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FULFILLING A DREAM: The desire on the part of Walt Disney Productions to create the first true CGI sci-fi film with the semi-successful Tron (1982) was at long last realized with this technically impressive sequel, its other-world conveyed through computer graphics and digital 3-D. Courtesy: Disney/Sean Bailey Productions.
CREDITS
Walt Disney Pictures/Sean Bailey Productions/LivePlanet; Joseph Kosinski, dir.; Edward Kitsis, Adam Horowitz, Brian Klugman, Lee Sternthal, scr.; Sean Bailey, Jeffrey Silver, Steven Lisberger, pro.; Daft Punk, mus.; Claudio Miranda, cin.; James Haygood, ed.; Darren Gilford, prod. design; Sean Haworth, Kevin Ishioka, Mark W. Mansbridge, Ben Procter, art dir.; Michael Wilkinson, costumes; Matthew Aebig, Rick Baker, Julie Beaton-Pachauer, special makeup effects; Steve Boeddeker, sound design; Quantum Creation, F/X; Digital Domain Vancouver, Prime Focus, Prana Studios, compositors; Eric Barba, visual effects; 125 min.; Color; 2.35:1.
CAST
Jeff Bridges (Kevin Flynn/Clu); Garrett Hedlund (Sam Flynn); Olivia Wilde (Quorra); Bruce Boxleitner (Alan Bradley/Tron); James Frain (Jarvis); Beau Garrett (Gem); Michael Sheen (Castor/Zuse); Anis Cheurfa (Rinzler); Serinda Swan, Yaya DaCosta, Elizabeth Mathis (Sirens).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day . . .
KEVIN FLYNN, TO HIS SON SAM (OPENING)
BACKGROUND
It all began with Pong, which, if not the original video game, was certainly the first to achieve widespread popularity. Following Atari’s 1972 release of the simulated tennis game, the resultant industry cinched a connection to the sci-fi genre via such games as Space Invaders (1978) and Asteroids (1979). The audience that now loyally followed such franchises as Star Wars consisted of the same people who were soon devoted to video games. Once Pac-Man introduced the maze and edged up the violence quotient in play, Steven Lisberger (1951–), a School of the Museum of Fine Arts graduate renowned for his 1973 short Cosmic Cartoon, conceived of formalizing the already existent relationship between games and films. Disney, eager to regain its corner of the mass market for animated projects, green-lighted Lisberger’s Tron, modifying his concept of a 100 percent computer graphics piece by adding live actors, a Disney tradition.
The resulting 1982 film, Tron, featured Jeff Bridges as a young computer programmer who enters the alternative world of software that he has designed, there experiencing a series of adventures. These could also be enjoyed by moviegoers once they bought the Tron game. Those who anticipated what sounded like a perfect film for that precise moment in time were disappointed by the feeble narrative and lack of interesting characters. The film was, at best, a modest success, and there would be no immediate sequel. Yet, Tron gained cult popularity via cable TV and home video, and there always remained a sense that a great opportunity had never been fully realized.
THE PLOT
CEO and the primary shareholder of ENCOM International, young Sam Flynn has no financial worries. His father, Kevin, created the software giant shortly before disappearing back in 1989. Like his dad, Sam wants more out of life than money. Financial returns are insignificant compared to the scientific, spiritual, intellectual, and creative gains for humankind inherent in a fascinating alternative universe known as the “Grid.” The melancholy Sam can’t grasp why his father would have deserted him after promising to share the glories of the Grid. Then Kevin’s trusted friend Alan shares significant news: apparently, Kevin did not die or run away, but exists inside the game that began it all. As adventurous as his father, Sam also makes the journey into innerspace.
THE FILM
After Disney executives decided the time was ripe for a belated sequel, they hired writers Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal to create a story line that would respect the original, so as to please its considerable cult following, while allowing for deeper motives and believably human responses on the part of characters. These include the father-son reunion, which is tempered and challenged by the fact that each has complicated feelings for the beautiful humanoid Quorra. When, several years later, director Joseph Kosinski (1974–) joined the mix, he rejected the then-in-place F/X scheme that borrowed heavily from such landmark films as The Matrix (1999). Instead, he opted for state-of-the-art chroma keying to ensure that his first significant feature would project a visual identity all its own.
Kosinski’s style is marked by a graceful employment of Vision Research’s “Phantom.” The camera captures high-speed digital imagery of the sort expected by genre aficionados from the now all-important IMAX 3D Experience. Kosinski dropped the glitzy disco-age phantasmagoric color spectrum of the original in favor of a jet black and gun metal blue palette, enhanced and contained by yellow, orange, and lightning-white framing devices, far more appropriate in the era following Minority Report (2002) or Children of Men (2006).
THEME
Like many of the best sci-fi/fantasy films, TRON: Legacy recalls tales from classical mythology. Sam’s journey to rescue his long-lost father parallels, in Homer’s Odyssey, Telemachus of Ithaca setting out to discover why Odysseus (aka Ulysses) has not returned from the Trojan War. Not surprisingly, in the film, the seductive females who stand in the way of father and son are referred to, in Homeric form, as the Sirens. When Kevin must fight Clu, the double for himself he earlier created, the duel recalls the doppelganger motif: our hero facing off against his evil twin. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein myth is also referenced. Here is a variation on the theme of a father creating a synthetic son to benefit humankind, only to realize that he has potentially set up the destruction of his own race. As with Victor Frankenstein, at least in the original literary incarnation, Kevin appears doomed to an unpleasant fate by having conceived a virtual son without the benefit of a woman only to turn his back on what strikes him as a hideous mistake.
TRIVIA
Kosinski followed up with Oblivion (2013), a spectacular based on his own earlier graphic novel of the same name. At the time of publication, his name has been associated with the remakes of such sci-fi franchises as The Black Hole and The Twilight Zone, as well as a possible sequel to TRON: Legacy and a new project, Archangels.