Lessons learned in 2014

"[E]very time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things—connect or divide. Some people inherently divide, and some people inherently connect. Connecting is the most important thing, and actually an easy thing to do. ... I’m shocked that there are so many people that live to divide."

-Joss Whedon, 2013

"I want to spend time doing films and exploring ideas, with the opportunity to fail - which you don't have in the professional film business. You've got to win every single time, and it's very difficult because you end up making very safe movies: you know this works, so you do it. ... I want to try making some films that I'm not really sure will work or not."

-George Lucas, 1981

* * *

At the end of 2013 I wrote what I thought was one of my best posts to this blog. Then, some weeks later, I discovered that it had only gotten about a dozen hits (it’s had more since then) … and that the new blog entry I was about to post covered very similar ground.

So I took it as a sign that maybe this blog had reached its natural end. It had begun as an online tie-in to my then-new indie film Saberfrog, and I also used it to discuss topics that I felt were related to the movie. By 2014 the movie had been out for a while, and I figured it was time to move on.

Saberfrog still pops up anew from time to time – opportunities still arise to sell some additional copies to interested viewers. But in 2014, my focus has switched to an older project that I am now remastering – a Super-8 stop-motion animated sword-and-sorcery film that took me two years to make as a teenager, and that had languished forgotten for decades.

I spent much of 2014 reconstructing this old project – transcribing my old handwritten script into Celtx, getting the Super-8 footage digitally transferred, making a temporary soundtrack to sync with the rediscovered visuals.

Rediscovering this project has been an emotional experience. Whereas Saberfrog was the angst-ridden tale of an adult trying to get his life back in order, this older project was the more innocent work of a teenager who had his whole life ahead of him, and was absolutely confident of his purpose in life.

I felt that reviving this older project would be a way of reconnecting with my less jaded self, who believed wholeheartedly in a life of filmmaking, before adulthood intervened. It was an opportunity to set aside the cynicism I’d developed in recent years, and return to the joy and optimism and positivity that originally fueled my passion as a young filmmaker. I also set up a crowdfunding campaign with a friend of mine, after doing as much research as I could on the brave new world of social media and online fundraising.

Unfortunately, both I and my crowdfunding partner ended up going through major job changes at the time, and I was therefore unable to devote the necessary time and energy to promotion. Prioritizing my new day job was a major reason why I failed to commit more passionately to the campaign.

But it was not the only reason. Even after all the groundwork I’d done, I found myself extremely hesitant to promote the project on the Internet, even though I knew (from telling strangers about it in person) that this was a project that would probably interest people. I had to think hard about why I now had such cold feet.

I realized that – for the first time in my many years, off and on, as a filmmaker – I was now afraid of the audience. That fear was holding me back, and I needed to overcome it once and for all.

* * *

Like many teenagers, I was a bit of a misfit and an introvert. But I loved movies, and I loved sci-fi and fantasy. And it seemed like those things came from a world that was somehow better – a world of artists and thinkers, a smarter and more tolerant community than the “mundane” world of regular people who weren’t fans.

When I first became an aspiring filmmaker, it was a time when people loved movies, and admired and respected filmmakers. Creating an entire world from one’s own imagination, and sharing that personal vision with an audience, was a celebrated achievement. Filmmakers were praised for pursuing their own visions, rather than allowing focus groups and studio conservatism to tell them what they could and couldn’t do.

Today is actually not a bad era for movies. Mainstream Hollywood has fully embraced the once-marginalized world of geek culture, creating ambitious and interconnected stories. Independent films continue to explore brave new territory. VOD has made acclaimed, limited-release films available even to people without specialty theaters in their neighborhoods. And even if none of that were true, DVDs and Blu-rays and VOD continue to make the riches of the past as available as those of the present.

And yet, nowadays I often sense a deep hatred and resentment of movies and the people who make them.

When people badmouth certain films and filmmakers – as well as other storytellers working in TV, literature, or comics – they do it with such a swell of pride, as if the highest demonstration of intellect was to be unmoved by a creative work.

That is not an attitude I’ve ever identified with. Even as a kid, I always thought that seeking out and appreciating the good work was more important than dwelling on lesser work.

And the people who made the good work were my heroes and role models. I always respected people who did the work more than I respected people who could only find fault with the work of others.

Has Internet culture turned this value system upside down? Is it now the social role of artists and storytellers to simply be punching bags for people whose self-esteem needs a boost?

I hope not. Especially when promoting this new (old) project, I want to believe that audiences are open and accepting, that they will give a movie the benefit of the doubt instead of deciding in advance that it sucks.

