Only Quora (Olivia Wilde) remains.Īs a program attempting to destroy his creator and likeness, CLU is a rather curious character to be realized with VFX that could, in theory, replace actors. In the setting of Tron: Legacy, the ISOs are now closer to humans than programs, which is why CLU wiped them out. They’re also a far cry from the single-minded and somewhat predictable CLU, whose actions Flynn can read at every turn.
The ISOs are manifestations of the Grid’s true potential, more flexible than the regular programs and apparently beyond Flynn’s understanding. While Tron: Legacy on the surface is about taking a mystical approach to digital life, the film as viewed in 2020 reads as a warning against using “digital actors.” One of the main elements of the story is the emergence of “ISOs,” beings made from an impossible combination of technology and biology (Flynn calls them “bio-digital jazz”). Even with the guiding hand of a veteran like Martin Scorsese, who utilized the tech to depict Robert De Niro’s lifetime in The Irishman, the technique remains firmly rooted in the uncanny valley. It’s glaring enough that you wonder why anyone tried again. While normal-faced Bridges eventually pops up, CLU remains front and center in Tron: Legacy, continually confronting the audience with his uncanny appearance, often framed looking directly to the camera, a creepy reminder of his nature as a program wearing a human suit. The tender atmosphere of an early scene, in which Kevin nostalgically recounts the events of the first film as a bedtime story, is immediately undercut when he finally turns around to see a dead-eyed Jeff Bridges clone. But in Legacy, its use turns nightmarish. The point being: de-aging was ready to take off. A similar “digital skin-grafting” effect created by Lola VFX would be used on Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in X-Men: The Last Stand. It’s since been used in 15 films (many of which are from Disney, who were even sued for stealing it).
Even at the time, critics described the effect as resembling “ one of the Westworld robots, but less real” and a “ simulacrum that here looks like an animated death mask” Handled by Digital Domain, which had made strides with similar tech in David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Tron: Legacy was an experimental moment for digital de-aging after throwing out a mould of a younger Bridges designed by legendary makeup artist Rick Baker ( An American Werewolf in London, for starters), the production team decided to undertake the task entirely using Mova Contour, a program created by former Apple Computer engineer Steve Perlman. While the rest of the film’s sleek digital effects have aged well, less enduring is the film’s usage of digital de-aging.
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The film prioritizes aesthetic pleasure - knowing full well there’s no Star Wars or Marvel or Fast and the Furious setup that could result in its excessive, digital grandeur - but there’s still insight to be found in the cinematic artifact, as so much of the last decade in studio moviemaking can be seen in and traced back to this point. It’s all paired with a soundtrack by Daft Punk that mixes in sumptuous, ethereal soundscapes with the pulse-pounding beats for which they’re known. In a fairly straightforward gotta-get-home adventure, Joseph Kosinski, a commercial director who made his feature debut with the film, updates and streamlines the original’s basic visual ideas with stunning monochromatic structures and vehicles illuminated by neon accents. Complicating matters is CLU, a tyrannical program created by Flynn in his own image circa 1989, now determined to capture his creator and use him to gain access to the outside world (and, of course, take it over). Set 28 years after the events of the first film, Tron: Legacy follows Sam (Garrett Hedlund), who discovers his father, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, returning from Tron), in a parallel computer world known as the Grid. And based on Disney’s current plans for the future, the blockbuster industry has no sign of slowing down. Tron: Legacy is the peculiar and perhaps unwitting precursor to several practices that have come to define mainstream filmmaking up until now. But like the original 1982 Tron, a landmark of digital effects, it feels equally experimental in retrospect. 17, 2010, the big-budget Disney sequel was hypnotically watchable and maligned as a throwaway vehicle for a new Daft Punk record. What’s the legacy of Tron: Legacy? When it opened on Dec.