Virtuality 1: Tron 2

Wi-fi?  What's that?

Kevin Flynn, Tron: Legacy

I went to see Tron: Legacy last week, and I was surprised by my reaction:  I thought that it was a bit old-fashioned. 

This is an odd reaction to a cutting-edge 3-D CGI extravaganza, and so I came home and watched the original Tron, a comparison which I was certain would establish Legacy as the visual masterpiece that it must be.

Surprisingly, even with its 28 year handicap, I found Tron to be a better movie in many ways, especially when viewed in context.  In 1982, Tron was a groundbreaking state of the art special effects movie, although obviously state of the art has moved on since then, as it always does. But at the time it presented a unique and original view of a digital world, a view which in many ways offered the first metaphor for a visual representation of the world of bits and bytes.

But let's give some perspective to this picture.  In 1982 we were sitting in front of monochrome green CRTs and 8-bit colour displays, listening to the click and whir of single-sided 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. There were only primitive graphical user interfaces:  the first Mac had not yet been released, and the first version of Windows was three long years away.  Tron's special effects were created using systems with 2 MB of RAM and 330 MB hard drives - you can get a smart phone with more processing power now.

In spite of the limitations of hardware - in the end, only a very small percentage of the movie was actual computer graphics -  Tron showed us a world that none of us had ever imagined, or perhaps the world that we'd all imagined.  It represented an important landmark in our first fumbling attempts to establish a metaphor for the digital universe that was beginning to develop. 

So why doesn't Legacy represent an extension of that metaphor?  What's changed?

We have, or rather society has. People grow up in cyberspace these days.  Millions of people spend most of their free time on the game grid, people who operate digital avatars for hours every day.  Most of us neither know nor care what the physical location of anything on the internet might be - for example, I haven't the least clue where this blog is actually stored, nor do I need to.*  We work online, we shop online, we talk online, we date online - let's face it, we live online.

On that basis, Legacy left me with a bit of a "Yes, and...?" feeling.  It's a bit like one of those movies where explorers find a long-lost plateau in Africa which is teeming with dinosaurs.  Technically speaking, Legacy takes place in a closed single-portal system which has been churning away in isolation for over 20 years, 20 years of technological development in the outside world.  The prospect of the denizens of that system attempting to take over the real world is almost comical, like the idea of being attacked by a basketball-sized 8-bit Pacman while walking down the street.

Now, I don't want to make any claims that Tron is the virtual equivalent of Gone With The Wind in terms of moviemaking.  Even at the time, I doubt that anyone considered it as a nominee for Best Movie at the Oscars.  But visually, conceptually, it did what science fiction is supposed to do:  it showed us a "what if" world, a world that didn't exist, but which could exist, which might exist.

Legacy?  I don't mean to suggest in any way that the effects in Legacy aren't well done (or that it's any more deserving of a Best Movie nomination), but their representation of cyber-reality certainly didn't offer a unique view of a digital universe, just a more expensive view of the universe that Tron had already shown us. In fact, the combination of lighting, sets and costumes made it look like nothing more than an extended commercial for the next really big male body wash of your choice.

- Sid

*  Have you ever wondered where Google™, Facebook™ or eBay™ actually are, in the real world?