TRON: Legacy

Tron | A digital-era remodel of an analog-era vision of the future. It's got The Dude, and it's got light cycles, and it's got Olivia Wilde...but does…
Photo: Disney

STARRING Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde
WRITTEN BY Adam Horowitz, Richard Jefferies, Edward Kitsis
DIRECTED BY Joseph Kosinski

Although it earned only $33 million at the box office, Disney’s 1982 sci-fi film TRON developed a serious cult following. Disney had long played with the idea of making a sequel to the film, about a computer programmer named Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) who gets zapped into a server where he must play lethal games to survive. But it took veteran commercial director and TRON fan Joseph Kosinski to come up with the winning pitch for TRON: Legacy: Clu, the digital alter ego Flynn created in his own image, pulls him back into the server, and 20 years later, Flynn’s son Sam (Troy‘s Garrett Hedlund) is drawn inside too. Kosinski’s headiest brainstorm? Cast Bridges as both the aged Flynn and the ageless Clu, occasionally in the same scene. ”You get this really interesting triangle of Kevin Flynn, his real son Sam, and his digital son Clu,” says Kosinski.

Bridges was intrigued by the project. ”The kid in me responded to getting to mess with all the latest toys,” says the Oscar winner. But playing opposite himself with Avatar-like performance-capture rigs proved to be a challenge. ”I’d put a little monitor up [off camera] so I could actually act to myself, looking at a TV of me,” he chuckles. ”I had to get past some of the frustration of not having what I enjoy as an actor — costumes, the set, another actor — and get with the new thing that’s going down.”

Related Articles