I just finished watching Tron for the first time and while it is mildly entertaining it is certainly a product of its time. After Disney previewed a teaser for the 2011 sequel TR2N at this year’s Comic Con (description here) I had no idea what was going on since I had not seen the original. Now that I am up to speed it appears Jeff Bridges’ character, Kevin Flynn, is now in control of ENCOM, but to what degree, how and why I have no idea. At the end of the first film you would have to assume Flynn is now the head exec at ENCOM after Dillinger (David Warner) was proven to be a fraud. Has Flynn become a power hungry exec? Is he killing people off in his game for fun? What is going on here?
Let’s first take a look at this 1982 original a little closer.
I am not quite sure I understand what the major infatuation with Tron actually is to begin with. Outside of the light cycle sequence it is all quite boring if you ask me. The action is limited, the soundtrack is too upbeat for its own good and it is all too Disney. This is not a crack on Disney, but the music just felt way too happy for what was going on. I mean, Flynn was going to die in real life if he died inside the system, but is that a concern? Not really. The music would lead you to believe it’s just a happy trot through Oz on the way to see the Wizard. I don’t even think the possibility of Flynn dying is ever even mentioned now that I think about it. Any sign of darkness is gone once Flynn, Tron and Ram escape following the light cycle battle. It was all roses until the finale against Sark and the MCP, which was actually pretty cool, especially when Sark takes a code disc to the dome.
However, one thing the first film does do is set up the sequel with many avenues to go down. Tron was something of a man against the system story, and it opens the door to a man against man inside the system story; it’s just a matter of whether or not man will continue to die while inside the system and how much effect the Disney production factor will have on the film’s storyline.
Obviously The Matrix already ripped off a lot of what Tron brought to the table initially, but in a far more elastic way. Tron is set in a very controlled environment, but it appears there is some leeway for a rogue program inside the system, which essentially is what Neo and Morpheus were when they jacked into the Matrix.
In Tron Flynn doesn’t jack in as much as he is “transported” in, which would make any kind of human-inside-the-machine interaction an intentional action on the system’s part as opposed to the rogue action that took place in The Matrix. This breeds a whole new slew of ideas for a sequel story especially now that we know Jeff Bridges is already aboard the production. Sorry, no word yet on Bruce Boxleitner or Cindy Morgan.
How dark can this really get though? The Matrix was rated R and Disney tends to pass off its darker stories to its other houses; Touchstone primarily gets to release the films that are more geared toward adults. Then again, considering this is more of a cyber story (whereas The Matrix was a cyber story with a real world element) much of the “violence” can occur in the cyber world and therefore the worry of blood won’t become an issue. The first film was rated PG and there is no chance a second film would be anything more than PG-13, but I hope they do darken it up a bit.
Tron was one of the first computer generated films so it is to be expected a lot of the emphasis would be showing off this electronic world, but now that CG has become such a movie staple the writers will need to rely more on actual story for the sequel rather than the world its characters inhabit. At least if they want it to be anything more than a fanboy film.
As far as any story information on the sequel goes, everyone is in the dark and we only have that Comic Con teaser to go by. If you want to see that you can only find it online in bootleg tiny version. However it does give way to a theory that the computer world is now something of a real world in terms of involving human participants.
My only guess for what the sequel possibly could be is that Flynn has taken the ability to scan oneself into the system, like he was in the first film, and is giving people a firsthand account of living out their videogame of choice. Things go wrong, I am guessing, when the game believes it is no longer a game and begins killing the participants as opposed to just letting the game end. One thing I don’t see happening is Flynn becoming a bad guy. He may have been a disgruntled hacker in the first film, but he was never a bad guy.
This is all pure speculation of course, and I have no idea how they could turn that into a feature length film since I would hope they would stop use of the game after the first participant death, but who knows? I am looking for anything here simply because that Comic Con teaser was so damned appealing and the first film wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy my interest.
I do have to propose one thing for the sequel. Dumont (pictured above) needs to get a better wardrobe if he is going to be involved. Someone really screwed him over with the Pope hat. Only one man on Earth can really pull that look off and he is much older than Dumont.
End of line.
