Script Suggestion: TRON 3
Warning: huge amounts of spoiler below for the original TRON and TRON: Legacy movies
Whenever a movie disappoints me, I have a habit of brainstorming how it could have been improved after identifying what aspect didn’t quite meet my expectations – such is the case with TRON: Legacy. To be honest, I didn’t begin playing around with ideas until recently while I was watching a DIY video on how to make your own TRON suit (the video was created by my good friend Justin). Midway through the video, I found myself doodling in my sketchbook, coming up with alternative costumes in the TRON universe; a quarter through the video, I was bouncing around possible ideas for TRON 3.
One of the problems with TRON: Legacy was its story – specifically, its misfired focus. To quote Paddy Chayefsky, award winning screenwriter of Marty (1955), The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976) and the only person to ever three solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay:
The basic story is always the emotional line of the script. Don’t ever make the basic line the social comment of the script.
In this respect, the TRON: Legacy screenwriters made a huge mistake.
By focusing on the entire story on a commentary about social-political-religious-whatever freedom, the writers inadvertently made the characters secondary in driving the film. This led to a jumpy, poorly-paced story with long bouts of exposition that in themselves, made little sense (another mistake: when writing a screenplay – show, don’t tell). TRON: Legacy had little cohesion besides its visual splendor.
The original TRON, while not without its flaws, had one thing TRON: Legacy didn’t include: a primary focus on its human characters. Specifically, TRON was about programmers, and wisely the director, Steven Lisberger, decided that it was more interesting to represent computer programming by anthropomorphizing different aspects of a computer system, such as the accounting program that Kevin Flynn first meets in the digital world.
The obvious allusion of the MCP representing communism was a product of the original TRON’s time, when the Cold War was still going on and McCarthy sentiments still echoed in the public conscious. However, the social comment about communism – inadvertent or not – was still secondary to the main story. TRON revolved around Flynn hacking his way into Edward Dillinger’s computer system to prove that Dillinger had stolen his ideas. Everything else – the digital world, the MCP, the lightcycle fights, etc – was a nice visual fest for representing coding and hacking, which in real life, is actually pretty boring to watch if you’re not the person doing it.
(aside: David Fincher managed to make coding seem relatively exciting in The Social Network, but I’ve yet to see a coding ‘party’ that matches up to that kind of hype)
Take that, Steve Jobs
Additionally, TRON established very clearly what was what in the digital world in relation to the real world. With the magic of editing and cutting, the 1982 film jumped back and forth between the digital and real world to remind us that yes, the digital world is basically a computer program, that this represents that, and so on. For instance, we saw the MCP interact with both Dillinger in the real world and with Flynn in the digital world, so there was never any pretense that the MCP was anything else but a program – a powerful program, but a program nonetheless.
In TRON: Legacy, director Joseph Kosinski didn’t cut between the real and digital world, so there was nothing really to establish what each character in the digital world really represented (note: I know from a plot point that Sam was alone when he first entered into the digital world, but would it have hurt to cut back to the real world and give us a sense of what we would see on a computer screen while everything was happening in the digital world?)
Sure, you could argue that it’s a digital world created by Flynn, and perhaps everyone is autonomous. However, keep in mind that there is a distinct hierarchy in how computers are constructed: a HD/SSD isn’t responsible for video processing just as RAM isn’t responsible for storing information, and so on. I wouldn’t have had a problem with the digital world being an autonomous world except that different characters are referred to as distinct programs and computer components many times throughout, and the idea that the digital world is autonomous becomes inconsistent with the first TRON, where Flynn was just working within a computer frame.
TRON: Legacy fails to establish the distinction between autonomy and pre-programming, and that’s where the plot starts to really strain beyond comprehensible. You can call me cynical, but the reality is that computers are just like our brains: different aspects of computers are designed to perform different functions, just like different parts of our brain are designed to process different sensory information. Point in fact: it makes no sense that components of a computer act autonomously within the digital world like they were shown in TRON: Legacy (the only exception I can think of is Quorra since she’s the only Isomorph).
My suggestion to the screenwriters of the TRON 3 project is this: focus on the coding and programming components of the digital universe, and actually make the TRON program an important component of the story instead of a tangential lackey.
If you think programming and coding is boring, you’ll be surprised how much fun it is when you’re the one typing commands into terminal (watching someone else do it is a different matter). To quote my friend Mimi, a bioengineer by trade,
“I find that people who love to code are extremely obsessive [because they have] ultimate control. It’s an amazing facet for a very special type of creativity [in] a very logical [sense].”
Why not emphasize the power of the programmer/coder, or the User with respect to the jargon of the TRON universe? There are limits to everything (e.g. no matter how hard I try, my Macbook will never handle flash well because Apple is like that) but within those limits you, if you know what you’re doing, you can code really amazing programs that the original developer never envisioned.
