Does Tron Fulfill Its Legacy? [Spoilers ahead]

I’ve never seen the original Tron.  Disney’s futuristic 1982 computer adventure movie was by all account a flop back in the day.  A lot of people didn’t get the notion of being sucked into a computer.  It was hard to comprehend the idea programs and complex computer systems at a time when very few people had or understood computers.  Adding another layer of representing a computer as a city and people simply abstracted it one step farther for the audience.  Plus, the CG was flaky (and considered a gimmick), the acting was poor, and the dialog and story was cheesy.  By all accounts, Tron isn’t a very good movie.  It’s a cult favorite for geeks, but it’s just not that good.

So why on earth make a sequel?  Wired Magazine’s cover article this month is a huge spread on the movie Tron: Legacy.  They do a better job of talking about the creation of the sequel than I.  In a nutshell though, it was time to fulfill what Tron should have been.  Today, everyone has a computer and the notion of the computer as a living being, with programs as individuals living in a “city”, while still abstract, is far easier to wrap our heads around.  Not only that, but today we have the internet and cyberspace, a real virtual world where we all exist as avatars of ourselves in some way or another.  MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Second Life, along with movies like The Matrix all make the world of Tron seem a whole lot more plausible.

But what captures this movie for me is the subject matter: the notion of living programs and envisioning computers as other worlds.  Jeff Bridge’s Kevin Flynn speaks in the movie of another world existing in the computer, and he preaches a la Steve Jobs to a baiting audience about a future to behold that will rock the world to its very core: science, culture, religion, medicine, everything will be affected.  He’s talking about the internet, right?  No actually.  He’s still talking about very 1980s era stuff.  Living in a singular computer?  Running 80s hardware no less?  This movie takes place in 2010, so why do I feel thrown back to the 80s (a decade I have the distinct pleasure of never having to personally experience)?  The problem(?) with the movie for me is that perhaps it stays too close to its roots as a conception of 1982.  While the movie could have expanded into the frontier of cyberspace, it instead remains decidedly local.  It’s been 28 years since the original Tron, why didn’t the director take advantage of the nearly 30 years of progress in the computing world?

Thoughts On Inception

While movie criticism and review is not my forte, I have on occasion been known to delve into some thoughts on movies that I find truly remarkable and/or noteworthy. If this blog had existed when “The Dark Knight” was released, I probably would have posted something like this.

Luckily, Chris Nolan does other work besides from his Batman bread and butter. His summer blockbuster “Inception” provides a thrilling odyssey into the mind, wrapped in a sci-fi heist package. As a general movie, it was incredible. A visceral, fully enjoyable movie that hits all the right notes. It’s music is engrossing, the acting is top notch (I have a total man crush on Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and the cinematography is so Chris Nolan: flawless.

Inception deals with a future where civilians have learned how to trigger lucid dreaming and share dreams. Dom Cobb (Leonard DiCaprio) is an extractor, one who specializes in taking secrets out of others dreams by pretending to be part of the dream. Cobb’s job performance has withered because he is unable to control the manifestation of his dead wife, Mal, from entering dreams and ruining his plans.  Eventually, Cobb is employed by a former target to perform inception, the act of placing an idea in a person so that they think it is their own.  Cobb assembles a crack team to perform the inception, and along the way we learn the rules of the dream world.

It is this technical aspect of the movie that I have a problem with. I have no problem with the rules of dreams that Nolan gives us, I have a problem that he seems to forget them. Cobb explains to Ariadne (Ellen Page as a prodigious “architect” of dream worlds) that one person has the dream and another fills it with their subconscious.  The dreamer can control the dream world while the other’s subconscious populates it. If this is so, why does Cobb’s erratic mind generate a train in the middle of the road when he is neither the dreamer nor the subject who projects the subconscious? Oh sure, it looks cool but it breaks the rules. Further more, why do dreams collapse when the dreamer becomes aware if they are also tasked with controlling the world?

Further more, the nature of limbo confuses me. Normally, when you die in the dream world you wake up. But under heavy sedation this is not the case. Instead your mind falls into a realm of erratic dream state which can last for perceived decades. Cobb has been to limbo before with his wife and remained there for decades, stuck inside their minds. But this is not explained. Did they die under heavy sedation? Or does limbo simply trigger when you go down too many levels? How many is too many? Cobb also escapes from limbo by killing himself with his wife. Uh…. Isn’t that what got you there in the first place? Why not just do that the moment you got there instead of spending 50 dream years wasting away? These plot holes are actually quite inexcusable. Cobb and Ariadne go to limbo towards the end of the movie to extract their target who was killed by Cobb’s projection of Mal. This is filled with inconsistencies. To get to limbo, they simply hook up to their machine and boom – limbo. Is Cobb’s dream always limbo? Is it just because level 4 is always limbo? How does Fischer end up there even though he isn’t hooked up with Cobb? Or Saito for that matter? Come on Nolan!!

However, despite these glaring holes, the movie is excellent. It was the same situation with “The Dark Knight”: technical details in the plot made no sense. But the over arching experience of the film, coupled with the message that it has about the human mind and our perception if reality, is phenomenal. Chris Nolan tends to get the big picture, but he tries to be too smart in his movies and ends up confusing himself. Annoying? Yeah. But that’s Nolan. And he’s still making some of the smartest and flat out best movies of anyone out there.