Series Minded: Trons

[Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop]

Tron (1982, d. Steven Lisberger - Disney+)
Tron: Legacy (2010, d. Josef Kosinski - Disney+/Blu-ray [my internet crapped out about halfway through so I had to switch formats, and let me say physical was so much better])
Tron: Ares (2025, d. Joachim Rønning - in theatre, IMAX 3-D)

Tron debuted in 1982, 43 years ago, as an extremely modest success, at least financially, making its budget back and a little extra for the Disney coffers. But it was not the nu-Star Wars smash that its corporate overlords had hoped. Toys went on discount, and the merchandising blitz and tie ins came and went. It’s only resounding wins were the piles of quarters dumped into its fairly radical (and still alluring) arcade cabinets.

Steven Lisberger’s idea for Tron would basically become the template of so many Pixar and Pixar-esque films: a what if x-inanimate objects or concepts had feelings and lives and culture and civilization. In Tron’s case, it’s a “what if programs were real?” The reality they exist in is called The Grid, and it was all conceived in a nascent computer age where 64 kilobytes (practically the size of this text document) was considered a lot of processing power. The general populace didn’t really understand computers on a technical level and were barely familiar with them on an operational level. It’s also like the screenwriters of Tron weren’t all that knowledgeable themselves. Either that or they liberated themselves from the restraints of that knowledge in order to make their techno-fantasy world, and frankly it’s a better film for it.

Tron, at its core, is about world building, with a story about a user getting trapped in the digital world as he seeks evidence of a corporate executive having stole his ideas for himself. The bad guy is Encom VP Ed Dillinger (David Warner, The Omen) whose master control program (MCP) started life as a chess game and evolved into a bloatware tyrant absorbing all useful programs and trashing the rest as it rampages its way through corporate and governmental systems. Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, Starman) created a half dozen very lucrative video games that Dillinger stole, passed off as his own, made the company some serious cash and got promoted and while Flynn fired. But Flynn has friends on the inside of Encom who help him get access to find the evidence he needs, only the MCP uses an experimental digitizing laser to zap Flynn into the digital world.

The titular Tron is, effectively, a security watchdog program, and Flynn needs Tron’s help if he’s going to both escape and bring down Dillinger as well as his tyrannical MCP.

Tron opens on the Grid with Flynn’s Clu avatar (also Jeff Bridges) driving a tank through the vector-graphics inspired world, communicating back and forth with Flynn as it seeks the evidence Flynn’s looking for but is overpowered by the MCP’s response team. Clu’s failure immediately takes us to the real world, where we see Dillinger interact with the MCP, concerned over yet another incursion, as well as introduce us to Flynn’s friends Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner, Scarecrow and Mrs. King) and Dr. Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan, Caddyshack). Alan is the creator of Tron, while Lori is the designer of the digitizing laser. There is a half-hearted love triangle (Lora is Flynn’s ex, and is currently dating Alan) that extends to the Grid when Flynn meets their avatars Tron and Yori.

The in-Grid world had three primary designers. Legendary French comics illustrator Jean “Moebius” Giraud worked sets and costumes, primarily, with neo-futurist designer Syd Mead creating the film’s vehicles, and digital commercial artist Peter Lloyd creating the landscapes. As much as the film is known for its extensive use of then cutting edge computer effects, much of it is trick-of-the-eye as painted backdrops and clever use of light and shadow as well as rotoscoping and a lot of manual processing was necessary to build the world. It was a strenuous and laborious process to create the look and feel of the Grid, shot in black and white, with up to ten layers of processing as well as merging with digital effects… it’s the only film of its kind like this and it never fails to impress. It’s so damn unique.

The film’s other trick-of-the-eye is in its use of sound to flesh out its world. There’s nothing else that sounds like Tron, effects wise. As the Skywalker Sound library has gotten pillaged over the years and the sound effects of Star Wars have bled into other films and television, the sounds of Tron remain uniquely its own. Rather than using the primitive 8-bit audio sounds from video games of the era, sound designer Frank Serafine built everything specifically for the film. 