* * *

I guess I’ve always seen sci-fi/fantasy movies as a more expensive type of experimental film. Movies like Star Wars and Tron and The Dark Crystal seemed like someone’s personal, creative vision – passion projects that a studio was somehow convinced to pay for.

When I was real little – we’re talking late 70s / early 80s – the line between mainstream and experimental was a lot blurrier. Underground filmmakers did animation for Sesame Street. Oddball short films were regularly shown to the public, projected on 16mm in schools and libraries, or used as filler between movies on cable. Stand-alone animated specials would show up randomly in prime time. UHF stations and fledgling cable networks showed any obscure movie or foreign TV show they could get their hands on cheap.

That great churn of the weird and wild and unexpected had just as much impact on my interest in filmmaking as the more universally recognized hits like Star Wars. You would see these strange things as a kid, not knowing where they came from or who made them or why they were being shown. Maybe years later, you could finally look them up on the Internet or ask someone else if they knew what the title was. But the stuff you remembered less well would always be out of reach, and probably not easily available on video even if you could identify it.

Maybe a part of me is still wedded to that time when movies were mysterious and magical, when seeing a movie was an ephemeral privilege. Perhaps the permanence of home video was what enabled the modern nerd instinct to collect and categorize and rationalize. Like a villainous computer in an old Star Trek episode, we now try to explain away anything strange or unexpected as simply incorrect or impractical.

I guess I still crave the experience of seeing a movie I don’t know that much about, in a dedicated cultural venue, in the company of actual humans who shared my curiosity enough to go see it too. You don’t get that by watching a movie at home on VOD. Even with video stores you had to go somewhere, browse the shelves, and talk to the weirdo behind the counter.

Roger Ebert once pointed out that Starbucks offers not just coffee, but also a trip away from the office. He meant this as an analogy to argue that Netflix and video on demand would not supplant the experience of going to video stores. But clearly he was wrong – a lot of people are happy to watch movies at home, or on portable devices, without having to go someplace or interact with other people.

Is that antisocial attitude now manifesting itself in the tone of Internet culture?

* * *

In the last few years I’ve been to a fair number of independent filmmaker conferences, and read many articles about indie filmmaking, in an attempt to keep up with a changing industry.

One of the major messages that keeps coming up is that filmmakers need to be marketers and self-promoters. The days of a Kubrick or Kurosawa being allowed to concentrate simply on creating his art, and let distributors and critics do the work of convincing people to go see the finished product, are over. With the decline of brick-and-mortar cultural hubs (not just video stores, but also record stores and bookstores), it’s become more important for the artists themselves to maintain an online presence. You need to be on social media. You need to engage with your audience in a personal way.

But to me, interacting with strangers on the Internet is a daunting prospect. The Internet is where people seem to drop all real-world pretense of civility and politeness, and vent their frustrations and hostility at length. And major media outlets feed this climate with their clickbait headlines, generally phrased in terms of disdain and rejection: Why You Shouldn’t Watch This Movie, Why You Should Stop Watching This Show, Why This or That Person is a Hack or a Jackass.

Perhaps it’s mainly the big Hollywood productions and franchises that generate that kind of hostility, while smaller independent production are relatively safe. But should artists really stay small – never leaving the garret or the garage – to be safe from criticism? Is that really how we should think? Are we not supposed to be bold and strive?

* * *

The original Star Wars was one of the films that inspired me to become a filmmaker. I certainly enjoyed watching it as a kid, but when I was old enough to read accounts of how blown away people were in 1977 – by the opening shot, by the cantina scene, by the jump to hyperspace, by Han’s heroic return at the end – I thought, I want to do that. I want to make something that amazes people. Not by making a Star Wars fan film, but by learning the craft well enough to come up with something of my own that would have a similar effect.

Is that still a realistic goal today, when so many people seem to hate movies before they even come out? Or does it only seem that way on the Internet?

* * *

These thoughts have led me to at least one positive lesson. I never thought of myself as particularly social or outgoing or extroverted. But Internet culture has forced me to realize how comparatively well I thrive in real-world situations. When I introduce myself to strangers, I hear myself speak with much more charm and confidence than I ever feel when I’m brooding in isolation, staring at a computer screen, reading hostile text written by trolls.

This revelation has motivated me to go to the movies more often than I’d been doing lately, and to attend social and cultural events even when I’m not quite in the mood. The Internet might often seem like a race to the bottom, but the real world is a place where skill, accomplishment, and distinctiveness are still somewhat valued. And realizing this has helped me to reconnect with humanity in a way that the Internet – seemingly designed to connect people – has not.

