Tron Legacy

Tron Truancy

I keep meaning to put this post up but I keep getting overtaken by other things. it's a bit like how I avoided this film for a long time. There's something not quite compelling about this movie at first glance.

I know we do computer graphics much better now than in 1982, but did we really need to revisit the grid after 'The Matrix' movies sort of ate and spat out the whole of cyberpunk?

I don't think I even liked the old 'Tron' all that much back in the day either. It was one of those movies that looked a lot better than it played. It had a look all of its own that somehow managed not to tell its story well. Looking back on the DVD of the earlier film, it seems getting the look right was just too much and the action sequences seem disjointed. Perhaps it was overdue for the contemporary cutting edge computer graphics treatment, but I resisted the allure of flashy graphics. After all, how much story could there be? And so it took me a long while to get to it, but I got there in the end and I'm glad I did.

The updated sequel is a surprising film in many aspects.

What's Good About It

It's hard to get nostalgic about a movie you didn't enjoy way back when, but the design in this film extends upon the designs in such a way as to evoke nostalgia for the old film. Now, that's pretty good. This iteration of the world of the Grid is a lot more sultry, dripping with post-Blade Runner style and infused with a dash of Matrix hi-jinx. It's the Grid as it should have been back in 1984, but wasn't.

The graphics are splendid and the image is gorgeous.

What's Bad About It

In the 21st Century, retconn-ing story-lines is all the rage, so there is elaborate exposition going on at various points in the film, and they are all boring. Getting Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner back to reprise their roles reinforces the link back to the original film, which is a good thing, but then it works against itself by having to explain how this film connects to the earlier film. This leads to the Hollywood standard absent Daddy narrative which is boring as dried out day-old white toast.

Also, Jeff Bridge's original character Kevin Flynn rabbits on about Zen as if he's still playing The Dude from 'The Big Lebowski' and Bill Django from 'Men Who Stare At Goats'. I know it's the current Jeff Bridges persona that bleeds from one film to another - sometimes successfully as it was for 'Men Who Stare At Goats' - but it doesn't really fit too well in this one; and that's even if they did write it in pretty hard.

What's Interesting About It

Cyberpunk and the Matrix movies owe a great deal to the original 'Tron' and its abstracted computer graphic spaces. Of course aspects of 'Tron' owed a great deal to the second last sequence in '2001: A Space Odyssey' with the rushing landscape as Dave Bowen enters into the world of the Black Monolith. This film, therefore quotes the room from the final sequence of '2001' as if to make a point. The living quarters where Kevin Flynn has been living for 20 odd years turns out to be a lift of the room Dave Bowen finds himself in, at the end of '2001'. It's a weird kind of circular connection back to the source and is also a weird kind of quoting of Stanley Kubrick but remarkably, it makes an odd kind of sense.

The Grid And The Internet

The Grid is of course the abstract space of computers, as transposed by a laser. For years we've had the internet and we've assumed that what the original film meant to indicate was the internet, but clearly this is incorrect. The Grid seems to be a definite space that happens inside of computers as a function of computer programs and gaming becoming anthropomorphised.

The grid greatly informs the descriptions of the net in William Gibson's early work, which at least got the bit about the net becoming a jumble of advertising. Visualising the network to come back in the 1980s was the main business of science fiction; there were some interesting visions of this abstract cybernetic space but it all sort of got packaged up with virtual reality and you had the Matrix movies rounding up a rather banal vision of a Grid that is at once virtual reality, networked, abstract, computerised and brimming with game-like action.

Still, the Internet we've ended up with is nothing like the Grid, and we may never approach the grandeur of the Grid unless we hit Ray Kurzweil's Singularity or something like it. In revisiting the Grid as being separate and totally unlike the internet frees up the possibility for the narrative of an abstracted space. The internet is always a present tense sort of development. Science Fiction demands the future (or an outrageous, hidden past). Seeing the updated vision of the Grid therefore opened the door again to a more genuine cyberpunk vision than with what 'The Matrix' left us.

Computer Consciousness

In a lot of Science Fiction stories, we find computers that go Frankenstein. It's like one of those set pieces in early Star Trek for instance, where Captain Kirk and crew arrive to find a planet that's under the control of a computer and they have to free the people by making the computer calculate 'pi'. The computer is out of control in so many of these narrartives, from HAL in '2001' to Wintermute in 'Neuromancer' through to whatever the hell it is that goes on in the world of The Matrix. In the original Tron, it was 'Master Controller' that tried to usurp the Users (humans).

The most interesting development in this film might be notion that there are already native sentients in the Grid, awaiting contact with humanity. The film could have played out this idea more, but it didn't probably because the theme is too big. We live in a kind of fear of  the computer taking control but we never seem to ask what the computer wants and whether it really would want to take over from us. All these questions bear asking and pondering.

Still, it's also quite banal in this film: The 'other' lurks in the abstract space of The Grid, but the only way Hollywood can put handles on the idea is to turn into a pretty girl in a tight black suit.

The Abstracted Space

One thing the film and its earlier film really do point at is an abstracted space dominated by thoughts, senses, intuition and emotions. It's not entirely without merit, although the mechanics of telling an action story detract from the importance of this space. For instance what kind of mind space are we in when we play computer games? I know the traditional description is that we zone out like zombies to play games, but the subjective experience of computer games is a lot more far-reaching and searching.

Clearly the players are in an abstract space of thoughts and intuition and senses; but you would be surprised to know how difficult it is to put the abstract on the screen. A good example of this might be that you can put lots of bad guys in a movie, but you can't really put an abstraction of evil in a movie; you can only point at it through ciphers of actions and characterisations. The apparent banality of film development often revolve around these very kinds of problems.

The Tron movies might be the only films that offer up the abstract space as a visible space. Certainly it has had far-reaching influence over how we have pictured what the world of sentient computers might look like. On the one hand the internet has turned out to be quite unlike the Grid, but it is possible Technological Singularity might turn out to be quite like the Grid, if only we could experience it.