'Tron Legacy' illuminates cinema's science story

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'Tron Legacy' illuminates cinema's science story
December 19, 2010
By Dan Vergano
USA TODAY

Speeding light-cycles, illuminated catsuits and the computer-recreated head of Jeff Bridges—Tron Legacy has plenty of fun stuff.
Are we just being spoilsports when we ask how much science there is in the just-released science-fiction flick?

Nope, says film director Joseph Kosinski. "It's in there," he says, citing meetings with scientists from the National Academy of Science's "Science Exchange" that shaped the look, story and sensibility of the sequel to the 1982 cult classic, Tron.

"Once the discussion moved past the 'how could you do it, if you had to do it,' stage, the scientists had great ideas," Kosinski says. Discussions centered on physics advances made since the late 90's in quantum "teleportation," where atomic particles can transfer their characteristics from one to another instantaneously across great distances.

The talks influenced the design of the Tron: Legacy laser that magically (let's be honest) zaps the story's hero, Sam Flynn (played by Garrett Hedlund) into the computer game world of "The Grid," Kosinski says. The laser comes equipped with canisters of carbon, oxygen and the other chemical ingredients for rebuilding a person out of computer game information. "It is still a story of a father-and-son, but the science definitely helps in lots of subtle ways," Kosinski says.

No surprise, says science historian David Kirby of the United Kingdom's University of Manchester, author of the upcoming book, Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema, an exploration of the long-running interplay between movie-makers and scientists. "Virtually every movie now involving science relies on science advisors," Kirby says. "And they do a lot more than just fact-check scripts. They are part of the whole creative process."

Not that fact-checking is so bad, Kosinski says. "Audiences are very sophisticated now," he says. Even for a movie as fantastical as Tron: Legacy, the filmmakers can't commit a science blunder so implausible that filmgoers tune the movie out or so bone-headed that it creates complaints among science-savvy fans that drive folks away from buying tickets to see the flick.

"Of course this is good for science, too," Kirby says. "Ideas get out there into the public mind in a shape closer to scientific thought and reflecting areas of real scientific interest. There is no publicity like movie publicity for an idea."

Just last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Hollywood screenwriters discussed the process of working with scientists to produce plausible, if impossible, scientific scenarios for stories. Bruce Joel Rubin, screenwriter for 1998's Deep Impact, described there how learning of the dangers of trying to blow up a comet headed for Earth, creating more bullets out of a big one, drove the film's plot. Deep Impact is often contrasted with Armageddon, released the same year, where a bomb miraculously saves the Earth from an asteroid. New Scientist magazine reported in 2007 that NASA uses Armageddon as a training aid in finding errors, at least 168 then.

Scientists help filmmakers with the look and feel of a lab, how they behave with each other and more. "It's counterintuitive, but putting some limits on what is possible in a story helps writers," Kirby says. "If anything is possible, then you are stuck for conflicts in a story. But if there are logical limits to what can happen, then the writers have edges to exercise their creativity against and the result is a more exciting story." Kosinski agrees, saying that talking with scientists helps "discipline" stories, even ones as fantastic as Tron: Legacy.

"What scientists have to learn is that film and television-makers are experts too. Expert storytellers," Kirby says. "Often science advisors are used to being treated as the experts. But top creative people in film and television are very sophisticated individuals and they are just as much experts at telling stories, delivering emotional impacts to audiences, as the scientists are experts in their fields." The best collaborations result when science advisors respect the story as the central focus of their assistance, he suggests, not as a means to deliver a science lesson.

"What I'm really excited about is the next film we are working on, which is a remake of The Black Hole," Kosinski says. Astronomers have made tremendous advances in understanding super-massive black holes thought to lurk at the center of most large galaxies, since 1979 when Disney released that film. "Hard science will drive that film, the reality of what happens at the boundaries of black holes, what they might look like, because so much more is known now." Kosinski says.

Science and the cinema, not quite "the beginning of a beautiful friendship," to borrow from Casablanca, but an old one that looks likely to grow stronger as time goes by.