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From Clash of the Titans to The Karate Kid, A Nightmare on Elm Street to Predators and The A-Team to a second Wall Street, this was the year that the ’80s took back the multiplex in a big way. So it’s fitting that 2010 ends with the belated return of another piece of the Me Generation’s cinematic history.
Sweeping onto IMAX and regular screens nationwide on Dec, 17, TRON: Legacy is the long-in-the-works sequel to the cult favorite TRON, which first appeared on the pop-culture landscape in the distant past of 1982. Dreamed up by animator Steven Lisberger and bankrolled by Disney, the film sought to capitalize on the excitement surrounding the impressive advancements made in computer technology (most notably the recent introduction of personal computers) as well as the young medium of videogames by chronicling the adventures of Kevin Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges), a flesh-and-blood computer whiz who is transported into a brave new digital world.
Using cutting-edge special effects, Lisberger depicted a visually dazzling cyberscape where the characters sport high-tech suits, ride around on speedy light cycles and battle each other with glowing discs. He also filled his screenplay with a healthy amount of actual computer jargon—residents of the computer world are referred to as Programs (in fact, the film’s villain is known as the Master Control Program) and other then-new buzzwords like RAM and grid are heard throughout. In short, it was a film made by geeks for geeks and, perhaps as a result, geeks were the only ones who turned out to see it. Despite a prominent mid-summer berth, a strong ad campaign and an extensive line of merchandise, the movie grossed a middling $26 million during its theatrical run.
But many of the people who saw TRON in 1982 never forgot it and, as it turned out, Disney didn’t either. After years of kicking around the notion of reviving the franchise, the studio finally took serious steps toward realizing that goal in 2007. Under the guidance of producer Sean Bailey (who became Disney’s new head of production earlier this year), a team was assembled that consisted of first-time filmmaker Joseph Kosinski, an architecture student-turned-commercial director with a strong background in computer graphics, and scribes Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who had an extensive background in television (their credits include “Lost” and “Birds of Prey”) but no produced feature film scripts. Not coincidentally, all three men were youngsters when the original TRON came out and the movie left a lasting impression on them.
“That film had such an impact on myself and Eddie,” confesses Horowitz. “We’re part of a generation that has been really impacted by it. And now that we’ve all grown up and have become writers, directors and executives, the time was right to revisit it. We had to get to this place where were ready to take a crack at TRON.”
From the beginning, the trio agreed that TRON 2.0 shouldn’t be a ground-up reboot, but instead continue the story of Kevin Flynn. “For us, it would have been blasphemous to want to re-do TRON,” says Kitsis. “We’re fans and we approached our task like fans; we were never interested in redoing something that we thought was awesome.”
Kosinski was even more adamant about Flynn—and, by extension, Bridges, whose enthusiasm for TRON had never waned in the two decades since the first film—remaining the face of the franchise. “In order to make it feel like TRON, the central element had to be Kevin Flynn. Not only is he a great character, but also to have an actor like Jeff at the center of a movie like this is an opportunity you can’t pass up. I can’t imagine the movie without him.”
At the same time, the trio was aware that in order for the sequel to appeal to a broad audience, they had to devise a way to make the established mythology accessible for new viewers. They found a solution by dusting off a classic narrative trope: the relationship between a father and his son.
The story that took shape once again involves Flynn vanishing into the computer world, this time leaving behind his young boy Sam, who knows little about his dad’s work and grows up wondering whether he was simply abandoned. Years later as a rebellious adult, Sam discovers his father’s secret lab and has a run-in with the same digitizing laser that transported the elder Flynn into cyberspace. Trapped in this strange universe, Sam searches for the real Kevin Flynn while also confronting his dad’s digital avatar Clu, a once-heroic Program who has apparently become corrupted.
“The idea of a man lost in a machine and the search for him is such a compelling way into this story,” explains Kosinski. “It’s also a great way to introduce a new character and allow the audience to experience the world through his eyes. You need something emotional to hold onto when you’re creating a place that looks and sounds like this and a father-and-son relationship is a very relatable narrative.”
It’s not lost on either Kosinski or the writers that the father-and-son dynamic that drives the film reflects their own experience making the movie. After all, they are the bright new kids taking over a franchise started by an older man they all look up to (and who at one point was actively developing his own version of the sequel). Kitsis remembers the terror he felt prior to his first meeting with TRON’s creator. “Adam and I were at Steve’s house with Joe and Sean to pitch our take on the movie to him and Jeff Bridges. We knew that if we told him our story and he said, ‘No,’ that’s it—you can’t fight with someone who created the world.” But both the director and star of the original film responded enthusiastically to the sequel’s direction and Lisberger—who is credited as one of the movie’s producers—made himself readily available to the screenwriters and Kosinski as the project moved through the development process.
“We call him ‘Obi-Won,’” Kitsis says, laughing. “If we were stuck on something, we could pick up the phone and call him and he’d spend three hours talking with us about one detail. At one point, he even told us that we were writing the story of him and his son. That was the greatest compliment ever, to know that we had tapped into something in his life that was personal to him. At the same time, we were thinking, ‘We’re actually your sons! We’re the fans of your movie trying to please your generation, who inspired us.’” Those feelings are clearly manifested in the title of the sequel, which at one point bore the more impersonal name, TR2N. “We thought long and hard about what the title should be and Legacy seemed to resonate,” Kosinski says. “It’s a theme that’s echoed in so many different ways in the movie.”
