GAME CHANGER

SFX HEADS TO VANCOUVER TO VISIT THE TRON: ARES GRID AND TALK ALL THINGS TRON WITH THE FILMMAKERS BEHIND THE LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL

- WORDS: JACK SHEPHERD

SFX IS HALFWAY UP a snowy mountain, watching Greta Lee shoot a laser at a tree, and yet that's far from the strangest thing happening.

Behind Lee, the entire mountain range is moving - and not just a little, but a new peak is emerging from the ground. “That looks good,” calls director Joachim Rønning. “Action!”

Okay, admittedly, we're not really on a mountain, despite being just outside of Vancouver, where there are mountains aplenty. We're actually on a studio lot, witnessing a scene from Tron: Ares being filmed on The Volume, the massive LED screen made famous by The Mandalorian. Watching The Volume in action is an otherworldly experience; an engineer can change what's appearing on screen at the director's whim, allowing the background to be customised on the fly, the actors reacting accordingly. The main direction today? “Act cold!”

The fact that the latest Tron, the third instalment in the series, is utilising cutting-edge technology should come as little surprise. The 1982 original and its belated sequel, 2010's Tron: Legacy, both utilised groundbreaking computer graphics to immerse us in the world of Tron, which primarily takes place on “the grid” - the digital realm created by Jeff Bridges’s character Kevin Flynn. Ares upholds that, ahem, legacy.

“One thing about developing this movie for a while is that the technology has finally advanced to a place where it's more possible to do what needs to be done,” says producer Justin Springer, who also worked on Legacy. A sequel was first posited 15 years ago, but a variety of factors, including rewrites and directors dropping out, contributed to the project's delay.