As I went through the coverage of Comic-Con reveals and announcements in the summer of 2008, I fondly remember watching a taped copy of a surprise teaser: TR2N. I had read the description of the teaser, and as I watched it for myself, I instantly knew moments in that it was related to TRON, a movie I knew of but had never seen. It was a pretty interesting trailer, but the big reveal at the end, with an older Jeff Bridges watching as his younger self destroys another “player” meant nothing to me in context. I simply marveled at how realistic the younger version looked.

TR2N eventually came to be known as TRON: Legacy, and as anyone who has been paying attention to the film scene knows, Disney has been promoting the hell out of it. I am talking total market saturation -- you cannot go anywhere, watch anything or look at anything without seeing some form of an ad for this movie. You remember the phrase of “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? Well, it looks like Disney forgot, and has bet the farm on this one. The lucrative marketing deals, sequel development, a TV show -- it is all rumored, and is all likely going to come to fruition should the film do well. The tracking is all over the map, and much like Avatar last year, no one has any idea how well it is going to do (/Film’s David Chen wrote a great article on its potential failure, beating me to the punch.)

It is not like it will be a huge deal for Disney -- they already have the top two highest grossing films of the year (the Best Picture nominee-to-be Toy Story 3 and the nearly unwatchable Alice in Wonderland), and Tangled continues to bring the heat. But of course, its failure also means studios may be less likely to invest and hedge their bets on unique and new ideas like TRON: Legacy. So the outcome of its release is a bit of a Catch-22.

With promotion running wild and no real experience with the background material going into TRON: Legacy, I felt the easiest and most obvious thing to do was watch the original film so I knew what I was getting into. But the DVD has been out of print for years now, relegated back into the Disney vault of occasional return. And apparently the local library lost their copies, as had Blockbuster Video. eBay has them, but the going price is over $50 for a used copy. I like buying blind occasionally, but fifty-plus dollars on a used DVD of a movie I have never seen did not really sound all too feasible.

Easy solution -- wait for the surely inevitable Blu-ray release a month before, with movie cash to use towards the sequel. Except, Disney did not bother with that bit of self-promotion (one of the few arenas of marketing they are not in). Rumors abound about a recent screening of a restored print of TRON, and the unintentional laughter and negative response the film got from a generation of filmgoers who had never seen the movie. The response was apparently so negative, that the higher-ups felt a wider audience would feel the same way, not bother with the sequel and thereby sabotage the studio’s own attempt at box office glory. The studio has denied up and down that this ever happened, yet has still made it nearly impossible to track down a copy of the film.

So clearly, you know where I had to turn to find a watchable version of the film, not cut into 97 pieces.

For the uninitiated like me, TRON revolves around a young software engineer and programmer named Kevin Flynn (Bridges), who was unceremoniously dumped from his company ENCOM by their new senior exec Ed Dillinger (David Warner). Turns out Dillinger found a stack of computer games Flynn had developed, stole the code, claimed them as his own and rapidly started moving up the ranks. Flynn tries to hack into the ENCOM computer system to find the files to prove this, but is blocked by the newly installed Master Control Program, or MCP for short.

We quickly find out the MCP is up to no good, as Dillinger locks out a chunk of their current staff from accessing the ENCOM mainframe, including Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner). Bradley had been developing security software to monitor the MCP -- software he called TRON. Flynn gets access into a computer terminal at ENCOM and as he attempts to find the files that prove his original ownership, is zapped by a laser and teleported into the ENCOM mainframe. Inside, he has to survive “games”, encounters with other “programs” and try to help destroy the dictatorship being run by the MCP. While inside, he encounters and befriends a fellow “freedom fighter” -- a program named…you guessed it, TRON.

Did that small description just make your head spin? Did it make any sense at all? Cult classic or not, this is a lot of heady stuff to try and grasp onto for anyone. Also, rather shocking to someone who had no idea about the content of the film, TRON is basically a secondary character helping in Flynn’s quest. He’s not the “game” or mainframe Flynn is zapped into, he is not Flynn, and he is not the bad guy controlling all the strings behind the scenes. Why name the movie after him? It seems kind of silly in retrospect, does it not?

The story takes short cuts left and right, is all over the place in terms of its dialogue and characters, and plays its plot points and action sequences fast and loose with no real sense of direction. What can happen within the ENCOM mainframe is never really discussed, and as Flynn’s “user” abilities start appearing (think Neo in The Matrix), the film never really sets any form of idea over what can and cannot be done. Things just simply happen to help advance the plot, almost absentmindedly. I frequently drifted off and had to rewind to catch things set-up mere seconds before they happened. The film runs a lean 96 minutes, but feels like it has been cut to pieces.

Yet horrendous hack job or not, it was the visuals that left an impression in 1982 and stand out in 2010. Sure, they look horrendously dated (even more so than a lot of other movies that came out in the early 1980’s) and will likely look even worse when restored and upconverted to high-definition. But the fact that this mix of computer and hand-drawn animation even existed at the time is nothing short of spectacular. There is just an incredible amount of bravado in the visual style of the film; such a highly developed sense of detail and imagination. Director Steven Lisberger knew what he wanted to create, and seeing his largely uncompromised design on screen is simply wondrous. I can only imagine the wonder, the delight and the complete and utter confusion the original audiences went through watching the film. It is unlike anything I have ever seen, and is truly a unique and ambitious vision, somewhat ahead of its time. It is no wonder why the film failed horribly when it first came out (but then, practically everything got crushed in the wake of E.T. that year).

But here is what I do not get. The film not only has a loyal cult following, but enough of one to develop a big-budget sequel nearly 30 years later? While it helped with the background going into TRON: Legacy, I cannot really think of any reason to reimagine, reinvent, remake -- whatever word you want to use to describe it -- TRON for a new audience. Money and marketing potential aside, it just seems baffling and almost completely unneeded. In a year filled to the brim with remakes, sequels and all kinds of opportunities for nostalgia, it stands out as the oddest release. Disney may like that distinction, but are audiences going to warm up to it? Only time will tell. There is a lot riding on it (including a remake of The Black Hole, another obscure failed Disney project made in the late 1970’s that is much better forgotten from what I hear), and with so many rumored projects in development and potential agony over the thought of everything Disney can do to bastardize the project like every other one of its golden gooses, you kind of hope it fails.

But when the competition at the box office includes movies like Yogi Bear, Little Fockers and Gulliver’s Travels, you start to hope for humanity and the filmmaking medium as a whole. A Catch-22 if there ever was one.

-- David Baldwin

Postscript: TRON: Legacy opened slightly short of expectations, raking in about $43-million on its opening weekend. Nothing to sneeze at, but then nothing all too incredible either (Avatar opened to a pinch over $77-million last year). It has already zoomed past the total gross of the original TRON (before adjusting), but it has neither critics nor filmgoers particularly over enthused. It would appear we may have another cult movie on our hands. But then, is this going to stop Disney's future plans?

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Further Reading

Geek Speak's TRON: Legacy review, by David Baldwin

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