You will like Tron: Legacy. That’s not a prediction—it’s a command. Don’t even try to fight it. Come December 17, when the movie comes out, your butt will be in a seat and your head will be plugged into migraine-inducing Urkel goggles like everybody else. The people from Walt Disney have made sure of it.

The studio has put an estimated $170 million into this choo-choo train, and it is chugging down the track. The producers started leaking images and designs three years ago. They showed a trailer at Comic-Con before they even had a green light to make the movie. The number of dollars invested in the franchise will likely enter the mathematical regime created by reclusive Russian geniuses for defense budgets and bank bailouts. Los Angeles visual f/x house Digital Domain deployed the latest 3-D cameras and motion-capture technology to render a younger Jeff Bridges as the villain. French electronic duo Daft Punk crafted the soundtrack. Two videogames and a cartoon were given the go-ahead long ago. The writers and director collaborated on the script to ensure the production design meshed with the story, and vice versa—they even ran an early cut past the story gods at Pixar, all just to make sure the movie would actually, you know, “work.” They spent years figuring out how to make Tron: Legacy connect to its antecedent. Tron: Legacy is a sequel—everybody already knows that—and the people making it knew from the start that to be a success their movie had to evoke the look and feel of the original Tron .

Yes, Tron . The motive force behind this winter’s biggest cinematic event is a weird little sci-fi flop from 1982 that no one really remembers. Seriously: Try. You’ll get bits. Images, mostly. Jeff Bridges in chalk-white armor that ripples blue. Glowing Frisbee fights. Bubble-shaped motorcycles trailing walls of light. But the story? Something about a hacker, maybe? He gets beamed into a computer and fights a giant. Bruce Boxleitner is there. And… the villain is a computer program with a British accent.

Don’t feel bad. Even Legacy director Joseph Kosinski admits to having initially been fuzzy on his source material. He didn’t see Tron until he was a teenager in the mid-1980s, on VHS. He was more of a Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of guy.

So why all this fuss? With almost a century of back catalog to draw from, why should Disney go all in on a sequel to a movie that’s generally regarded as not very good? Because Tron succeeded at what science fiction rarely attempts and almost never pulls off: It predicted the future. That little movie distilled and made visible a powerful idea—that inside a computer is a world, a place you (or some part of you) can go and live. This idea didn’t make much sense at the time, of course. It was utterly new and poorly expressed, and the technology to pull it off didn’t really exist. A movie about the magic and power of computing also happened to be the first movie made by computers… which, sadly, were then neither magical nor powerful. No wonder it fizzled at the box office. The metaphor, however, lived on.

The film would never come close to an Oscar, but that doesn’t make it unimportant. Nobody talks about cyberspace anymore—sci-fi writer William Gibson had just coined the term when Tron came out. But that’s what the movie gave shape to—a “consensual hallucination,” as Gibson wrote, “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.” Though Gibson says he had an entirely different look in mind. “An issue of Omni magazine that contained one of my earliest cyberspace stories also contained a preview of Tron ,” he says. “If Disney was into that stuff, I thought, I wasn’t even remotely ahead of the curve.”

Gibson’s stories were way out in front, of course, but Tron was the first mainstream pop-culture artifact to have similar insights about what cyberspace was and what it was going to become. The world it envisioned and the metaphor it helped create have become more resonant over the decades, as the movie essentially came true. Everything that looked weird in 1982 now looks naive, perhaps, but also profound. Insightful even.

For Tron: Legacy to succeed where Tron failed, it has to simultaneously sustain the integrity of and improve upon the first film. Lucky for Disney, the tools finally exist to make the movie that the original team was groping for but never quite found.

Tron started in the late-1970s as a TV commercial, a neon-lit little figure in a shiny black universe. Running the animation house that created him was Steven Lisberger, a twentysomething director who was convinced that the character could be in a movie created exclusively by computers. Today Lisberger is a shaggy, goateed guy who talks articulately about how baby boomers misapprehended the messages of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. He’s a compelling mix of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Dude. “There was a feeling amongst a certain group of Hollywood filmmakers that with all of these tools, CG was ready to be taken advantage of,” Lisberger says. “And it was like, who was going to get there first?”

In 1978, Lisberger met Bonnie MacBird, a midlevel development executive at Universal Studios, and the two hit it off. MacBird left Universal and joined Lisberger’s company. He was working on early computer animation tools, and Tron looked gorgeous. But beyond a sense that the plot should have something to do with videogames, he didn’t have a story. “We had no idea how Hollywood worked,” Lisberger says. “But when I met Bonnie, I thought, this is a person who knows what’s involved in doing a script.”