When you go to a movie, you have to leave the house. You are watching, on a big screen, something that took a lot of effort and expertise to complete.

And more often than not, it tells a story of a goal-driven person who accomplishes something difficult.

(Maybe that's why Internet trolls hate movies.)

So that refuels me as an audience member. But what about as a filmmaker? In the digital age, what kind of film can you still reasonably aspire to make, that has enough of a sympathetic audience to make it worthwhile?

* * *

I think a mistake I’ve made in this ol’ life is looking mainly to the big successes for inspiration. I was a precocious filmmaker at an early age, and I went to one of the most celebrated film schools. So I’ve allowed myself to believe that I was destined for big things, and that if I didn’t achieve that then I was not successful.

But there are other frames of reference, and other models of success. Completing projects is success, regardless of their scale or profile. Doing what makes you happy, no matter what other people think, is success.

You can make something very commercial, and be dependent on the approval of a large number of strangers … or something low-budget enough that you don’t need everyone’s approval.

The purpose of being an independent artist is not to keep up with the Joneses, or to bow to peer pressure, or to try to appease audiences who don’t get it. The purpose of being an independent artist is to be true to yourself, to be unique and different, and to have faith that there are audiences who do get it.

And if I do better in real-world situations than I do online … well, then I should tell more people in the real world about my work, and show it to them.

The audience is however many people you can get to be interested, in whatever walk of life, online or in reality, whether it’s 50,000 or 500 or 15.

Just make your art, and be happy.

Film snobbery in the digital age

“When I first came out here [to Hollywood], in the late '60s, I met guys like Richard Brooks and Billy Wilder who … would invariably talk about what shit was being produced then. I thought, These guys who made films that I thought were astounding, are totally out of it today. How can this happen? … Now … I feel like Wilder and Brooks, an old nag. And, like them in the early '70s, I think that most of the films being made in this country today are garbage.”
--William Friedkin, 1996

“It’s communication. I’m all about the conversation. It’s not about filmmaking … I’m not a filmmaker, I’m some weird [bleep] hybrid of something. And right now, film isn’t even the primary conversation for me. For me, I’m way more interested in being on stage, or [podcasting]. And film is like, as much as I love it, it’s just one way to talk to the audience.”
--Kevin Smith, 2010

The Smith quote is from an interview I'll mention later. The Friedkin quote is pulled from page 414 of Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a history of the wild adventures of the 1970s generation of maverick Hollywood directors.

Flipping through Biskind's book to search for that half-remembered Friedkin quote caused me to become transported back to the New Hollywood era. OK, I wasn't really around for that stuff at the time, but 1970s filmmaking was still very potent, and its directors still considered role models, when I was a film student in the 1990s.

The general attitude then was that that the 70s was the last time movies were actually good, and that anyone who wanted to make real movies should look back to that time for inspiration. A major reason why Miramax films such as Pulp Fiction were so celebrated in their day was precisely because they seemed like a throwback to the rawness, innovation and edginess of that earlier time, before movies became soulless and formulaic.

But here's the catch: What a control-freak grownup finds soulless and formulaic, an adventurous young person might find supercool and awesome. “The 1970s were better” version of film history almost always ends by demonizing Star Wars in particular, and genre filmmaking in general, without regard for the fact that the generation after them is loyal to those films above all others.

What I loved about the sci-fi and fantasy films of the 70s/80s was that they put original, never-before-seen worlds and visions onscreen. The films of George Lucas, Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam, James Cameron, Jim Henson, Tim Burton, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Sam Raimi and others showed that 70s/80s genre filmmaking was no less creative, no less “auteurist”, than the dramas of the 60s/70s.

In turn, big-budget fantasy films and action movies seemed to get toppled in the 1990s, with the rise of independent film as we know it today. You could feel a real generational shift happening as grunge and rap took hold. There was a growing dissatisfaction with regular Hollywood product, and a growing demand for films that were edgy and different and personal. But indie films – and dramas in general – have since lost the “it” factor, now that fanboy-friendly remakes and franchises have taken over.

Obviously, every generation eventually hits the age where its values are no longer a heroic challenge to the old guys, but a stuffy status quo being threatened by the young guys. Once that happens to you, it's time to make a course correction if you want to survive.


