves to be. This religious allegory is played for effect, and also reflects how, at the time, the computer technicians who had knowledge and access to hulking mainframes were almost a religious order themselves, digital monks who held the ultimate power to control your payroll and run your actuarial forecasts. The connection is particularly strong with Dumont, the elder program portrayed by Barnard Hughes, controlling access to the I/O tower in the film, a character decked out with priestly robes and papal mitre designed by Moebius.

The actual narrative of the film is very pedestrian, however. It is a mish-mash of Lisberger’s influences, including Star Wars and particularly, The Wizard of Oz, right down to the MCP stripped away at the end, revealing the old man behind the curtain of light, pecking away on an old-fashioned typewriter. It’s common to slag a film relying on special effects to impress audiences, instead of a well-told story or transcendent acting from the players. As the years go on, however, Tron firmly entrenches itself into popular culture, its unique concept and visual flair reverberating in countless homages from The Simpsons to South Park. It also influences a South Korean animated movie called Savior of the Earth, released in 1983 and later dubbed into English. “Influenced” is not a strong enough word; the movie lifts elements whole cloth from Tron, to such a blatant extent that it has to be seen to be believed.

Supercut of all the times Savior of the Earth rips off Tron

Also, as we have seen, Tron has begotten a super-charged, super-budgeted sequel. Filling in the story between the original Tron and the Legacy sequel is Tron: Uprising, referred to as the TRON Animation Project and the Grid Animation Project during development. It is a weekly animated series running on the  Disney XD cable channel in the U.S. from May of 2012 to January of 2013. Developed by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, Uprising deals with the young program Beck, voiced by Elijah Wood, becoming a new protector of the Grid under the tutelage of Tron, voiced by Bruce Boxleitner. The show displays a deep Japanese anime feel, a perfect fit to the zen attitude cultivated in the big-budget Tron sequel it follows. The most impactful legacy that the original Tron has left behind, however, is the boost it gave to computer graphic effects as a limitless pallet of light with which to paint the filmmaker’s imagination.