Wendy Carlos, composer known for her pioneering digital compositions, most notably for her scores to A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, creates her own digital audio soundscape here. Like those Toto or Tangerine Dream scores of the fantasy and sci-fi films of the early 80’s, Carlos’s score feels so very coded to its time. Electronic music was still exceptionally primitive at this time, but even at this era, it was being blended into rock and pop to greater effect than as its own enjoyable compositions. But the mix of score with visuals as well as technical adventurousness now cements the film to its time and it feels so pointedly a snapshot of an era, a piece of history [something not lost on the makers of the new Tron: Ares, but also sadly not replicated].

Tron is simultaneously not a great movie and also a mindblowing one. It’s so awkward in its conception of programs as living beings, and the society of The Grid makes no sense, and their worship of users as deities seems especially cruel, but at the end of the day, when Jeff Bridges is your guide into an adventurous world of kick ass games like disc wars and lightcycles, it’s too enjoyable to really care that deeply about where it goes wrong.

The first resurrection of the Tron property came with "Tron 2.0" in 2003, a first-person-shooter videogame that was a sort of testbed for the appetite for new Tron content. It was modestly well received and modestly successful. Modesty would be an enduring theme for Tron.

2010, though, had designs on blowing the modesty right off of the perception of Tron. Josef Kosinski’s directorial debut would cost at least 170 million dollars to produce, and every damn penny of it is up on the screen. Kosinski, an architect by training, really wanted to reintroduce The Grid for a modern era. To do so he would design the living hell out of it. Though indebted to the first film, and holding true to the light-piping effect, and the bold colours, Kosinski and his team really leaned into the shadows and contrasts with this film, to make the colours pop even more, and boy do they pop.

The light cycles, the Recognizers and the tanks, the buildings, the costumes, the landscapes, they’re all taking those original designs and reimagining them with absolute love and care. The vision of Tron: Legacy is an utterly stunning one, and just may be the most eye-popping movie ever made. Not even joking.

The story of Legacy is a sweeping one, following Kevin Flynn’s kid, Sam (Garrett Hedlund, Pan) as he gets sucked into the grid on what he thinks is an accident, but turns out to be the work of a new Clu, designed by Flynn years earlier to create the perfect system. Unfortunately Clu became a tyrant, chasing the impossibility of perfection, with nothing to guide him. Kevin Flynn has been trapped in the grid for about 20 years, he missed Sam grow up, and he watched his other baby, the Grid, fall victim to authoritarian rule. The world inside the Grid is just as bad as the outside.

On top of the drama of Sam reuniting with his father, and Clu’s own “father issues” , the film seeds the story of the ISOs, a unique breed of program that sprang up organically, not programmed. New life. Flynn was on the cusp of introducing them to the world when Clu’s regime took over, and his jealousy and distrust of ISOs led to mass extermination. The only survivor is Quorra (Olivia Wide, House M.D.).

Flynn and Quorra must get Sam out of the Grid and into the real world before Clu does, as he’s breeding an army to head in to the real world  and make it the “perfect system” too.

Tron: Legacy, while certainly not the first of the “legasequels” definitely was at the forefront of the trend that ran wild in the 2010s and still has not abated. It’s also one of the best, if only because it’s “franchise restarting” designs didn’t yield a film that feels unresolved by the end of it. Sure, there were seeds for where a follow-up might go, and yes Cilian Murphy was cast in a small role as Ed Dillnger’s kid as foundation for a larger role later on, but the story of Tron: Legacy is self-contained much in the same way Tron was. It builds the world, tells its specific story and it ends with a basically happy ending.

Rewatching Tron: Legacy [which I seem to do often] is always transportive. It is a world I get sucked into and a world I am absolutely transfixed by. It’s not just visually attractive, it’s sexy, without ever intoning sex. It’s just pure dopamine fuel, eye candy so sweet you’ll have ocular diabetes afterwards. The sound design, once again, is on point, but unlike the first movie where even the footfalls announce themselves, here the sound design is so clearly second in line to the Daft Punk soundtrack.  The soundtrack is part of the otherworldliness of the Grid, it’s so well integrated into the film that it feels like it’s impossible to separate the sounds from the visuals… and yet, the soundtrack is such incredible listening on its own. But the reverse likely isn’t true…as pretty as the film is, it loses much without the score.