MacBird turned out to be perfectly engineered for the job. She had studied programming, with paper and pencil, in junior high school in the 1960s. In college at Stanford, she made punch cards for a PDP-11, working late at night because it was the only time students could get access to the machine and playing a rudimentary version of Pong with lights on the computer’s control board. At Universal, she tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade the story department to put its records into a database. “I’m not a computer programmer,” MacBird says. “But I love the way a real computer scientist dreams.”

In Los Angeles’ only computer store, a dive on a Santa Monica side street, MacBird found the writing of Stewart Brand—creator and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog , cofounder of the seminal Internet network the Well, and coiner of the phrase information wants to be free. From Brand she learned about the work of computer scientist Alan Kay.

It’s a name that should make you feel a great disturbance in the Force. Kay was present at Douglas Engelbart‘s famous “mother of all demos” in 1968, in which Engelbart introduced the mouse, a windows-based operating system, hypertext linking, word processing… it’s as if pork chops, bacon, and ribs all came from the same magical animal. (A year later, Engelbart’s lab would become the second node on the nascent Internet.)

Kay’s work was even more out-there. He was reading Marshall McLuhan‘s rants on media and immersing himself in the learning theories of Jean Piaget and Seymour Papert. He’d also been “hit on the head,” as he put it, by a 1968 demo at the University of Illinois of the first flatscreen display. Seeing that led Kay to anticipate a time when computer chips would be small enough to pair with it—to make a laptop, essentially. He coined the term personal computer, and working at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Kay and his team combined Engelbart’s innovations with their own work to create the first graphical user interface. This is the thing that inspired a young Steve Jobs to create the Macintosh computer … which inspired a young Bill Gates to create Windows.

So in 1979, MacBird set up a meeting with Kay. “He spent several hours with us,” she says, “and regaled us with stories about computers and learning and science and child psychology.” For her, Xerox PARC‘s bean bag chairs and bohemian attitude had a kind of glamour. “It was early nerd culture, and it was adorable. I just loved it,” MacBird says. She persuaded Lisberger to hire Kay as a consultant.

“We didn’t have the word avatar yet. We talked about agents,” MacBird says. “Alan had the notion of an intelligent agent that learns you, learns your preferences and needs and can function in a realm of endless encyclopedic information.” She loaded all of these ideas into what she describes as a funnier but deeper version of the movie. “Nothing wrong with light cycles and so forth,” she says. “But I think there was more to it than that originally.” Kay believed that a universe made of connected computers was akin to a living organism, a vast network with nodes and branches to infinity, all serving some artistic, humanitarian vision of a utopian future.

Those concepts became the source code for Tron. The lab at tech giant Encom, the company at the center of the movie, was based on Kay’s lab at Xerox PARC and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. Bruce Boxleitner’s buttoned-down programmer character, Alan, was based in part on (and named after) Kay. MacBird even sent versions of the script up to Xerox PARC via acoustic coupler and edited them with Kay on the Alto, Xerox’s way-ahead-of-its-time PC. “I think that makes me the first screenwriter ever to use a computer to edit a script,” she says. Kay showed her how to select a font, and she chose the closest approximation to Courier so the studio suits would think it was typewritten. (To this day, screenwriters still use Courier.)

Cyber Visions Tron may have provided mainstream pop culture with its first depiction of the digital realm, but a handful of other books, movies, and games have augmented our vision of how humans might inhabit bytes.



—A.R. The Shockwave Rider || The electronic network in John Brunner’s proto-cyberpunk novel was the backdrop for this early portrayal of a savantlike hacker fomenting revolution. True Names || Writer Vernor Vinge’s “other plane” was the first depiction of the digital world as an actual place where computerized versions of people could go. Neuromancer || William Gibson’s fiction gave the online world a name that stuck: cyberspace. The description sounds a lot like Tron ‘s universe, with a dose of druggy surreality. Habitat || Made by Lucasfilm Games, it isn’t exactly an RPG but is generally considered to be the first online graphical virtual world. Snow Crash || Writer Neal Stephenson’s “metaverse,” a 100-meter-wide, planet-spanning road, owed as much to computer games as to hacker culture. First use of the term avatar. The Lawnmower Man || A more Gibsonian version of cyberspace. Same glowing jumpsuits as in Tron , though. Hackers || A glowing-grid version of cyberspace that, as in Tron , evoked the cityscape-like silicon canyons of a printed circuit board. Johnny Mnemonic || The lackluster film adaptation of Gibson’s short story depicted a surreal and formless bytescape accessed via virtual-reality goggles. As Keanu might put it: “Whoa.” The Matrix || A digital universe that looks just like the real world. In fact, it’s indistinguishable—except for the “cheat codes” that provide superpowers. Second Life || A free-form, self-contained universe. Like the Sims but with a lot more avatars shaped like penises.