Even with a talented team in place and Bridges eager to reprise his role, Disney needed some extra convincing to give the movie an official green light. So in early 2008, Kosinski started work on a short teaser trailer to sell the studio on his vision. The resulting two-and-a-half-minute clip, which depicted a pulse-pounding light-cycle chase before closing with a peek of Bridges as an older Kevin Flynn, premiered at the San Diego Comic-Con that summer, where it rocked the geek-packed cavern known as Hall H. The crowd’s ecstatic response was exactly the encouragement Disney needed and the movie soon moved out of development and into pre-production. Shooting started in Vancouver in the spring of 2009, with a cast that included Garrett Hedlund as Sam and Olivia Wilde as Quorra, a comely female Program who aids the younger Flynn in finding his long-lost dad.
Like the original film, which had a famously tortured production history, Legacy was a mammoth undertaking from a technical standpoint, combining practical effects (including enormous sets and costumes that are fully illuminated rather than rotoscoped in post-production) with a number of newly developed digital tricks and tools. In addition, knowing that they wanted the movie to be released in the lucrative 3D format, Disney agreed to let Kosinski shoot the movie with 3D cameras rather than convert it after the fact.
“You put all that technology onto one soundstage and it felt more like NASA launch control than filmmaking,” says Kosinski, adding that, despite all the new gadgets at his disposal, TRON proved just as challenging a production today as it was back in 1982. “The original film had a nine-month post-production process. Our post time is 18 months! So with all the advances in technology, we’ve just succeeded in making everything longer.”
On the other hand, today’s computer hardware did allow him to realize certain ideas that never made it into the original film. “During pre-production, I had the chance to go through Steve’s personal archives and I saw a lot of the early artwork that [graphic artists] Syd Mead and Moebius had done for the movie, which gave me an insight into concepts that they weren’t able to pull off at that time. Like the light cycles: if you look at the first TRON, they have fully covered cockpits. But that wasn’t Syd Mead’s original design—he had the rider creating the silhouette of the vehicle. The computers they used at that time weren’t able to render such complex forms. One of the first things I did on Legacy was go back to Mead’s design, because we now have the ability to show the light cycles the way they were always meant to be.”
By far, Kosinki’s biggest technical headache was bringing the pivotal character of Clu to life. In the original film, Bridges was able to play both roles, but Legacy picks up after a significant time gap—28 years in the real world and several millennia in computer time—and while Flynn has aged considerably, Clu still resembles a 32-year-old. Using a combination of various digital processes, Kosinski and his special-effects team built a synthetic version of Bridges that would replicate the way the actor looked and sounded in 1982—not unlike the digitally de-aged Brad Pitt that appeared in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. “We’re attempting to create a digital human who seamlessly interacts with real human beings,” says the director. “Beyond that, we’ve got to capture Jeff’s personality and charisma. It’s the hardest thing you can do and it’s our biggest challenge on this movie.”
Early glimpses of Clu in the film’s trailers have been promising, although the effect still can’t quite be described as lifelike. Still, Kosinski believes that audiences will be convinced by the finished product. “I took confidence in the fact that we had a great actor driving that performance. When the movie comes out, I think you’ll see Jeff’s persona really come through that character.”
What the trailers—as well as a 20-minute clip reel shown to journalists earlier in the fall—do guarantee is that TRON: Legacy will, if nothing else, provide plenty of 3D-enhanced spectacle for holiday moviegoers eager for the next Avatar-like blockbuster. One of the first big set-pieces finds Sam locked in an exciting duel-to-the-death armed with one of those iconic flying discs. It still looks like TRON, but there are clearly new rules and new techniques in place. The sequel’s visual palette is noticeably different as well, replacing the bright and cartoony look of the original with a darker, sleeker sheen—a creative choice perhaps meant to parallel the way that videogames have evolved since the ’80s. It’s all part of the filmmakers’ master plan to produce a second chapter that pays the necessary homage to its predecessor, but takes the franchise into a new era in search of an all new fanbase.
“If you’ve never seen the original, you will absolutely be able to follow this film,” Kitsis promises. “But if you have seen TRON, there are definitely things in Legacy that will make you happy.” (The writer also confirms reports that Pixar was brought aboard to offer creative input prior to some planned additional photography this past summer. “To us, Pixar is The Beatles of storytelling and if The Beatles are willing to listen to your CD and give their thoughts, you listen and thank them,” Kitsis says.)
In the event that Legacy becomes the four-quadrant hit that the first film wasn’t, Disney has been busy readying all manner of TRON ancillary products. In addition to action figures, toy light cycles and videogames, the studio just announced plans for an animated TV series entitled TRON: Uprising, which will begin airing next year on the studio’s cable channel Disney XD as a 10-part micro-series (written by Horowitz and Kitsis), followed by an ongoing half-hour program in 2012. It may sound like overkill, but the filmmakers certainly feel that there are plenty of stories left to tell within the universe of TRON. “It’s a limitless world inside those computers,” notes Kosinski, who Disney has recently enlisted to update another one of its vintage sci-fi properties, the 1979 space odyssey The Black Hole. “It’s like going to another galaxy that has its own set of rules.”
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