Bridges hit his academy award-winning elder statesman phase at this exact time, with his Crazy Heart Oscar win the year before and True Grit reteaming him with the Coen Brothers the same year, it’s a reminder of just how much he brings to any film he’s in. Nearly every line delivery (only exception: “Nice!”) is pure gold, carrying either the full weight of Bridges seniority, or his post Lebowski Dude-ness, sometimes both at once. The first Tron movie would be primarily a curious relic without his affable persona as its demi-heroic lead.  Garrett Hedlund got a bad rap at the time of being another of the “bland” young leads that Hollywood was trying to force out into the theatre. I don’t think Hedlund particularly pops, but he’s definitely got character, and his performance is full of subtlety.  He’s not the brash, big-talking, jokey hero… he plays a thrill-seeking rich kid with daddy issues as a very down-to-earth, likeable, believable guy..with daddy issues.  Olivia Wilde’s Quorra is maybe the only “born sexy yesterday” character that should be given a pass. The camera is definitely in love with her, but it’s never objectifying her. The camera looks at her like the way she looks at Sam, intrigued, captivated, curious and admiring. She is a skilled fighter, and she’s full of curiosity. She’s not dumb, but she’s only experienced life inside the Grid, and so her wanting to know more of the outside world where her mentor comes from is naturally her focal point with Sam. It’s too bad the character doesn’t have more of the weight of being the last of the ISO’s, the trauma of having watched her entire race get eradicated, sitting on her shoulders, but, to paraphrase a Bridges line, that would be, like, a total bummer man.

There are few movies I love watching more than Tron:Legacy, and there are few theatrical experiences that legitimately blew my mind like Tron:Legacy. For a long time I held out hope that Kosinski would return to Tron and deliver another all out audio-visual assault, but I knew once Top Gun: Maverick became the biggest movie of 2022 [not a legasequel, btw, as often erroneously ascribed] that we would not be getting Kosinski back on Tron unless he had an absolute passion to do so. He does not.

So Tron:Ares being announced not long after Top Gun: Maverick was a definite surprise, and one that I welcomed… with trepidation.

The first trailer whetted the appetite, as it presented light cycles and Recognizers moving through the real world (Vancouver) and seemed to maintain the same bold contrasts of Tron: Legacy. Those jet black blacks and those vibrant popping trails (mostly red in Ares’ case). The soundtrack, at first, was the tag on the end of the trailer. Nine Inch Nails. Yes, it’s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the duo responsible for many of the best soundtracks of the past dozen years, but they’re doing it as fucking Nine Inch Nails! Getting the band back together! It would go on to be the major point of the film’s marketing, boldly proclaiming the NIN soundtrack early and often in commercials. So we know the producers at least did  one thing right.

But the flipside was the film stars Jared Leto.

Leto (House of Gucci) is a frustrating performer and as a human being, real suspect. Reports of his “method” antics on set, and reports of his real-world activities leaves nothing but a bad taste in one’s mouth. On screen, he can deliver performances that range from incredible to damn annoying. It’s a backhanded compliment from Fight Club – “I felt like destroying something beautiful” (referring to the scene where Ed Norton bashes Leto’s face in during a fight) – that’s hard to erase from one’s memory every time you see him.

So this film had a lot of goodwill thanks to Tron: Legacy and NIN, but also had an uphill battle.

The end result is kind of a draw.

Directed by Joachim Rønning, the less-than visionary director of the last of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (for now) and the Maleficent sequel from a script from David DiGilio (The Terminal List), the creative impetus is not anything other than “make content to see if the property is still viable”.

With Tron: Legacy, the film was accompanied by a blitz of toys, comics, video games, an animated prequel series, merchandizing tie-ins. It didn’t gross the near-billions that I think Disney was hoping for, but it was a modest success at 400 million globally, and it’s had staying power, in no small part thanks to the Light Cycle rides at Disney parks.  Tron is never going to be the cash cow that Disney wants all its properties to be, but if the property is treated with reverence and care, then the fanbase will keep coming along.

