Musings of a Hopeful Skeptic
**UPDATE** - After seeing Tron: Legacy I am revisiting my blog post below to report whether my fears were unfounded or confirmed.
I recently saw the new teaser (aka "VFX Concept Test", aka "studio trial balloon") for Tron: Legacy, the long-awaited sequel to the 1982 hit, Tron. Another friend asked me if I was excited to see it, and I said I was, "...if they don't screw it up." I thought my blog might be a good place to expand on that a bit.
Tron is a lot like Star Wars or even Batman. We fell in love with these shows as kids. In many ways these are the shows that taught us to love movies. They were child-like in their own way, making them easy for children to love them without getting caught up in the "stuff" of more grown-up movies. But now we are grown-ups, and we want to watch grown-up versions of these movies. The Star Wars prequels failed to deliver on that count, in my opinion. Batman Begins succeeded. I just hope the makers of Tron: Legacy learn from those two examples.
Tron had great vision (giving us a sneak-peak of the internet world long before it was available to us) and creativity (light cycles, the Solar Sailer, etc) and visual style that hadn't been seen before. The sequel has to be more than just a CGI-fest. It should also carry the mantle of being a creative visual effects boundary-breaker while also delivering on story, character, style, and performance.
I have lost a lot of faith in filmmakers lately, and unless J.J.Abrams, Christopher Nolan, or Steven Spielberg are directing, I really doubt I'll be completely satisfied with a movie. Tron: Legacy has so much potential, and yet it has even greater potential to get screwed up.
Screw-up Potential #1
The premise of the new film at least sounds interesting: Flynn disappeared 20 years ago and his grown son is looking for him. He goes back to the old arcade where Flynn lived and there gets pulled into the computer world where Flynn has been living all that time. I get the sense that Flynn has become darker and more malevolent after 20 years in the computer world which might explain why his "program" kills the other cycler in the teaser. Has he become a computer-world "terrorist"? The yoga pose, beads, bare feet, and beard all give Flynn a sort of "hippie" look that makes me think of the 60'-era communes. Could it be that Flynn doesn't like how computers have taken over every aspect of our lives and seeks to return us to a simpler time by destroying them from the inside? I'll be curious to know if there's a political message in Legacy. Almost every movie coming out of Hollywood today has a liberal message wrapped inside. If they try to feed us some analogous line that "terrorists are well-intentioned people" or some such junk it'll destroy the movie.
**UPDATE** - It seems like every movie to come out of Hollywood these days has an Evil Corporate Empire (a.k.a. "capitalist pigs") scheming in the background. This one's no different albeit somewhat at a distance from the centerpiece of the plot. I'd say my fears on this screw-up potential were not realized.
Screw-up Potential #2
The "Flynn program" in the teaser video was a much younger looking Jeff Bridges. I couldn't tell if it was a CG face (ala Beowulf) or if it was just a digitally photoshopped Jeff Bridges (as they did for Bruce Willis in the movie Surrogates). Either way, it wasn't convincing. Other than their faces, both cyclers were completely CG from what I can tell. The faces were "projected" into the helmets. That they were so obviously fake made me a little worried about the quality of the CG. Tron was a trend setter and did things that hadn't been seen before on film. Now, 20 years later an action movie without CG is almost unheard of. What could Legacy do to re-establish its role as a ground breaker in visual FX? Transformers and Terminator:Salvation were more visually compelling than what this teaser has to show. Granted, the teaser is really just a VFX experiment and doesn't show actual footage from the final movie since it hasn't been shot yet. Maybe the budget for the VFX will be better on the final product.
**UPDATE** - Meh. The VFX, while on par for other contemporary films does nothing to push the envelope. If anything, the Clu avatar (and "young Flynn") were lifeless cartoons. My guess is the reason we never see Tron's face is because Boxleitner knew how ridiculous he would look and wouldn't sit with dots on his face for any amount of time. I say the Rinzler character is more interesting because he's faceless. It's the voice that tells us all we need to know when the time comes. They should have done likewise with Clu. It would have been so much more intriguing.
Look how well it's worked for Daft Punk! Yep, they screwed up.
Screw-up Potential #3
There was a quasi-religious tone to Tron. The "Users" were analogous to gods and the Programs struggled with their faith in them. It wasn't the most Christian of analogies (every Program had his own User), but like The Matrix there were some interesting analogies nonetheless. Will the filmmakers be expanding on these religious and philosophical themes, and will they be able to do so with any clarity (unlike the Matrix trilogy)? Speaking of which, the aforementioned Surrogates shows an interesting inverse of the matrix concept.
