Tron Legacy: What a bitter disappointment.

[mordorbund]

Wait, the program comes out of the portal and becomes human? I can see maybe the human going into the system because our brains are filled with electronic impulses, etc. But making a whole human out of nothing but electrical energy seems a bit much. You can't get proteins and mitochondria out of the air ><

Sure you can. If you can digitize someone, all those proteins and mitochondria had to go somewhere. In fact, there seems to be a surplus as two men enter, one man leaves.

[HoosierGuy]

SPOILER ALERT!!!**********************

I was a little put off that the Bridges' character was sort of a "god" like person who created that whole world. Plus one of the computer people made it to real earth. So out of nothing or electricity this person became a real person created by Bridges? I didn't care for that angle.

[Guest]

Yeah. It seems like now people (mostly my daughter and nephews) take computer stuff for granted, it's as much a part of them as breathing. I remember programming on a commodore, it thrilled me to no end when I figured out how to change font colors

Do you remember playing Zork on your commodore? I LOVED THAT GAME!

> You are standing to the east of a white house with a front door.

> Open door

> The door is boarded

...

...

...

> There is a mailbox

> Open mailbox

> Insert disk 2

:D:D:D:D:D

Yeah, nostalgia is a good thing... Except Tron Legacy got buried and whacked in the head with nostalgia it can't get out.

Man, the intro was a great opener too... Sam hacks Encom with his ultra modern PDA and Dillinger Junior chases the hack through the internet and wipes it. Awesome.

Then they get stuck back in the light cycles! LAME.

It would have been really cool if Sam gets sucked into the internet and Dillinger chases him with Modern Warfare 2. Then I wouldn't feel like I'm sitting there inserting disk 2 so Zork can open the mailbox in the middle of all this 3D technology.

[Guest]

Okay, so the kids watched Tron... AGAIN. They loved it that much. So, I said to them... I can't watch it again, it hurts too much. And my kids said, it's ok, mom you don't have to watch it again, but we're going to watch it because we're not programmers and we don't care if the programs don't have programmers... LOL. So, I went with the hubby to watch True Grit instead. Which was also... blah. My husband loved it so much he went to watch True Grit again! Sigh. I am going to watch Tangled again... reward for having to sit through these boring movies.

So, I was talking to the kids about Tron again, after they watched it a 2nd time and I asked them what they liked about the movie...

So, I took what they liked and made a new script out of it. So here's what Tron Legacy could have been:

Flynn goes missing - he got stuck in the computer... back in '89.

Sam goes rogue and hands over Encom to the board, but he doesn't like where Encom is going, so he hacks into the server with his fancy PDA to figure out what's going on. Dillinger's son (I never did get his name) foils his attempts at it and kicks his program out... but, he gets a wierd signal on his PDA that looks like it came from his father - the hack program he inserted into the system triggered an event that cracked the Encom firewall for a split second giving Flynn the opportunity to send a signal out...

Because, the grid that became Flynn's prison is still at Encom connected to Flynn's Arcade through the old network, unused since 1989, so it is now buried under new technology - still connected to the rest of the Encom system but is outside the firewall.

So, Sam starts looking into what the signal means and goes to his father's good buddy Allen for an explanation. Allen then takes Sam into Flynn's Arcade to see if it came from there and they find his father's lab and the digitizer. Sam and Allen gets an a-ha moment thinking hey - Flynn still has the digitizer, so Flynn might have gotten stuck in there! So, Sam volunteers to get digitized to see if he can find his father... he instructs Allen to plug his PDA into Encom (because, of course, his PDA can't interface with 1989 computers).

So, Allen then sticks the PDA back at Encom and gets caught by Dillinger's son who then proceeds to hunt Sam's program down. Little did we know, that Dillinger's father was involved in getting Flynn stuck in the computer. That's how Dillinger got enough control of Encom to still make it the "big brother" and even got his son on the board. (Okay, I really don't like Dillinger back - you can go ahead and replace him somebody completely new).

So then Sam goes into the old grid, gets sooo wierded out by light cycles and disk throwers (my kids thought this was a cool part of the movie) but then he finds his bevy of hack programs that Allen inserted into the system, so he goes shooting at the cycles with his Modern Warfare machine gun, or whatever. He finds his dad, and they try to race out of the grid back to the portal... but Dillinger's program catches up with them and blocks the portal to Flynn's video arcade, so they had to go through the firewall (opened by Sam's program) and get to the rest of Encom and the Web!

So there Sam fights Dillinger in modern video game era! You name it - first person shooter games, running through the rockband stage and knocking over the drumset, and getting hit by the wii sports golfball, getting lost in facebook - which is this giant dance club/bar thing... they go through systems via wi-fi or 4G, so there's no Solar Sailer anymore - they just get sucked out and fly to the next system.

Man, that would have been really awesome...

And then, of course, Flynn is not without his super-programming-skills - so he goes to get Tron out of the "prison grid", and together they fight modern security programs so that he can get both him and Sam back to the digitizer to get back into the real world. That's when he finds Laura's lab that has evolved so much that they have programs now that can digitize and un-digitize - that is, get humans into the computer and programs out of the computer (yes, the kids liked that the girl became human too). And that was the thing that went with the Encom OS release - so that Encom can rule the world - or whatever. The new OS will enable Encom to suck up users into the system and replace them with programs! (Yeah, that would be border-line hokey but it's still cool - it still makes sense). And that's when Flynn realizes that that's the reason he got imprisoned in the computer - because he wouldn't have allowed Encom to do this to Laura's department.

So, Flynn goes chasing after Sam with this new undigitizing program (that cute iso girl - the kids thought she was fun and pretty), but Dillinger's son and his army of programs is still chasing after Sam too, so Tron goes to battle Dillinger's army of programs (now, wouldn't this be nostalgic to have Tron fighting with his disc and Dillinger's army shooting him with sub-machine guns.) Flynn and Sam finally meet up and invokes the un-digitizer and goes flying out of a phone app that is testing out the new Encom OS startling the guy using the phone... that would have been really funny and cool at the same time...

But then, Dillinger captures the undigitizer program and forces her to un-digitize him... so Tron ends up blowing up everything killing Dillinger and his army and the undigitizer with it together with the entire Encom OS.

Flynn takes control over Encom once more but then hands the company over to his son... so, no more programs-turn-human happens. Ever.

The end.

[Traveler]

I enjoyed the movie. Like the first Tron I realized that the movie was eye candy intended for escapes from reality not insights into reality.

The story line was greatly flawed from the terms used to the displacement of the portal (which should have been called a port) from entering the “grid” to exiting. I realized that the story could have been a lot more fun with concepts of local networks, global networks, viruses, servers, server clusters and firewalls. They should have at least updated the concept from users to clients. I would have loved to see a conflict with UNIX and Windows – with Apple OS included – and then there would be Google, Yahoo, Bing and MSN – each with their following. I would have loved some depiction of web crawlers and bots. Obviously the concept of core was a major flaw. I think multi threading; interrupts and memory swapping would have added some interesting twists. A missing concept that was present in the original Tron was the concept of executive processing and priorities. It would have been neat to have some old ancient machine code as the constant but necessary nemesis of the OS. But most of all I wish there had been a better understanding of artificial intelligence. The effort was silly when dealing with the concept of artificial intelligence becoming self aware.

The Traveler