There’s no multimedia merchandizing blitz for Tron:Ares, and even less love and care shown for the property in the movie itself. The film plays out nothing like the adventurous world building of the prior two films, and instead opts for a 2000s-era action film centered around the good guys and bad guys chasing a maguffin. It’s not exactly paint-by-numbers, because the Tron elements force at least a few intriguing deviations, but where those deviations SHOULD have been the story of the film, it can’t seem to get back to its nonsense plot fast enough.

Tron: Ares opens much like Tron:Legacy does, with a voiceover from Bridges explaining the Grid, and then news highlights filling the audience in on what’s happened in the world of Encom in the years since. The point here being to close the door on any further adventures of Sam Flynn and Quorra while tepidly introducing both our human protagonist, Eve Kim (Greta Lee, Past Lives) co-CEO of Encom, and Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters, X-Men: Apocalypse), the newest head of Dillinger Corp.  Both companies are in a race to bring the digital world to reality, and they’ve developed the 3-D printing technology to do it, to create living things and functional products, except the technology only lasts for 29 minutes before cohesiveness fatally breaks down. Eve wants to use the technology for the benefit of society and Dillinger wants to use it to make weapons.

Eve has discovered “the permanence code” from Flynn’s records and Dillinger wants it and will do anything to get it, including sending his Master Control Program, Ares (Leto), off Grid and into the real world to find Eve and take the code from her by force. The mission is successful, except Ares is discovering emotions and humanity in himself, and wants the permanence code for himself. The result is against programming, protecting Eve at all costs. So Dillinger sends the ruthless Athena (Jodi Turner-Smith, Bad Monkey) after them and she takes control of Dillinger Corp, prints out her own army, and is willing to decimate The City (Vancouver) to do so.

The plot seems like your standard direct-to-streaming sci-fi action movie premise, and lacks most of the Tron flavour. Our main “Grid” protagonist, Ares, is a nothingburger of a character, much like many a lead from said 2000’s-style action spectacles. Ares is just a curious program who has such a strong desire not to be a program anymore that he defies orders. He’s a weapon with a heart. He’s the Terminator in Terminator 2, with Athena being the T-1000. It’s largely been done before, and mostly better.

Leto is fine in the role, inoffensive, but there’s no real charm either. The character should be discovering himself, but there’s nothing behind the performance that says that’s what he’s doing, he just seems like a wide-eyed know-it-all who knows he doesn’t know it all (it’s really hard to power wash the smarm off of him). We’ve seen the little digital boy wants to be a real boy story so many times by now, it’s beyond cliche and nothing new is added to that cliche here. There is a scene where Ares encounters a legacy program of Flynn and we get even older than The Old Man Bridges, still full of more charm and life and unique energy than Leto 30 years his junior. 

Greta Lee does so much of the heavy lifting in this film. She has an innate sense of self-awareness that at once displays strength, smarts, confidence and vulnerability. She’s so alive, blood-pumping, playing against a character with barely a spark of life in him, whose veins bleed cold code. Jodi Turner-Smith needs to remain cold-cold-cold to the point of evil, which is always a flaw in these stories. They even state in the endgame that she was just fulfilling her programming, but at times it comes off as vengeful, emotional, and it’s too much for the character. I’m sure it’s what Turner was asked to do, and she does it well, I think it deserved more restraint. Peters as Dillnger is, again, an underbaked character. He’s so singularly focused on his objective that there’s no sense of calculation, just an idiot with a one-track mind. Gillian Anderson (American Gods) plays his mother, his advisor, the CEO he succeeded, and she’s trying to be the voice of reason and conscience and he ignores her. The conflicts between mother and son should be fascinating, but they’re like bargain basement Succession riffs and Peters falls short of being anything but a comic book villain.

The best moments in the film are two “Grid” sequences: the first in which Ares and Eve must escape Dillinger’s grid, and the second is Ares’ journey into the 1980’s Grid.  Both should have been full-act adventures on their own, instead they are mere sequences within the film that don’t amount to a whole hell of a lot. The ‘80’s Grid is largely a nostalgia tug that, sadly, has no reason to execute an action sequence (wouldn’t it have been more fun if Athena had infected the Grid and resurrected legacy protective programs and Ares had to find Tron to help him escape.... Or something?).  The journey into Dillinger’s Grid comes at the right time, right at the time where I was about to check out of the film for not really having the same vibe as the other films in the series. It just doesn’t last long enough and doesn’t explore what life in DIllinger’s militaristic Grid is really like.