Lisberger had planned to fund Tron independently, but when that didn’t pan out, he took it to Disney. The studio was trying to get a grip on the relatively new phenomena of the summer blockbuster and the science fiction epic. Fox had cranked out Star Wars. Columbia Pictures had Close Encounters. And Disney made … The Black Hole. But to a certain faction at Disney, Lisberger and his studio felt like a good fit. “We had a staff of animators, and we approached the project as an animated film,” Lisberger says. “When we came into Disney, we had storyboards, we had production art.” He even shot a few minutes with computer-generated effects and animation to give the bigwigs an idea of what they would be getting.

As Tron evolved, it became more of an oddball project. “We were a threat to the animation department. We were a threat to the special effects department. We were a threat to conventional live action,” Lisberger says. Star Wars made a kind of sense, with its knights and princesses. But combine the avant-garde production design of Tron (and multiple outside contractors doing CG) with what turned into a very religious script about living “programs” trying to commune with godlike “users” in the real world? In the actual real world, hardly anyone had ever touched a computer. You can see how that story would seem strange.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were an exciting time for technology—the cusp of the future. The Apple II plus went on sale in 1979. At Industrial Light & Magic in California’s Marin County, the men who’d go on to found Pixar were working on CG effects for Star Trek II and inventing George Lucas’ videogames division. William Gibson was inventing cyberpunk. But in Hollywood, it was basically still 1970. In the end, Disney and Lisberger touted the movie’s computer-generated imagery, but in truth, very little of the film was actually CG. Some of the images were striking—the light cycle chase, the climactic battle against the evil Master Control Program—but with the funky light-up costumes and shifting, vertigo-inducing backdrops, they were occasionally outright weird. Tron got better reviews than people remember—hey, Roger Ebert liked it—but the film never really clicked. And it had the misfortune of premiering the same summer as Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It was a year of nerd classics, all of them arguably better made, more ambitious, more coherent. “The night before the movie opened, the head of marketing came to me and said, ‘We’re going to do really well. Our expectation is to do $10 million this weekend, maybe more,'” Lisberger says. “We did half of that.”

Not everybody lost. Arcade and home console games based on Tron were successful. Lisberger went on to make a comedy called Hot Pursuit , John Cusack’s fourth-best film. MacBird ended up with a somewhat modest story credit, but in the end she got a lot more out of the deal. Her collaboration with Kay turned out to be what Hollywood screenwriters call meet cute—MacBird and Kay fell in love and got married in 1983.

Tron, however, seemed destined to be forgotten—except by those few thousand preadolescent kids who watched it, rapt, while their parents wondered just what the hell kind of Disney movie this was, anyway. And some subset of those kids went on to become directors, screenwriters, animators, and programmers. They’re the ones who reintroduced Tron to popular culture. It’s no accident that when Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the master satirists behind South Park, wanted to parody the idea of being “sucked into Facebook,” the episode became an extended Tron riff. Or that when 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon found her dress glowing under a blacklight at a cast party, she joked that she was going to go fight Sark like in Tron. “I owe a real debt to the Gen Xers,” Lisberger says. “That’s who embraced Tron and took it to heart.”

Sean Bailey, now head of production at Disney studios, was 12 years old when his father took him to see Tron. Sure enough, the images instantly embedded into his subconscious; those illuminated costumes and cold laser lines didn’t look like any other movie. Bailey grew up to become a filmmaker himself, eventually working with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. In 2005, he was tasked by Disney to reboot Tron. “The first big meeting I had at the studio, I said, ‘Here are three things I think we have to have to make this movie: The screen has to look unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. We need Jeff Bridges. And we need light cycles.'”

Making a new Tron may have been less risky than trying something brand-new, but familiarity doesn’t write scripts. All Bailey had, really, was a resonant title and a few images. “People talk a lot about built-in brand equity and those kinds of things, but I think with Tron it’s a little different,” he says. “It was a really forward-thinking movie that for a variety of reasons kind of missed the mark commercially.”

