Chapter Two: Tron Legacy
By Brett Ballard-Beach
June 9, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The original Tron came out in the summer of 1982, in the midst of what might be aptly termed the studio’s “dark days,” not only by virtue of a lack of potential hit animated releases on its slate (only a handful came out between 1978 and 1987) but for a collection of live-action features that broke sharply with the slapstick comedies, animal-centric tales, uplifting dramas, and crowd-pleasing musicals of previous decades. Beginning with Disney’s first-ever PG-rated feature, The Black Hole in 1979 (and its trippy/disturbing “happy” ending that feels like a Kidz Bop cover of 2001: A Space Odyssey), most of the live-action films of the next half-decade or so carried forth with the PG rating and an attempt to court a slightly more mature audience.
Trenchcoat and Condorman were middling attempts to bring detective thrillers and espionage tales respectively, to the younger set. The Watcher in the Woods and Something this Wicked Way Comes were both based on literary properties and both featured genuinely disturbing tales of young protagonists forced to confront supernatural mysteries with little to no guidance or help from their parents. (The trailer for Watcher honestly intoned, “It’s from Walt Disney, but it’s not for little kids.”)
There were also films with Bill Cosby playing the Devil (The Devil and Max Devlin), a biologist communing with wolves at the end of the world (Never Cry Wolf), a second visit to an Oz that is not one Judy Garland would recognize (Return to Oz) and an S.E. Hinton adaptation NOT helmed by Francis Coppola (Tex). Even a holiday tale with the innocuous title One Magic Christmas (and a G rating to boot) featured a mother whose “It’s a Wonderful Life”-esque travel back to the path of Christmas cheer involves her husband being shotgunned to death in a bank holdup and two children drowning after the car hijacked by that same bank robber goes off a bridge. This all culminated in Disney’s first ever PG-rated animated feature The Black Cauldron, with its cavalcade of disturbing images that at times seem to come from Ralph Bakshi’s imagination, minus a good percentage of the fascistic overtones.
But even as part of that eclectic bag of films, Tron stood out then as much as it does now, albeit for different reasons. Made on a budget of $17 million by writer-director Steven Lisberger, whose one previous feature as a helmer, Animalympics, was an animated short turned television project that wound up premiering on HBO, Tron was not based on any existing property. Through its custom-designed and groundbreaking special effects, it aimed to imagine what a life lived inside a computer program might be like, by rendering it as a state-of-the-art video game. Even allowing for the fact that Tron the movie preceded and inspired Tron the arcade game and Tron the home video game(s), it still has my vote for the best game adaptation ever. Tron performed okay at the box office, grossing back just over twice its costs at $36 million, but that didn’t make it the likeliest candidate for a sequel, and particularly one that would cost ten times what the original did.
Thirty years later, it has long lost its status as being on the cutting edge of anything, but in that stead, it has come to rest as a sci-fi anomaly of sorts. Lisberger never attempted to duplicate Tron on the big screen (his only other directorial efforts were a 1987 John Cusack teen comedy and a 1989 Isaac Asimov adaptation). Now that the realm of CGI and motion capture animation are where a lot of the special effects in films reside, the look of the film can come across as homespun as an etching by Miyazaki. Tron once looked to (be) the future - in perhaps the way that flying cars seemed to in the middle part of the last century - but now it’s an emblem of an alternate past via the road not travelled. In a way that’s quaint (not meant condescendingly), it wears the neon-colored hearts of Lisberger and his collaborators on its techno-sleeve, something that carries it past the clunkiness of its storytelling.
Tron Legacy arrived last December via three decades of false starts, retoolings, a 2002 first-person “sequel” videogame (Tron 2.0) and bearing the pressure of being the jumping-off point for future platforms of the Tron brand (including another videogame, a television series set to debut in 2012, and the possibility of a new trilogy of feature films featuring the new characters introduced in Tron Legacy). Considered in retrospect after viewing it last week, it is an odd mix of remake, reboot, and franchise (re) launch with a storyline designed to continue - somewhat awkwardly - from the original, and then cancel out those elements to make way for storylines hinted at (or barely suggested) by brief scenes early on and at the end.
To carry this one step further, the importance of the Tron brand over the Legacy aspect of things is also intriguing to me. Note the Tron logo/title gets prime real estate at the start of the film while Tron Legacy is shunted off to the end credits with Legacy in much smaller font, as it is on the poster. In the recently reissued edition of Tron with multiple versions of Tron Legacy and bonus material, Tron has been heralded as “The Original Classic,” perhaps so it will stand out from Tron Legacy, where the subtitle seems to fade into the background on both the cover and the spine.
With all that intervening time to work on a screenplay and story, and with the task eventually falling to a pair of writers from Lost, it wouldn’t be a misdirected hope that the plot and dialogue of Tron Legacy would rise above that of Tron. Unfortunately, since this turns out to be a placeholder film, the result is a storyline that reproduces all the major beats and key action sequences of Tron and infuses them with elements from other s/f films, most notably the philosophical mysticism of The Matrix films (man vs. machine), and the cyberpunk Pinocchio-esque journey at the heart of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (a boy searching for a father figure in a bright, garish metropolis).
In the vein of borrowing/homage/rip-off, even the movie’s poster art and a climatic scene from Tron Legacy boldly recreate the same iconic moments from their Tron counterparts. (The movie goes self-referentially one step even further and features a repurposed Tron poster - not for the movie, but for the Tron game as it exists in the world of Tron Legacy - in the bedroom of a young boy.)