It’s already established the Kevin’s son, Sam, is a computer genius like his father. The original antagonist of TRON, Edward Dillinger, also has a son, Edward Dillinger Jr. It would be best to shift the focus away from social commentary about autonomous freedom vs. autocracy/communism since one, the Cold War is over; two, no one wants to go to a blockbuster that shoves social-religious-political-whatever commentary in your face like a brick of compressed prunes (why do you think CLU 2 seemed like the perfect caricature of a villain without a particularly driving motive behind being Mr. Evil Pants?); and three, it doesn’t make sense for parts of your computer to stop doing what they’re programmed to do, unless you’re using Windows Vista then in which case that’s already a given.
Sam and Quorra are both incredibly idealistic – in the beginning of TRON: Legacy, Sam hacks into Encom’s company and uploads the company’s newest OS to the internet as a free download, ruining the company’s profits; Quorra shows incredible interest in learning about the real world, demonstrated by her love of the books in Flynn Sr’s library in the digital world – and Edward Dillinger Jr. epitomizes the greedy corporate figure that we all love. So why not play off of that dynamic?
Here’s an idea: make the TRON program the MacGuffin that’s difficult to find. At the end of TRON: Legacy we see that TRON has reverted back to his ‘good’ self, but we’re not sure what happens to him. So why not play off that? Why not make TRON the program that everyone wants – Sam and Quorra because there’s a chance TRON could indicate whether or not Kevin Flynn is alive, and Edward Jr. because TRON is the best corporate security software in the world, and would ensure that Encom’s corporate interest would be well protected (another idea: make Edward Jr. even more evil by having him intent on demolishing the competition of other software companies. Nothing spells great cinematic evil more than a greedy corporate CEO – it’s not like the Occupy Wall Street movement came out of nowhere! – and well, what’s not to love about another opportunity to see the evil MCP again?)
You’ve enjoyed all the power you’ve been given, haven’t you? I wonder how you’d take to working in a pocket calculator.
Want to introduce a new character (because new characters are fun and draw audiences back for more)? Here’s another idea: introduce a new genius hacker who, like every other hacker in the world, is intent on claiming the TRON program for herself (question: why a her? answer: why not?) Unlike Sam and Quorra, this said hacker is only interested in acquiring the TRON program for herself because – well, why not? After all it is the best security software in the world, so who wouldn’t want the chance to dissect it apart for their own use? (alternatively, imagine Lisbeth Salander minus the background of psychological trauma she comes from) Now we have a triad of three different characters going after one MacGuffin, all with different levels of motivation ranging from idealism to corporate greed to I’m-a-hacker-so-why-the-hell-not.
I don’t expect my ideas to ever make it to the big screen, nonetheless for anyone working on TRON 3 to even stumble across them. For me, it’s both an exercise in criticism and the creative process, an idea I picked up after reading through Aaron Diaz’s revamped costume designs of famous comic figures like Batman and the Justice League (aside: I highly recommend you take a look at his work – he’s one of the few artists who takes the time to describe the thought process of his design).
TRON: Legacy was a beautiful visual splendor that, unfortunately, could not astound me enough to not care about the shoddy storytelling. I sincerely hope the next TRON installment will learn from Legacy’s mistakes:
- Show, don’t tell
- The social comment should be secondary to the emotional story, not the other way around
Alternative TRON universe costume/female hacker costume for fun (note to real artists: no, I’m not a professional artist, I draw for fun/when I’m supposed to be doing my actual work, and I’m not going to make a pretense of it otherwise)
The end result of my doodling an alternative TRON universe costume in Flash 8 (question: why Flash 8? answer: because vectors are awesome and honestly, I prefer traditional media but I don’t have a scanner so there you go). Truth be told, this is how I envisioned the new female hacker to look like (to be explained down below). I’m not sure why I called her Miwa Ishikawa – sometimes I just like naming characters while I’m in the drawing process, and Ishikawa stuck.
Unlike Quorra, I envisioned that a hacker isn’t going to use armor – you need to move quickly before you’re caught, so her suit is really about being as streamlined as possible (alternative explanation: why fight when you can just run away after buying some time via corrupting a program?) The chest squares are actually drawn to represent the hacker emblem. You’ll notice that she shows more skin than the average TRON universe persona, and it’s not purely for aesthetic reasons: I wanted to emphasize her status as a human/user as opposed to a program, all of whom mostly seem to be covered up.
I don’t believe that showing more skin than the average TRON universe persona is actually a good thing – in fact, I think it makes her look more vulnerable than Quorra by a long shot. Again, the emphasis is on speed and her humanness, but there’s also a sense of vulnerability by exposing so much skin. She has to work quickly less she gets caught and gets derezzed.
I’m in a phase where I can’t draw hands for a damn. Many apologies to real artists out there.
The video of interest than got me brainstorming. I highly recommend you check out his blog for additional description of the process of making his suit.
