Unfortunately, I can't take pictures reliably in college (turns out beige desks make for shitty backdrops) but I can talk my ass off about movies. This isn't so much a review as a retrospective; so let's talk about a movie exactly four people still care about! Of course, I'm referring to Tron. Tron is an enigma, because depending on who you talk to, it can mean one of two totally different things. My father, for example, has never seen Legacy and only knows Tron as that 80's movie with the cheesy hockey suits and Jeff Bridges in his sexiest years. I grew up on both films, so Tron to me means something between the original and Legacy; something of an evolution between the two.
I wouldn't realize the importance Tron would have in my life until around a year ago, however. We are currently in month eight of America's COVID-19 pandemic, so I had a lot of time over the Summer as classes ended. I decided at some point to rewatch Tron (1982)—that movie I hadn't seen in years but fondly remembered from my younger days with a DVD player. Tron was cool; I kind of knew what to expect. Tron Legacy (2010) is what really caught me off-guard. I vaguely remembered the plot, but only the visuals really stuck with me over the years. Despite having seen it probably multiple times as a younger child, watching it this year was a pretty fresh experience.
Let me tell you, it fucking rocked. I knew the visuals were gonna be pretty cool, and the plot was as fine as it could have been, but the music and details were on point. A friend of mine pejoratively described the film as a two-hour music video, and I completely agree; but I don't think it's a bad thing. It's a proof of concept for a style and an aesthetic, one that wouldn't be fully realized until Tron: Uprising (2012-2013) would air years later. Uprising is excellent, but I'll go into further detail about that later. Even the brief snippets we saw of The Grid in Legacy were excellent at conveying what life there was like; the End of Line club, the Games, and the entire premise of an uprising. This is all ignoring the importance of the ISOs and what they would do to the story (Quorra is hot, by the way). In a vacuum, the culture is interesting.
Of course, this is all something of a carryover from the original Tron. It's easy to dismiss the original as a Disney science fiction action movie for eight year-olds, but there is more thought put into that. Have you ever seen the deleted "love" scene between Yori and Tron? Besides the entire implication that these programs can experience romance (something, once again, expanded upon in Uprising), Yori remarks that her apartment is "very illegal;" law wouldn't play a role in the culture of the Old System again until Tron 2.0, which features Jet Bradley evading security programs. Of course, that's just a deleted scene. If you'd like to explore what showed in theaters, look no further than the core plot of the film.
According to RAM and Tron, the MCP was rounding up programs who still believed in the users. Later in the film, it's revealed by Tron that he believes users would only act carefully and logically. This is something of a religion; the users are the gods and the programs the followers. Besides the bizarre humanization of ambiguously sentient electronic signals, this reveals culture. This is why I think the new material gets too much credit; much of it is drawn from the old. Don't get me wrong, though, I adore Legacy. Since the start of this semester, I've watched it five times. I respect that the writers didn't shove the original aside, but I wish the fans would follow suit.
There's a lot more I could say about Tron, but this summarizes my thoughts. It's a loss of potential. Two wonderful movies and a fantastic television show, and yet not a single plot was actually concluded. Dillinger returns to the story following Legacy, but obviously we'll never know how that turned out. Quorra's existence on Earth will never be explored, and Beck's uprising gained some momentum in the end but we won't know where that went either (at least we know it failed). Where the hell is the future of Tron?