And from a financial standpoint, how did Disney fare in their attempt to embark on setting a new blaze of Tron hysteria (or at least mild mania?) The fact that they are proceeding with the previously mentioned television show and another movie (which conceivably could be less expensive since they won’t be reinventing the wheel technology-wise) is really the only answer, but it can’t have been an easy one. After opening to $45 million domestically, it went on to recoup its budget back here - barely - with $172 million. Overseas kicked in approximately $230 million for around $400 million worldwide.
What I don’t grasp is how Disney sees this franchise eliciting the same kind of excitement the next time around. There was pent-up demand in some quarters and to a modest degree it filled the slot of Christmas 2010’s Avatar, but domestically I see any continuation of this delivering decreasing domestic returns on the order of the Narnia series. I also don’t see it expanding its success in foreign markets, but with The Fast and Furious, Ice Age, and Pirates of the Caribbean sequels continuing to deliver ever-greater overseas returns, this could be shortsightedness on my part.
I haven’t yet gotten to the plot, the performances, the visuals, or the music yet and though I have been actively avoiding the former, I will touch on it first as my observations about a key element blend in very nicely with my thought on Jeff Bridges’ “dual” roles. On the surface, Tron Legacy is just like all the other “boy has father, loses father, finds father being held captive in a secret digital world and endeavors to rescue him” stories out there. (In that regard, it fits in very nicely in the long line of Disney films where parents are absent or dead.)
Plot: While I accept that Sam and Kevin Flynn (humans/users) can get sucked into the virtual world and that by the same token, Quorra (a program) can exit the Tron world to enjoy a nice ride on the back of Sam’s motorcycle and glimpse her first sunrise (the one truly human note in the film and a well-played understated moment), I still don’t understand the promised utopia that Flynn Sr. claimed to have stumbled into with the virtual world or the threat of world destruction that Clu (Kevin Flynn’s virtual alter ego) aimed to unleash by escaping into our world with hordes of corrupted programs made live flesh. At the risk of offending those who have put time and thought into it, I honestly don’t think it matters. The plot and Tron world both appear to collapse these junctures and distinctions by the very end, leaving me left to ponder (SPOILER) if Cillian Murphy’s unbilled cameo in the film’s first reel as the son of the villain from Tron could in any way possibly point towards where future installments are headed.
I also have time to ruminate over the film’s uneasy blend of hippie-ish idealism and state of the art technology. While I don’t begrudge Kevin Flynn’s philanthropic motives as ascribed by the plot, he seems to have morphed from the late 20-something computer hacker/slacker of the first film into a benevolent bearded sage who seems like he would have been at the forefront of sit-ins and protests in the 1960s. From a timeline perspective this makes no sense, but it does from a cultural standpoint simply by benefit of having Jeff Bridges reprise his role from the first film, looking and talking, meditating, and pounding his hands on virtual walkways like the unlikeliest blend of The Dude, Neo, and Gandalf. His presence is enough to grant Tron: Legacy some distinction even if he is given as little to do in the film, as he is able to do for the film.
Performances: As Sam and Quorra, Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde acquit themselves nicely by being pretty faces onto which we can project our thoughts and emotions on what it might be like to encounter your father in the unlikeliest of places or to never have seen a sunrise. Michael Sheen pops up in a small splashy role (about the only splash there is), and his presence in a film like this or the Underworld films or the Twilight films or that Pierce Brosnan-Julianne Moore comedy always throws me for a loop, as I always see him as Tony Blair or David Frost. I don’t want to deny anyone his or her range, but I think he suffers from Kenneth Branagh thespian overacting hamminess when left unchecked. On the opposite end, I was happy for Bruce Boxleitner to also reprise his role from Tron and deliver a quiet weariness to his three scenes.
Music: Daft Punk provides the score (and cameo as DJs at the establishment run by Sheen’s character) and it is no small praise to say that their music (performed with help from The London Orchestra to achieve its symphonic richness) carries the film and helps it rise above at several key moments. As one example, I am thinking of the bubbling, gently building track (aptly titled “The Son of Flynn”) that kicks off the great transition from Sam Flynn as a teen riding off on his bike in anger to the adult Sam tearing up city streets on his motorcycle. If at times some tracks settle into John Williams territory standard bombast, these are balanced by compositions of such sweep and fullness, it becomes impossible to imagine this Tron world should sound like anything else.
The Visuals: Tron Legacy is eye candy and glorious sugar for the peepers at that. The computer world feels like spending two hours under the backlight at your favorite club, and even on my home screen in 2D, the luminescent glow was potent and… oddly soothing. The film’s schema of fluorescent colors draped over black backgrounds should reasonably grow monotonous as the film nears the two-hour mark, but director Joseph Kosinki finds ways of pushing the film along, notably by shooting action sequences so that the flow of events can actually be followed.
The one visual trick that doesn’t work - creating a late '80s-era Jeff Bridges face for Kevin/Clu results in, surprise, a creepy fake Jeff Bridges - doesn’t hurt the film since Clu is the villain and not meant to seem relatable (note how the camera stays away as much as possible from showing Kevin’s full face in the early scene set in real world 1989). Almost lifelike, but still just not quite, it’s the true ghost in the machine, but not one that keeps Tron Legacy from being a gorgeously passable diversion.
Next time: an iconic '80s hero/villain returns to our troubled modern times, and finds out his portable phone is a tad big now.