I've started thinking about all this for several reasons. As I ponder where to send Saberfrog next, I am forced to evaluate what I hope to gain by giving the film more exposure. The cultural landscape has changed multiple times since I first fell in love with filmmaking as a kid, and as George Santayana put it, “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” The recent return of Tron has also been pause for thought, but I'll get to that soon. (I've been working on this post since before it came out.)

Re-reading the anecdotes in Biskind's book reminded me just how passionate people used to be about filmmaking and film-viewing. There was something tactile and sensual about the whole process – carrying bulky film equipment to far-flung locations, like heroic explorers of a new continent … threading and splicing celluloid in an editing room, grease pencil ever ready to mark an important frame … and sitting in a darkened screening room, as cinematic dreams unspooled on a clackety projector.

It was still like that when I was a student. But several things have happened since then.

Films have become more accessible, if not downright disposable. There are a gazillion channels showing movies, and the few that aren't easily available on DVD can probably be pirated somewhere off the Internet. Also, technology has made it easier to produce footage and share it with other people. There's just not the reverence for the moving image that there was even ten years ago, let alone twenty or thirty.

Equally important is the fact that other art forms have caught up with cinema. Television, comic books and video games were each considered junky time-wasters once upon a time, but in recent decades they've made massive leaps forward in form and content. They also allow fuller explorations of a fictional world, and the characters who populate it, with greater length and depth than a single film could, often on lower budgets that allow for more risk-taking.

In trying to catch up with newer trends in indie film, I've attended workshops such as Lance Weiler's DIY Days and Jon Reiss' Think Outside The Box Office, and a common buzzword that keeps coming up is “transmedia”. This basically means extending a property and its story across multiple platforms, so that the world of your film continues into other media such as the Internet, computer games, and phone apps.

There's already a word for this. That word is “franchise”.

Star Wars is transmedia. There are the movies, which are fine. But over the last 33-plus years there have also been novels, action figures and games, all of which let the consumer explore particular aspects of the Star Wars universe in greater detail.

Monty Python is transmedia. Beyond the TV series, you had books, films, albums and stage shows, each of which had material not featured on the show, and each of which played with their chosen medium as mischievously as the TV sketches – for example, the Matching Tie and Hankerchief album was an LP with not two, but three sides; and the Big Red Book actually had a blue cover.

Lord of the Rings and Dune, even in their original book forms, were transmedia. You had the main stories, but you also had maps and glossaries – which you could consult at any point during the main story, to understand their created worlds more fully.

Increasingly, Hollywood films are no longer works of art in their own right, but are the extension of a brand that generated its loyalty elsewhere, just as films get converted into TV shows or video games. All these different media are interconnected now, and as much as the film purist in me might want to complain, this isn't changing any time soon.

Besides, I'm not really one to talk. I went to the midnight opening of Tron: Legacy, rather than waiting for a more convenient time to see it in the theater (let alone wait for home video), because of the strength of my life-long loyalty to Tron as a brand. While the new film is clearly designed to stand on its own, many aspects of the new movie – including its very existence – will be more meaningful to those of us with prior knowledge of the world, characters, themes and backstory.

Which made me think a little more about the whole “death of film criticism” issue that's been such a hot topic among film buffs in the last couple years. Many people (including film critics, natch) lament the decline of serious intellectual debate regarding films, and the decline in appreciation of film as a serious art form. An alternate view, however, was summed up well by Kevin Smith in an IndieWire interview back in July:

“I used to read [reviews] to see if anybody got it … And back in the day that was the only way you could know, because there was no [bleep] internet. You know, you could see people at a screening and they would tell you how much the movie meant to them or what it did for them and stuff. But, generally all you had to go by was the critics … Then into that world was introduced the Internet and suddenly everybody can give you their opinion on movies, which is what I was always chiefly interested in. So, I’m getting opinions from not just the same 100 people … I don’t dislike critics, I’m just like, why are these 100 people any more valid than the people that, I don’t know, the 1.7 million on Twitter, or whatever it is.”

For Smith, then, connecting with audiences who “got” his movies is more important than impressing cultural gatekeepers. Regular readers of my blog (all four of you) will have heard me complain about all the remakes and adaptations, and also about the fan types who don't care whether a film is good or not unless it's faithful to the original material. But seeing Tron: Legacy made me appreciate two things more deeply:

1) When it's something you're a fan of, you have different priorities than someone who's only judging it as a stand-alone movie.

2) Critics know about films (especially dramas) and are purist about film as a separate art form with its own history; they don't necessarily know much about other art forms, and thus don't always have the most useful insight when a film is based on something with a larger history.

