TRON Night!

The TRON: Legacy hype machine officially starts kicking into gear now that the release date is coming up fast, and they held a special event last night across the country (maybe the world, I’m not sure) called TRON Night, where they showed off about 23 minutes of IMAX 3D footage of the film. I was lucky enough to make it out to the event last night, and I was absolutely blown away. I’ll recount some the scenes they showed. For those of you trying to remain pure in the way of spoilers, you may want to look away.

If you’ve seen the trailers you’ve seen all the shots of Sam Flynn meeting with Alan, getting the keys to his dad’s Arcade and finding the hidden office to set off the movie. The first scene they showed was a more fleshed out version of this. We come to find out that Alan has been kind of a surrogate father figure to Sam, and has been grooming him to run the company, and of course Sam wants nothing to do with this, and is more interested in riding his motorcycle around and ending up in jail. Foreshadowing!! Anyway, it was a much more fleshed out scene than I was thinking and sets up a lot for the characters. Important (or not) to note that this scene was in 2D, but the rest of the scenes that took place in the Grid were all in 3D.

The next scene was when Sam has first entered the Grid, and is met by a Recognizer, and is taken into custody as he doesn’t have his Identity Disc (here’s the part where if you haven’t seen the original, you’re going “whaaaaaat??” but my answer to that is: go see the original!). As expected, he gets assigned to the Games Grid, and we see him taken in, and he is given his suit and ID disc by a few lovely assistants, and is thrown on in to the Disc Battle arena. The arena is a LOT bigger than in the original, and it’s in this whole scene that we start to see the changes in the Grid from the last time we’ve seen it. Let me say this: Sam’s disc battle sequence is incredible. The choreography is amazing, and of course it looks beautiful, but they also keep in tact that same feeling of ‘what the hell am I supposed to be doing?’ that we got when the original Flynn first got in there. Sam starts to figure out the system and wins his battle.

Next, we got our first look at a couple of things: the light car, and Kora, Olivia Wilde’s character. Somehow Sam and a mysterious helmeted character have ended up on the lightcycle grid in their light car, and of course are being chased by a couple of lightcycles. Again...it looks absolutely gorgeous, and so smooth. No quick crazy cuts so you can’t see what’s going on. They want you to take in all that TRON-y goodness. The two escape after blasting through the wall of the grid, and end up on some rocky terrain (which the lightcar adjusts for, by popping out some sweet off-road tires), which apparently means they’re “off-grid.” Very interested to see what exactly that means. As they’re driving, the mysterious driver removes the helmet and is revealed to be Kora. She seems like a fun character, and she seems very excited that Sam is there, like it’s fulfilling a prophecy or something (hmm...).

The final scene is in a ‘safe house’ where Kora was taking Sam. It’s a completely white room, with a man dressed in white knelt in the middle within some sort of beam of light. It doesn’t need to be said that this is Flynn. They don’t really explain anything about what Flynn’s role has been during his time stuck in the Grid, but it’s clear from appearances and the way he refers to Kora as his “apprentice” that it’s probably some sort of rebellion of sorts. There’s an emotional meeting of Flynns as they haven’t seen each other since Sam was a kid, and when Sam says ‘it’s been a long time’ Flynn responds with ‘you have no idea’ which, again, raises the question of how long he’s been there.

After that final scene, we got about a minute of sizzle reel stuff that’s been seen before, including the Daft Punk cameo, and some lightcycle stuff, and one thing I hadn’t seen before...light-jets. Rad. All said, I think the event had Disney’s desired effect on me. I was excited about TRON: Legacy before, but now I’m super stoked about it. It really seems like they’re keeping respect for the original’s mythology, and not just updating for the sake of updating. They’ve definitely kept that same sense of wonder as soon as you see stuff in the Grid. I’m very curious to see the backstory of how the Grid has come to this state, for instance why everyone is wearing black instead of the original white, and why it’s always lightning now, and stuff like that. Even more than that, though, I’m just excited to see more awesome blue-light-accented awesomeness in my face. I got my midnight screening tickets on the way out, and you probably should do the same.

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