There was an 8K restoration of Tron screened at the Academy Museum. If the 4K looks like this I wish I could have seen double the K.
Tron’s digital effects may seem primitive now but there is still something special about Steven Lisberger’s take on computers. To this day I imagine the apps on my phone as people. He has programs literally be the image of the user, as in the same actor playing them. In 1982 computers were lines and graphs so that’s what Tron brought to life, in full primary colors.We’ve lost Cindy Morgan and David Warner since the Blu-ray release too, so it’s lovely to see Yori/Lora and the villainous Dillinger/Sark brought back to life so vividly.
The pure black backgrounds of the grid are what 4K does best. The blue and red lights on the suits are more vivid than ever. Now it looks like they’re shining into your living room, not just illuminating the suits.
The Encom helicopter flying at night, only its red light visible against the sky and rooftops, is a neat real world parallel to the grid.
The real world scenes are restored too. Flynn’s arcade looks like my childhood. The Encom offices are so crisp can pick fuzz off Walter (Barnard Hughes)’s sweater. Those massive white CPU chambers are so vast and sleek.
Discs whiz around, light cycles zoom and various bleeps and bloops surround throughout. The master control explosion echoes digital debris all around.
In 2010 Tron Legacy was a big “what could we do with Tron now that we have all the tech?” 15 years later it’s more an artifact of an era of sci-fi. It was something to see that aesthetic in Tron style but now it says more about millennial sci-fi than Tron. For all its limitations, the original remains more pioneering. And actually, the digital world should look like a black void. It wouldn’t be a human city, but everything was in the ’00s.
The grid in Legacy is more Matrixy but blue instead of green. Recognizers and light cycles are three-dimensional. Alas, there’s no pure black sky. It’s all cloudy and busy. That’s the 2010 aesthetic of overcomplicating the simplicity of Tron just because they could. It’s mainly inspired by The Matrix, Star Wars prequels and Lord of the Rings, but it can also be seen in Chronicles of Riddick, a bit of Minority Report, et al. So Tron: Legacy is in good company for its time.
The discs and light cycles can be more choreographed 28 years later, but again, this is after all movies were adding martial arts moves. There is also more animation transforming the programs into the cycles. It’s still fun to see Jeff Bridges back, with Garrett Hedlund as his son and Olivia Wilde as his happy program helper Quorra. The white faced, white haired, white suited Castor (Michael Sheen) and Gem (Beau Garrett) are distinct.
IMAX scenes are more immersive and fully envelop viewers. When it switches, it’s really a seismic shift you can feel. It seems more light glows in IMAX than the widescreen shots. The IMAX scenes truly make the 4K difference in comparison to the standard, so those are what really showcase an evolved grid in 4K.
They never should have shown young Jeff Bridges full frontal as Clu or in flashbacks. Even if the effect was perfect, it should have been mysterious and obscured in shadow. That’s cinema. This VFX was hardly perfect and that would’ve saved it. Having him talk was the giveaway.
But hey, Joseph Kosinski went on to make the biggest legacy sequel of all time with Top Gun: Maverick. Tron: Legacy is worth it just for the R&D on that! When Ares comes out next month, we can compare the 2025 Tron to the middle child, too.
Legacy has a lot more surround effects and rumbles, as it was designed with the film. The original only got upgraded as sound technology advanced. Legacy has a lot more flyovers and echoes in the vast grid.