Bailey teamed up with Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, coexecutive producers on Lost. The duo was key in the dispensing of Easter eggs throughout the series, sneaking in winking references for the show’s disciples—a useful talent if you’re trying to connect a new movie to an old one. And they loved Tron. On their first gig, a TV show called Popular (made by the creator of Glee), they’d written an entire Tron-themed episode. When they signed on to write the film, Kitsis recalls, “the first thing we thought of was that we didn’t want a remake, because Tron was awesome.”

What they came up with was a sequel, a father-son story—Kevin Flynn, Jeff Bridges’ character from the first movie, has disappeared into the Troniverse, and his son, Sam, has to go in to find him. Meanwhile, a younger, eviler version of Flynn, named Clu, has taken over the game grid. It worked for Bailey, but none of them knew if it would be technically executable.

That’s where Joseph Kosinski came in. Trained as an architect and aerospace engineer, he had come to Hollywood’s attention for a series of TV commercials that were slickly digital but didn’t look it. During one of their early meetings, Bailey asked Kosinski: “In the post-Matrix era, how do you make a sequel to Tron?” Kosinski proposed keeping the characters and building a mythology that connected 2010 to 1982. It was a ballsy approach that meshed with what the writers were already working on. Kosinksi was hired.

So that left just one last tricky bit: convincing Lisberger and Bridges. Lisberger had been kicking around Disney for decades, trying to get a remake or sequel made. But his ideas had become increasingly distant from the source material. And Bridges? He was on his way to winning an Oscar for Crazy Heart. Tron was a B movie from before he was famous. So in 2007, Bailey set up a meeting with Bridges, Lisberger, and the whole crew: coproducer Justin Springer, Kosinski, Kitsis, and Horowitz all trooped to Bridges’ house in Montecito, California. Kitsis and Horowitz were thrilled—they were about to meet two of their heroes. And if Lisberger and Bridges didn’t buy in, poof, there goes their first movie. So they pitched: There’s an old you and a young you in the Tron world, and the young you is the bad guy, and you have a son, and —

Bridges all of a sudden stood up, excited. “Hang on,” he said and disappeared into another room. He came back carrying the helmet he wore in the original. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. At which point he made everyone stroll around the property, taking pictures of one another wearing the helmet. (“One of the great meetings,” Bailey says.) Bridges and Lisberger were in.

Now the team could do what it had promised from the beginning—exactly what Lisberger had done 25 years before in the same situation: Kosinki would shoot a test clip to show the style and approach of the film he’d like to make, an increasingly common strategy for first-time directors. And then Bailey and the team came up with a plan. Instead of just shooting a test, they decided that they’d make something good enough to show outside the studio. Bailey got Disney to pony up development coin, and Bridges agreed to appear.

They finished the test reel in March 2008, early enough to suggest showing it at Comic-Con in San Diego. “This place was not entirely comfortable with the idea,” Bailey says. “A little bit because the movie wasn’t green-lit yet, but more like, why are we going down and showing something when we don’t know how it will play?” Bailey and Kosinski were pretty sure it’d play to the hearts of the Comic-Con crowd (and if it didn’t, they weren’t making the right movie). “From a more Machiavellian perspective,” Bailey says, “I was thinking, well, if they show it and it plays, there’s not going to be a lot of turning back.”

It played. Oh, it played—and it deployed every tool Bailey said the movie would need. The production design was original but clearly looked like the first Tron. Bridges’ appearance produced paroxysms of cheers from the 6,500 nerds in Hall H. Light cycles banged into each other. Disney gave the movie a green light.

Kosinski finished shooting Tron: Legacy in June 2009 and quickly began postproduction. Since then, Disney has released two trailers and leaked dozens of images. It has run alternate-reality games that started as websites based on characters and companies from the movie and then exploded, spewing into mock-ups of the film’s sets at Comic-Con or played-as-real press conferences where actors from the original Tron perform as their characters. Fragments of imagery and sounds from the movie have been processed and recapitulated at fashion shows and live concerts. Even in the throes of postproduction, the actual movie lived inside computers… but it was trying to get out.