The original Tron, for me, was a gateway to the life and career I'm in now. I first saw the film as a kid, thinking it would be about arcade games, and it turned out to be an introduction to the then-new world of computers. Like William Gibson's Neuromancer, it was an analog production that showed the potential of a digital future. So when I glance at Rotten Tomatoes and see reviews from critics who not only disliked the new movie, but thought the original Tron was a silly flop that never merited a sequel anyway, I thought, They don't get it. It seems an obvious thing to say, but Tron: Legacy wasn't made for fans of Citizen Kane or Casablanca; it was made for fans of the original Tron, and fans of computers and digital imagery.

Even the smarter critics are running aground in their failure to recognize the evolving relationship between film and other art forms. Roger Ebert's reluctance to consider video games an art form has received scorn even from his dedicated fans, to point where he finally recanted; and his negative review of Tyler Perry's debut feature, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, provoked angry responses from Perry fans scolding him for his unfamiliarity with Perry's earlier theater work. (The latter example suggests that these cross-media disputes don't solely affect the geek community.)

It's an almost deadening cliché to point out that we're living in a digital age, and that our lives and our culture are being changed by Facebook and Twitter, by YouTube and Netflix, by Google and Wikipedia, by the iPad and the Kindle. Yet certain nostalgic attitudes die hard, even though some of these attitudes – if we stop to think about it – have perhaps outlived their usefulness.

Glancing through Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls was a melancholy experience, because it chronicles a romantic attitude towards film – and filmmakers – that is just plain gone. Yet two things need to be said to put the freewheeling 70s film counterculture in perspective. One is that – at least by Biskind's account, and judging by what they say about each other in the book – these guys were assholes. As enthralling as their war stories are, most of the directors covered by Biskind come off as out-of-control egomaniacs who dug their own graves, then tried to blame others for their own demise.

The other thing is that many of the issues these guys fought for are simply outdated. Biskind's introduction praises these artists for producing “work that was character- rather than plot-driven, that defied traditional narrative conventions, that challenged the tyranny of technical correctness, that broke the taboos of language and behavior, that dared to end unhappily.” Admittedly Biskind's book is itself over a decade old now, but all of these qualities are quite commonplace in the storytelling media of today. And “technical correctness”, far from being a “tyranny”, is not only craved but demanded by the film and media buffs of today, and is also within reach of any consumer- or prosumer-level media maker willing to put in the effort to learn how to use the tools.


I get the sense that, when it comes to art – in any format – there are two broad schools of thought. One is that art must be “real” – that it should be truthful to real emotions and real experiences. The other is that art is artifice – it is imaginative and imaginary, an escape from humdrum reality.

Supporters of the former always criticize the latter, on the grounds that stories which amuse or distract us are a brainwashing diversion from the real world. But the core assumption there is that “real” always means grim, angst-ridden or defeated … the assumption being that anything positive, optimistic or constructive is always a lie.

But I'm a lifelong science fiction fan, and have come to learn the SF philosophy from authors' essays and filmmakers' interviews. I'm far more drawn to the idea of art and storytelling as a venue where you can create something better, promote new possibilities, envision things that haven't happened yet, propose better models for how things could be.

The existence of computers strikes at the very heart of this debate. Many people condemn anything digital as a bad thing, on the grounds that computers and virtual worlds aren't “real”, and are highly reluctant to understand how much power these new tools give to people who are willing to embrace them.

This contrast between introversion and misery on the one hand, versus extroversion and confidence and willingness to make something happen, is probably the most important divide in our culture, and people who embrace modern media are firmly in the latter camp.

While I was in college, I was given the assignment of reading the Beckett play Waiting for Godot for a liberal-arts class in the history of theater. At the same time, I happened to be reading – for pleasure – Medea: Harlan's World, an odd book that resulted from SF author Harlan Ellison inviting several of his fellow writers (with some input from a seminar audience) to collaboratively create an alien world and write some short stories set within it. The book consists of a transcript of a panel where the authors thrashed out their ideas, followed by individual treatises on various aspects of the invented world, and finally the short stories (a couple of them quite moving) written by individual authors.

I couldn't help but notice the contrast. Beckett's protagonists were passive, helpless victims who couldn't even work out what day it was. Ellison and his colleagues, on the other hand, were pooling their imagination, intelligence and cleverness to create something that wouldn't have existed if they hadn't worked to make it so. Medea: Harlan's World, though forgotten today, was a completely unique kind of book, and perhaps just as mold-breaking as Godot but for completely different reasons that I found far more inspiring. By working together to create stories in a shared world, Ellison and his writers were creating – to all intents and purposes – a little mini-franchise.