The climax of the film, with Athena bringing a Recognizer into the real world (I don’t think that hangar bay was big enough to print that out completely…some assembly required?) is really the only “Tron-in-the-real-world” aspect that fully delivers on awe. The light cycles riding around Vancouver never quite feel tangibly part of their environment, and people in Tron costumes walking around real-world sets, well, often feel like people in Tron costumes walking around real-world sets. The Recognizer sequence seems to get, late in the film, how Tron-stuff works in the real world, but it’s still a sequence that feels like an action sequence and lacks real narrative thrust.

I watched the film in IMAX 3-D, and I have to say that 3-D technology, in IMAX at the very least, has advanced leaps and bounds since the last time I watched a 3-D movie. The depth of field seemed well orchestrated (especially where the light trails were involved) and the 3-D-ness of it all rarely called attention to itself. At the same time, I did have to wonder if some of the difficulty I was having with appreciating the action sequences was because of the 3-Dness, or if it was how Rønning shot the film. I didn’t have full clarity on the action sequences at all times. The fight choreography was also seriously underwhelming.

The Nine Inch Nails soundtrack is huge. It delivers, mostly. Because it’s playing with aspect from Legacy and the original, there are obvious nods to the Carlos and Daft Punk scores (and Carolos and Daft Punk sounds outside of their Tron work) as well NIN seem to crib notable sounds from Radiohead, Bjork and Massive Attack which left me puzzled as to the intent of the nod (I wonder how many would actually notice). It’s a kick ass soundtrack that, unfortunately, isn’t in complete lock-step with the film, and at times overpowers the imagery on screen.

Tron: Ares is satisfactory (but not satisfying). Like the prior two films it has an ending, but offers a braindead post-script (two actually) that tease where it could go in the future, and we're never going to get there.  Outside of it’s soundtrack, is not daring in any way. It does not live up to the legacy its predecessors established, and never fully feels connected to its past despite all the references and desperate efforts to tangentially connect it (really, the “permanence code” should have been related to the ISOs, to Quorra, but I suspect Disney was hoping to cater to a new new audience more than servicing an existing fanbase…and fair enough). It’s true crime is just being generic in its storytelling and action sensibilities in having the real world and the digital one collide. There should be more meat on those bones.

Tron:Ares will, unfortunately, put the lid back on the box for at least another 15 years before Disney decides to dust it off again. We'll see then what kind of effort they're willing to put into this modest property.

[Poster talk... quickly, as I've been at this for long enough. The main Tron poster, of Tron and Yuri and the ascending data disc in the (original) laser-in-the-sky is one of the series' most iconic images, so it was obviously replicated for both Legacy and Ares. Legacy tries to sexify it up a bit with Quorra's hand on Sam Flynn (which doesn't happen in the film), while Ares spoils the whole meeting of Ares with Flynn in the 80's Grid. Not sure how I feel about that. I really don't like the Ares' poster representing this, though).

Other posters for OG Tron are pretty clunky.  For Legacy, there's a plethora of posters highlighting all the gorgeous visual elements of the film, the costuming and vehicles with a big focus on the light cycles. Ares likewise focuses on the light cycles heavily in its posters.  I like the poster that highlights that Legacy introduces a new vehicle (though Legacy did not have a plane or glider poster which is too bad). Ares only introduced one new vehicle, a sort of monster truck/snowplow hybrid, and it didn't make the posters.

I didn't talk about Legacy's "digital de-aging" here, but it's curious that there are many posters spotlighting Clu and his weird cgi-reconstruction of Bridges young face.

Ares' poster series delivers the usual spate of character posters...so boring. It also leans heavily into the red accent of the film, but ignores the Triangle motif that the film tries to establish early on, only to abandon by the end of the first act. There are some Leto posters and just as many Turner-Smith posters, so, to quote Flynn... Nice. There's also a heavy focus for Ares on Tron-in-the-real-world including a series of posters with a light cycle driving through or past famous international landmarks. Meh.]