**UPDATE** - That we're talking about the existence of an entire universe (the computer world) that is surrounded by en even larger, transcendent, (and more "real") place (our world), there are bound to be quasi-religious similarities in the film. However where Tron fully embraced its religiousity, Legacy seems to want to distance itself from the notion of gods/users and their creations/programs and instead set a course for a computerized Darwinian secularism. You have an excellent opportunity to make a modern Christian story of a creator Father and his Son who enters the creation to bring about renewal. Instead we're learning about creator-less evolution. Again, it's Hollywood, so why am I surprised? Screwed up.
Screw-up Potential #4
Tron got away with a lot because most people didn't know much about how computers worked back in '82. The inner-workings of the computer world were accepted as fantasy. Now that a huge percentage of Tron fans have such intimate knowledge of computers, the way the computer world is depicted will be under much more scrutiny. One hopes that the filmmakers will give us a great fantasy world without grotesquely divorcing it from how things work in the real world.
**UPDATE** - I don't know much more about computers than I did back in the 80's, but I think this movie's version of the computer world is even more disconnected from anything we could imagine as life in a computer world. At least Tron understood that programs had different purposes, and as anthropomorphized characters, would have different designs and styles. It seems the creators of Legacy were a bit too enamored with the look of The Matrix. Everything is dark, and the background "programs" are all too alike. The intent may be to suggest that the influence of Clu on the computer world has made everything cold and lifeless, but regrettably, it makes the movie so as well.
Screw-up Potential #5
Yes, Boxleitner is back along with Bridges, (sadly, no Cindy Morgan.) 27 years later, they're not the youngest actors on the block, so how the filmmakers will age their "programs" is a good question - repeating my earlier concerns about digital photoshopping. I don't want to see a flabby Tron. Bridges has had the most post-Tron success of the two, but he's no Christian Bale. Despite the 3D aspects of the film, as another person put it: he'll still have 2D acting. Tron was a bit campy in that early '80s sort of way, but that kind of thing won't fly at the box office anymore. The casting for this should be replete with strong actors, but it's a Disney movie so there's no guarantee of that.
Screw-up Potential #3
There was a quasi-religious tone to Tron. The "Users" were analogous to gods and the Programs struggled with their faith in them. It wasn't the most Christian of analogies (every Program had his own User), but like The Matrix there were some interesting analogies nonetheless. Will the filmmakers be expanding on these religious and philosophical themes, and will they be able to do so with any clarity (unlike the Matrix trilogy)? Speaking of which, the aforementioned Surrogates shows an interesting inverse of the matrix concept.
**UPDATE** - That we're talking about the existence of an entire universe (the computer world) that is surrounded by en even larger, transcendent, (and more "real") place (our world), there are bound to be quasi-religious similarities in the film. However where Tron fully embraced its religiousity, Legacy seems to want to distance itself from the notion of gods/users and their creations/programs and instead set a course for a computerized Darwinian secularism. You have an excellent opportunity to make a modern Christian story of a creator Father and his Son who enters the creation to bring about renewal. Instead we're learning about creator-less evolution. Again, it's Hollywood, so why am I surprised? Screwed up.
Screw-up Potential #4
Tron got away with a lot because most people didn't know much about how computers worked back in '82. The inner-workings of the computer world were accepted as fantasy. Now that a huge percentage of Tron fans have such intimate knowledge of computers, the way the computer world is depicted will be under much more scrutiny. One hopes that the filmmakers will give us a great fantasy world without grotesquely divorcing it from how things work in the real world.
**UPDATE** - I don't know much more about computers than I did back in the 80's, but I think this movie's version of the computer world is even more disconnected from anything we could imagine as life in a computer world. At least Tron understood that programs had different purposes, and as anthropomorphized characters, would have different designs and styles. It seems the creators of Legacy were a bit too enamored with the look of The Matrix. Everything is dark, and the background "programs" are all too alike. The intent may be to suggest that the influence of Clu on the computer world has made everything cold and lifeless, but regrettably, it makes the movie so as well.
Screw-up Potential #5
Yes, Boxleitner is back along with Bridges, (sadly, no Cindy Morgan.) 27 years later, they're not the youngest actors on the block, so how the filmmakers will age their "programs" is a good question - repeating my earlier concerns about digital photoshopping. I don't want to see a flabby Tron. Bridges has had the most post-Tron success of the two, but he's no Christian Bale. Despite the 3D aspects of the film, as another person put it: he'll still have 2D acting. Tron was a bit campy in that early '80s sort of way, but that kind of thing won't fly at the box office anymore. The casting for this should be replete with strong actors, but it's a Disney movie so there's no guarantee of that.