However, there still have to be people with the vision to create a franchise in the first place, not just perpetuate one created by someone else. I do still believe in creating original work, and the only way to do that is by having a passion.

That passion is easier to tap into when you're young, and haven't been weighted down by disappointments and setbacks. It gets harder with age; you have to resist the temptation to play it safe, and continue to be as determined and adventurous. Filmmaking is a drug. And as Paul Schrader says in Biskind's book, “In your forties, you really have to want to be a drug user, because it's so hard to keep the hours.”

So why do it? Because you must. Not for fortune or fame, but because you have a vision you believe in. It's important to learn from your experiences, but also to keep your youthful vision and not let experience deaden you or trap you in the past.

“I had the confidence of ignorance. Not knowing anything about it, there was no basis for fear. In other words, if you're walking along the edge of a cliff and you don't know it's the edge of a cliff, you have perfect confidence. And I didn't discover the cliff in the theater or in films until after I'd been in it for a while.
“Then you have to be careful not to listen to anybody. You have to remember your old ignorance and ask for the impossible with the same cheerfulness that you did when you didn't know what you were talking about.”
--Orson Welles

The Legacy of Tron

One month from today, Tron Legacy will open in theaters.

It's only recently that I've fully realized what a huge impact the original Tron had on me as a kid. I saw the film when it first came out and don't recall being that impressed, but I got to know the film well on home video, and became quite obsessed with it.

Whereas Star Wars inspired me to be a filmmaker, Tron almost singlehandedly triggered my interest in anything digital, from computer animation to game design to programming.

The depth of this hit home when I attended a screening of the film at the George Eastman House earlier this year. When Bruce Boxleitner is first shown sitting at his cubicle working on a software program, I realized with a shock that I now had the same day job as this character. I was looking at myself, even though I had no ambitions in that direction when I first saw the film 28 years ago.

I wonder if anyone else was similarly influenced, since Tron came out quite early in the history of personal computing. One of the ironies of Tron is that, back when it was made, even imagery that was supposed to be perceived as digital had to be largely created through old-fashioned analog means. (In the 21st century, of course, it's completely the opposite; digital technology is regularly used to create images that are supposed to be accepted as real.)

I remember being a bit confused by the movie when I first saw it. I was obsessed with video games as a kid, and was under the impression that Tron would be a video game movie. It more or less delivered this for the first half, then seemed to get more abstract and confusing. But after repeated viewings on video, my young brain came to appreciate that the film was less about video games than about computers: it helped introduced me to users and programs, input and output, bits and bugs.

Set in a self-consciously artificial world, Tron is (perhaps inevitably) simplistic in its story and characters, and gets a bit slow and meandering once the two lead characters, Flynn and Tron, are separated from each other by the plot. But it creates a unique and imaginative world with its own strange rules. It's a purely conceptual universe where programs are living, thinking humanoids that have the same likeness as their creators – “our spirit remains in every program we design,” says one elderly programmer early in the film.

The audience doesn't need to be told that these characters glow brighter when they're emotional and fainter when they're weakened, or that when they die their particles disperse and are reabsorbed into the environment. (I also like the subtle touch that the older, more obsolete programs have hand-drawn, hieroglyphic-style patterns on their costumes, as opposed to the circuit-like patterns worn by the younger characters.) This is visual storytelling, and the fact that these exotic and esoteric concepts are so easily communicated in the guise of a straightforward summer action movie may actually qualify as a kind of genius.

Other themes that may have been intended by the filmmakers were less obvious to me as a kid. On one of the DVD extras, writer/director Steve Lisberger claims that the film depicted the conflict between the personal computer and the mainframe – the idea being, presumably, that characters such as Flynn, Tron and Clu represent individual will and freedom, while the Master Control Program represents authoritarian control. Like its precursor Star Wars, Tron champions freedom, creativity and innovation while itself being an example of these values.

I haven't paid too much attention to the viral marketing for Tron Legacy (well, apart from a six-hour round trip to Toronto with my friend Scott just to see the two-minute trailer when it was first unveiled). I'm trying not to watch the increasing amounts of footage that Disney has been putting online, because I want to be surprised by the finished film. From what I have seen, the visuals appear to be more impressive than the writing, but then that was true of the original Tron as well. It's been a while since I went to a midnight movie opening (I'm still kicking myself for not attending the earliest screenings of Grindhouse or Snakes on a Plane), but I ain't gonna miss this one.