The screening room at Digital Domain is a little tattered—concrete floor, ratty reddish rug, four rows of threadbare stadium seats. But the screen is big, the sound is good, and the projector is equipped for 3-D. Mounted in the middle of the front row is a console with a small button in the center. “Anytime we’re in here and I see a shot I like, I hit this button,” Kosinski says. He presses it and a bell rings as if it were recess. A sign over the upper left corner of the screen blinks on and off: final. At one side of the room, Eric Barba, the visual effects supervisor, laughs ruefully. Three months before release, he has a wall of index cards representing unfinished shots. Maybe he’d like to see that sign light up a little more often at this late date.

Kosinski has about 25 minutes of film that he’s willing to show, some of it finished and some of it still wireframe. A sleek, sexy Jeff Bridges—young, with poufy ’80s hair and chiseled abs, who could plausibly have sex amid Mayan ruins, like in Against All Odds—sprays menace all over the place. Modern-day Jeff Bridges, the weathered, huskier 2010 iteration, could probably do a range of menace in a single take, from a light dusting to let’s-just-open-the-spigot. It requires considerably more effort to get the rejuvenated version to do the same bit of business. The body in the tight black jumpsuit with orange piping is real, but the head is entirely digital—a near duplicate of the 1980s-era Bridges that the animators call Rev 4. It has taken hundreds of digital artists two years to create this simulacrum. They spend days in darkened rooms, row after row of cubicles decorated with stills of Bridges, like a creepy teenage girl’s bedroom, tweaking the corner of his mouth and the reflections of light in his eyes—and this is a movie with a lot of reflecting lights. In the completed scenes, Rev 4 is nearly indistinguishable from real even close up—you can tell it’s CG only because you know it’s CG.

Whatever else happens, the movie is really pretty. The light cycle battle, an 8-bit maze of luminous color blocks and right angles in the first movie, has been turned to crystal—motocross by way of Harry Winston. Now five yellow cycles race against five blue, curving and arcing across three levels of transparent ramps, roads, and spirals and leaving icy, glowing walls behind. When characters are killed, they shatter into thousands of glittering cubes.

So Tron: Legacy doesn’t look like Tron. Nobody would really want it to, frankly, and anyway, technology has moved on. What counted as cinema-quality for Lisberger back in the 1970s looks like what Kosinski’s team sketches with today. “Our pre-viz looks like the original film,” Kosinski says. “I wanted this to feel like we took cameras into the world of Tron and shot from the inside.” This echoes what Peter Jackson once said about Middle-earth. But nobody had ever been to the Shire to say whether the vision was accurate. Today people think they’ve been to cyberspace. Whether it’s Facebook or Azeroth or the virtual Afghanistan of Modern Warfare 2, everyone has already lived inside the Troniverse.

All those artists at Digital Domain know they’re creating Tron‘s reality by creating it in reality. “We’ve achieved what the first film predicted,” Kosinski says. Jeff Bridges had to get a full-body laser scan during preproduction, an eerie hearkening to his digitization in the first movie. When he shot his scenes as Clu, the motion-capture rig he wore to translate his facial movements to Rev 4 included a visor that looked uncannily like the helmet he wore in the original. And the prospect of an unimpeachable, photorealistic avatar for Bridges ought to make the Screen Actors Guild freak out. In fact, a flashback sequence featuring flawless, CG youth-enized versions of both Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner as the eponymous hero sparks a burst of laughter from Kosinski: “Oh! I know what my next project is going to be,” he says. “A 1980s buddy cop movie with young Jeff Bridges and young Bruce Boxleitner!”

What really connects the old Tron to the new is a certain grandiosity, a feeling that big thoughts are being thunk amid all the shiny lights. The narrative links are fun—the disc-combat arena in the new movie unfolds with a sound from the old Discs of Tron arcade game. Sam Flynn’s first words upon entering the Troniverse in Legacy echo Kevin Flynn’s line from the same moment in the original. It’s the themes, though, that make a movie like this into something more than popcorn. Lisberger still thinks that cyberspace is a mirror of the human soul; Kay says its a window to other worlds. Tron: Legacy should make us do more than look at a beautiful new Bridges and think, my God, what have we done? And the filmmakers are, to their credit, giving it a shot. “After a lot of deep, late-night pizza-and-beer conversations, we thought there was a pretty interesting notion in that not being a one-way street,” Bailey says. “That world is coming into ours, too.” An interesting notion, if they can pull it off. Because even the cheesiest science fiction, like cyberspace, should be both window and mirror. It shows us where we’re going and who we are.

Or, failing that, it should give us light cycles.

Senior editor Adam Rogers (adam_rogers@wired.com) wrote about the Watchmen movie in issue 17.03.