**UPDATE** - Old Bridges and Boxleitner did fine, but the CG Flynn/Clu bombed. The "Rinzler solution" was much more creative and should have been used for Clu as well. After all, programs do age as hardware updates make older programs more and more obsolete. How fascinating it would have been to see Clu - masked all through the film - to finally be unmasked and shown to be older than even the "old" Flynn himself? (sigh) Sometimes I think I could out-write any screenplay writer in Hollywood today. Maybe I could, but I wouldn't be able to stand working with those people. Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde did fine I suppose.
If Star Wars Episode I and Batman Begins taught anyone anything, it's that after 20+ years with a huge fan base, a sequel (prequel, reboot, whatnot, whathaveyou) has to exceed our expectations. Yes, people are going to be thrilled to see new lightbikes and other cool VFX, but the story still has to be top-notch, the characters have to be deep, and the acting has to be rich and textured. Batman Begins delivered on every count. Episode I satisfied everyone's desire to see a real lightsaber duel, but it was overshadowed by a bad script, flat acting, midi-chlorians, and Jar Jar Binks. Hopefully Tron: Legacy won't make the same mistakes - but unfortunately there's lots of potential.
Addendum 7/23/10 - The newest trailer for the movie was recently released. Some of my earlier fears are being realized. While it's still too early to tell if the story will be any good, the first big letdown is the shoddy work they did on the Young Flynn/Clu. The doppleganger is about as convincing as Tom Hanks in "The Polar Express", and that technology is 6 years old. Maybe I'm just expecting too much out of the CGI community these days, but they can give better lip-sync to a lion and mouse in The Chronicles of Narnia than what we see when Clu gives his anti-Star Wars line, "I'm not your father." I cringed when I saw that. Please tell me they'll fix that after hearing a collective groan from their fans.
A lot of the other visuals are very cool. A "light-jet" is glimpsed very briefly at the end of the trailer, but "light-cars"? Yawn. It appears they've lost some of the imagination of the first film. Take for example the lightcycles. In the original, when the three renegades stopped their lightcycles to talk, the bikes would de-res and leave them standing free. In the trailer, we see the hero park his bike, some "transformer-ish" panels open to let him put his feet on the ground, and he just sits on it like he would a regular bike. Think of the cool effects they could have had with that bike digitally coming apart around him. Everything looks so real in the digital realm of the movie, that it seems to me the filmmakers forgot that their characters are IN the computer, so they can look more digital instead of looking more real. I mean a bedroom? With a table and lamp? Huge misses in visual opportunity if you ask me. They're trying to hard too have a "Matrix" edge to it. Could Olivia Wilde look more like Trinity?
I want so badly to get excited about this movie, but the more they show us, the more apprehensive I get about it. I think, as others have said, that perhaps Tron was best left as a one-movie show
Addendum 7/23/10 - The newest trailer for the movie was recently released. Some of my earlier fears are being realized. While it's still too early to tell if the story will be any good, the first big letdown is the shoddy work they did on the Young Flynn/Clu. The doppleganger is about as convincing as Tom Hanks in "The Polar Express", and that technology is 6 years old. Maybe I'm just expecting too much out of the CGI community these days, but they can give better lip-sync to a lion and mouse in The Chronicles of Narnia than what we see when Clu gives his anti-Star Wars line, "I'm not your father." I cringed when I saw that. Please tell me they'll fix that after hearing a collective groan from their fans.
A lot of the other visuals are very cool. A "light-jet" is glimpsed very briefly at the end of the trailer, but "light-cars"? Yawn. It appears they've lost some of the imagination of the first film. Take for example the lightcycles. In the original, when the three renegades stopped their lightcycles to talk, the bikes would de-res and leave them standing free. In the trailer, we see the hero park his bike, some "transformer-ish" panels open to let him put his feet on the ground, and he just sits on it like he would a regular bike. Think of the cool effects they could have had with that bike digitally coming apart around him. Everything looks so real in the digital realm of the movie, that it seems to me the filmmakers forgot that their characters are IN the computer, so they can look more digital instead of looking more real. I mean a bedroom? With a table and lamp? Huge misses in visual opportunity if you ask me. They're trying to hard too have a "Matrix" edge to it. Could Olivia Wilde look more like Trinity?
I want so badly to get excited about this movie, but the more they show us, the more apprehensive I get about it. I think, as others have said, that perhaps Tron was best left as a one-movie show
**UPDATE** - Inception was much more imaginitive and other-worldly than Tron It deserved all four Oscars it won and then some. If only Nolan had directed Tron: Legacy there'd be talk of a new sequel. Perhaps a reboot is in order. Tron: Inception?
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