Tron 3 is coming (and Garrett Hedlund is confirmed to come back)

[Cutter John]

Well I'm thrilled. The ending of Legacy pretty much cried out for a sequel.

I gues I'm kinda old school. CGI Balrogs are nice, but I much prefer glossy computer generated metallic surfaces and glowing colored lines.

[bullethead]

I really hope the guys working on Tron 3 take a page from Uprising's book in terms of the aesthetic of the Grid, because the black-white-orange color scheme looks pretty lackluster compared to the more diverse color palette Uprising has.

I would not be offended if they gave characters cool powers like Tesler's extension doom arms.

[Harvey]

Neither film is great -- the first is a fascinating failure, the second better, but not great. The best part of both films was Jeff Bridges, who, unless the writers jump through some serious hoops, won't be back for a third installment. That leaves me a little worried about the fate of part three, but I'm in wait-and-see mode.

[Donald Draper]

I would be surprised if Bridges does not return. He is a big draw of these films beyond core sci-fi fans.

[Trekker4747]

Is Olivia Wilde coming back? I only care if she's coming back.

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

Trekker4747 wrote:

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Is Olivia Wilde coming back? I only care if she's coming back.

I was just going to post that. Quorra rocks!

[Admiral_Young]

There's no reason why Olivia shouldn't be back. I believe she's contracted for a sequel (like Garrett) and she did return to voice Quorra in "Tron Uprising". She appeared in the viral videos as well, so I expect her to return.

[Mach5]

Admiral_Young wrote:

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There's no reason why Olivia shouldn't be back. I believe she's contracted for a sequel (like Garrett) and she did return to voice Quorra in "Tron Uprising". She appeared in the viral videos as well, so I expect her to return.

I think she already pretty much confirmed it (I read it in an interview a couple of months ago). Also, Cillian Murphy (Dillinger Jr.) is a must too!

[Mark_Nguyen]

Indeed. Wasn't that pretty much the only reason he was in Legacy int he first place?

I do hope we'll see a new grid though. The one from Legacy was created with the incredible high technology of the late 1980s, so I think the modern interneted, wified, smartphoned series of tubes of the mid 2010s would be real fun to explore!

Mark

[Cutter John]

That was one of my gripes about Legacy. That we didn't see the grid or even the city from the first film represented with current CG tech.

[Christopher]

My problem with Legacy is that it reflected the modern CG aesthetic -- make everything CG look as real as possible -- instead of the aesthetic of the original TRON, which was just the opposite -- to make everything, including the traditional cel animation and the live actors, look as much like CG animation as possible. TRON was essentially an animated movie (at least the Grid portions) using modified images of live actors as an element of the animation. At the time, it was impossible for CGI to resemble reality, so artists were experimenting with it as a new art form, a way to create imagery unlike anything seen before. TRON was an experiment with the new design possibilities of CG and it embraced the unreality of it. In fact, on the TRON DVD commentaries, you can hear the director of the original movie lamenting that filmmakers today have abandoned those experiments and now only use CGI to try to replicate the look of physical reality. Yet that's exactly what Legacy did. It made the Grid look like an exotic but essentially physical world, and even used a lot of physical sets and costumes with glowy bits built in, unlike the hand-animated virtual sets of the original. So it's the exact opposite aesthetic from the original, which is why to me it fails as a continuation. And that's not even counting how drab and monochrome the new Grid is. (Not to mention how wrong they get Flynn's character. He wasn't some populist rebel who wanted information to be free; on the contrary, his goal was entirely capitalist, to reclaim control of his intellectual property and the profit that came with it.)

Uprising comes closer to the aesthetic of the original, since it actually is a CGI cartoon. That's exactly what the makers of the original wanted to create but lacked the technology to achieve, so they had to try to fake it with cel animation and hand-modified images of live actors. Now we can do it for real. Personally I think Legacy should've done all the Grid sequences as full CGI in a stylized design. That would've been truer to the artistic intentions of the original. But Uprising does give us that, although I'm not crazy about the specific design style they use (particularly the ridiculously distorted female figures). Uprising still suffers from using the blander world of the sequel -- I hate it that the region beyond the city is just a lot of snowy mountains instead of the psychedelic landscape of the original -- but at least they let it look cartoony and unreal. And it is at least somewhat more colorful here and there. Plus it's nice to see that the Tron/Renegade costume (or surface texture?) is white instead of black, a nice callback to the original look. (Except I always find it silly when this guy who wants to sneak into facilities with all-black walls and floors does so wearing the only white costume in the whole Grid.)

[marillion]

Some of the best news I've heard this week... I loved Legacy and have found it to be completely watchable time and time again... Uprising has been a pleasure to watch and unlike some, I really like the renderings of the characters. I'll admit to being an unabashed fanboy of both movies...

There are so many ways they could go with a follow up, with or without Bridges, but I'm pretty sure he'll be back in one way or another... He is literally part of the grid now and I'm thinking the next chapter will focus on the Dillingers trying to figure out a way to capture and take over the grid for their own nefarious schemes... Tron will have to be more of a focal point though, and I think that will happen...

[Donald Draper]

Another big problem with Legacy was most of the best ideas of the original were ignored. That the Grid was mirror of our world. Not a copy. That the programs were representations of their human users. There is great potential for using the Grid as a metaphor for our very fast progressing technological real world.

[Christopher]

The idea in the original was really a rather Disneyesque, semi-mystical, fairy-tale view of computers -- that there was this whole world inside computers and programs were living things imbued with the souls of their creators. It wasn't something humans knowingly created or were even aware of until Flynn got zapped inside. It was more of an anthropomorphic cartoon metaphor for computers, the way, say, Osmosis Jones was an anthropomorphic cartoon metaphor for the interior of the human body with talking, personified immune cells and whatnot. It was also kind of a forerunner of the Digimon anime franchise, which also tends to treat the "digital world" as a parallel reality and ascribe animistic consciousness to the software within it.

But Legacy came along in an era when computers were less of a magical, exotic realm, and when the American moviegoing audience (not being prone to animism) wouldn't have been as receptive to a magical cartoon metaphor like that. So they retconned it and treated the Grid more as a computer simulation created by Flynn and its occupants as artificial intelligences he designed. It's a more science-fictional approach rather than the fantasy approach of the original. So it doesn't quite fit.

[marillion]

^^ But the potential is there... I think that was Flynn's ultimate intent (bridging the gap between the digital divide, as it were... I think his vision was to have a Grid that allowed users the ultimate interface. Back when the original came out, a lot of computer users were writers... My friends who had Apple IIs and Commadors wrote programs, exactly like the characters in Tron did... Had Flynn not been trapped inside his own creation, I think his goal would have been realized and we, the people of today, wouldn't be "surface users," or just using the programs created by a handful of programmers.

The potential is there for Sam to continue his father's work in bridging that gap and allow the rest of the real world to become more intertwined with the digital world now that true AI (the ISOs) has been realized. Not that the prospect of that isn't fraught with it's own set of problems...

OR - Maybe it's just a Disney movie and I should really just relax...